Written by Lonny and Erika (January 5, 2015)
Writing has always been difficult for me. It was my most challenging subject in school and writing my masters thesis just about killed me. I was asked to write a chapter for the new textbook that The Institute for Self Reliant Agriculture - Feed The World is publishing. It is entitled Feeding The Forgotten. Forntunatley for me my wife, Erika is a great writer and has a talent for taking my thoughts and putting them in an organized and readable format. Below is the preface to our chapter.
If there were a simple solution to alleviating hunger and poverty in developing nations, certainly third-world deprivation would have been solved long ago. But the answers are far from simple, and the problems of extreme poverty and devastating illnesses continue to haunt our modern society. While advances in technology and communication have helped developing countries to see improvements in their living conditions in recent decades, most of the world’s rural poor continue to live in circumstances nearly unfathomable in this modern world.
This chapter, A Practical Implementation of The Small-Scale Agriculture Model in Developing Countries, will explain how The Institute for Self Reliant Agriculture, or Feed The World (hereafter referred to as SRA/FTW), uses successful time-tested principles to alleviate hunger, malnutrition, and poverty in rural areas throughout the developing world. This chapter is intended to serve as a practical outline for university educators, community leaders, and non-government organizations (NGOs) who are seeking to alleviate poverty and help families achieve nutritional self-sufficiency by teaching and implementing the small-scale agriculture model (SSAM).
Using a unique program focused on teaching nutritional and economic self-reliance through hands-on mentoring, SRA/FTW’s program imparts important life-saving agriculture knowledge and skills adapted from principles of the SSAM developed by BYU’s Benson Institute. This approach helps rural farm families to achieve lasting self-reliance, empowering themselves to truly succeed for a lifetime.