1Well’s Role in Addressing the Food Crisis

by Dan Morrison

Thursday October 9, 2008 at 11:09am, EST

I was reviewing my notes and came across the following note I sent the 1Well board on the Global Food Crisis and wanted to share it with you. On April 18th the NY Times ran the article on food security, “Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger” (see excerpt below on India). In a general sense, it is a critical article because it highlights how U.S. and global policies (i.e., related to energy and biofuels) has a direct impact on other parts of the world (and vice a versa), and how large parts of the world population are not in control of satisfying the most basic human need - food.

Specifically, this article points to the impact some of our 1Well projects can have. On my recent trip, the major topic of conversation with agricultural communities (the vast majority of projects we do with 1Well are in these communities) was increasing the quality and quantity of their harvests. This can be done in several ways. A) improving the quality of the fields through deep ploughing of land, land leveling, and gypsum treatment to reduce soil salinity. B) Improving irrigation through farm bonding (building a stone fence around the field to keep in water), building of check dams (as one 1Well SVC has done in Sedla Village), and deepening and widening irrigation ponds that collect the monsoon rains. C) By providing other services that increase the people’s time spent on productive and income generating activities.

This last area is the indirect approach, but possibly the most important. The well we built in Vachragpur is a good example. Prior to building the well, the women were walking 5 hours a day to fetch drinking water. That was 5 hours not spent on earning a living to support their families. Now that the well is built, their walk is 40 minuites round trip and the village women are creating small enterprises to increase their income. Other projects will also help - child care centers will free women for most of the day to earn a better living; toilets and sanitation facilities will prevent people from having to talk over 1 km to relieve themselves; education facilities will help prepare the younger generation for the future.

There is no direct, clear answer to the food crisis we are facing, but the villages see an opportunity to partner with 1Well and its supporters to solidify the life sustaining infrastructure their villages need to provide for their basic human needs, and beyond that, to create an environment where people have the opportunity to break the cycle of poverty.

I am thankful for your part in bringing 1Well to this point, but there is much more to do. Some times it feels like too much time is done planning and not enough time is spent “doing” 1Well’s mission, but all this hard work will get us to that point. I hope you will be with us as we build towards our goal of helping people make an impact that matters.

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From the NY Times article:
“The rising prices are altering menus, and not for the better. In India, people are scrimping on milk for their children. Daily bowls of dal are getting thinner, as a bag of lentils is stretched across a few more meals.

Maninder Chand, an auto-rickshaw driver in New Delhi, said his family had given up eating meat altogether for the last several weeks.

Another rickshaw driver, Ravinder Kumar Gupta, said his wife had stopped seasoning their daily lentils, their chief source of protein, with the usual onion and spices because the price of cooking oil was now out of reach. These days, they eat bowls of watery, tasteless dal, seasoned only with salt.”