Check out this preview of After the Harvest Org’s new film After the Harvest: Fighting Hunger in the Coffeelands.
Over 67 percent of small-scale farmers in Mexico, Guatemala, and Nicaragua indicated they were unable to maintain their normal diet for 3-8 months of the year. These are “los meses flacos,” or the thin months, when families make ends meet by eating less, eating less expensive foods, or borrowing against their future earnings from coffee. While incredibly complex, recent work suggests it is not unsolvable. The film brings the day-to-day challenges of the thin months to life in the voices of coffee farmers themselves, and shares the successes of creative projects that have been established to eliminate this annual period of food insecurity.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
