The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change

In this empathetic and eye-opening account, former Wall Street Journal reporter Thurow (coauthor, 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." Lacking modern farming equipment and valuable fertilizers, these farmers struggle to feed their families throughout the year and produce enough crops to bring in money to send their children to school, believing that "education was the surest route out of poverty." However, even these humble goals are often too lofty to achieve. Instead, growers must stretch dwindling food supplies across the gap between harvests, a period known as the "wanjala," or hunger season. In chronicling the plight of these farmers, Thurow also discusses the efforts of the One Acre Fund, a relatively new organization founded by Andrew Youn whose aim is 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. B&W photos. (May)