In his empathetic account "The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change," former Wall Street Journal reporter Roger Thurow ("Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty") focuses on a group of smallholder farmers in western Kenya, "a paradoxical region of breathtaking beauty and overwhelming misery."
Without modern equipment and valuable fertilizers, these farmers struggle to feed their families throughout the year and produce enough crops to make money to send their children to school. They believed "education was the surest route out of poverty."
They try hard to stretch their food supplies from one harvest to the next. The time in between - when prices soar with shortages "and parents scramble for whatever income they can find and scrounge whatever assets they can sell to afford daily nourishment" - is known as "wanjala," the hunger season.
In chronicling their plight, the author also discusses the efforts of the One Acre Fund, founded not long ago by Andrew Youn, a social entrepreneur with an MBA from Northwestern University. The organization works to provide farmers with "access to the seeds and soil nutrients and planting advice" that would normally be unavailable to them.
By documenting their collaboration, Thurow paints a sobering but ultimately hopeful picture of a continuing food crisis in Africa and some of the things people are doing to mitigate it.
(A version of this review appears in Publishers Weekly.)
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