from iowa to rwanda

December 23, 2009 in Global Ag Issues

We met Julie Carney at the Hungry Filmmakers event last week – she’s a rockstar who works for Gardens for Health International, as the Country Director for their Rwanda program. She wrote us this nice note:

My mother grew up on farms in the midwest, but I was raised in the suburbs of the East. She likes to joke that what I am doing now in Rwanda is really a return to my Iowa roots. Maybe this is partly true, but it’s really as I’ve been growing Gardens for Health in Rwanda that I have begun to learn the power of having access to food, and the power of growing this food oneself.

You come to appreciate just how closely good food and good health are connected when you see how people struggle, how desperate they can become, to nourish their children. While our work is not based in America, and certainly the issues differ somewhat, we’re inspired by the greenhorns movement. It’s an exciting, but also pivotal time for agriculture in Africa, where grand schemes to follow the same trajectories of American industrial farming abound. And thus, I think there is so much hope in the young farmers of America today!

And also wrote this recent piece in The Atlantic:
Planting Maize, Promoting Health.

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