Pg. 99: Roger Thurow's "The Last Hunger Season"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change by Roger Thurow.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of a group of Kenyan farmers working to transcend lives of dire poverty and hunger illuminates the challenges, and vital necessity, of transforming Africa's agriculture sector

Africa's small farmers, who comprise two-thirds of its population, toil in a time warp, living and working essentially as they did in the 1930s. Without mechanized equipment, fertilizer, or irrigation; using primitive storage facilities, roads, and markets; lacking capital, credit, and insurance; they harvest only one-quarter the yields of Western farmers, half of which spoil before getting to market. But in 2011 one group of farmers in Kenya came together to try to change their odds for success—and their families' futures. Roger Thurow spent a year following their progress.

In The Last Hunger Season, the intimate dramas of the farmers' lives unfold amidst growing awareness that to feed the world's growing population, food production must double by 2050. How will the farmers, Africa, and a hungrier world deal with issues of water usage, land ownership, foreign investment, corruption, GMO's, the changing role of women, and the politics of foreign aid?

Read an excerpt from The Last Hunger Season, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Roger Thurow is a senior fellow for global agriculture and food policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. His first book, Enough: Why the World's Poorest Still Starve in an Age of Plenty, written with Scott Kilman, won the Harry Chapin Why Hunger book award and was a finalist for both the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award.

The Page 99 Test: The Last Hunger Season.

--Marshal Zeringue