“By selling my vegetables on the market, I used to earn 160 Birr (around 10 US dollars) in two months on an average”, says Haraba Abdulamahid, a smallholder in Assosa, Ethiopia. In this region, farming is a challenge as the soils are threatened by erosion and many farmers lack the means and knowledge to adopt sustainable farming practices such as organic agriculture. Faced with this challenge, Ms Abdulamahid signed up for a training course at a so-called biofarm: a model farm, where farmers are shown feasible, low-cost, but highly effective farming methods. The approach is very much “hands-on”, as the farmers are able to see the methods in practice at the farm run by the Ethiopian NGO BioEconomy Africa and supported by Biovision. After the course, Ms Abdulamahid went back to the farm and started to apply what she had learned. She explains that she is now able to get a better price for her organic products as her products are now of better quality. “I am very successful in the market – in only two months, I have earned 700 Birr (40 US dollars)”, emphasized Ms Abdulamahid.
As a smallholder, Ms Abdulamahid in Assosa states, everyone should be able to have enough and healthy food and enjoy a decent livelihood. It is simply not acceptable that every fifth child born today will inevitably grow up hungry. It is particularly daunting that progress is so very slow: since the mid-1990s, the number of malnourished people has increased by more than 100 million.
Global consensus is increasing that change is needed if we want to nourish a growing and more demanding population, whilst maintaining and protecting natural resources. As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated: “we need to transform the way we approach food security, in particular by unleashing the potential of millions of small farmers and food producers.” This calls for a global transformation towards an agriculture based on ecological principles, which strengthens small and family-held farms.
To reach a breakthrough, we need to strengthen an agricultural and food-producing system that manages natural resources in a sustainable way, advances resilience to climate change, improves food and nutrition security, and benefits the livelihood of millions of small-scale farmers around the world. Seventy per cent of the global food production is produced by 525 million small farms. The potential to increase their yields and revenues is quite high when solely using ecological methods. Numerous projects in the tropics and subtropics have shown that organic agriculture can generate an extra income of between 50 and 150 per cent. Small-scale farmers are actually able to nourish people in the developing countries – and this without expensive inputs, clearing forests, or destroying valuable ecosystems. However, they need to be supported and sustained by the appropriate agriculture and trade policies and research plus development and education and the respective institutions.
Then her husband died of liver cancer. That was in 1982. From then on her life became steadily harder. She had to take her children out of school because she could no longer afford the fees. She also had repeatedly bad harvests as the rains became increasingly unpredictable. “In extreme years the yields were so bad that the state gave out food aid to the elderly and orphans.” Mrs Wanjiru was not considered for aid and so instead of three meals a day, her family ate only in the evening. “The children cried. They were hunger and had stomach ache and they lost weight”, she says bitterly.
Dr. Akumu works for 
In rural Uganda, the coverage with practitioners of Western medicine is very low. One doctor serves about 250’000 people in Mpigi District. On the other hand there is about one traditional healer per 187 people. Traditional healers are thus important providers of basic health services and treatments for the communities.