Food Security: Green Grams Changing Lives in Eastern Kenya

Concerned with colony collapse syndrome in honey bees worldwide, scientists, farmers and tech companies teamed up in Australia to create a micro-sensor that collects data on the bee's environment.

By supporting small-scale female farmers, Groundswell International, an NGO, is diversifying diets and combating food insecurity in countries in West Africa.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture assists farms which follow the sustainable farming style, Silvopasture, but few farmers take advantage of the program. ForeverView Farms in Vermont is advising policy groups about ways they can boost this type of farming.

With a global food crisis, farmers look for how to get long-term high yields out of difficult farmland. In Oaxaca, Mexico, farmers farm like a forest, eat low on the food chain, restore damaged land, and have reverence for the planet.

Farmland is expensive and scarce in urban areas. In Boston Higher Ground Farm uses green roofs to grow its produce and Grove Lab has designed a cabinet for people to grow their vegetables indoors.

In just the next couple of decades, the World Bank says, farmers across Africa could lose more than half their cropland to drought and heat - the issue is considered so pressing that, a few years ago, Malawi's Department of Meteorological Services added "Climate Change" to its name. A new aid group group now works with farmers in more than 60 villages — with plans to expand — helping them become more resilient to a changing climate.

A Kenyan government initiative is helping a growing community of residents to tackle food insecurity in one of the largest slum areas in Africa, championing an unusual form of urban farming: sack gardens.

Many unskilled workers in Tanzania are women and, due to gender inequality, they are often disregarded and live with economic hardship. Oxfam Tanzania has a reality show that raises awareness of women farmers. The winners of the show go use their notoriety to promote women’s rights and improve the lives of other women farmers.

In many parts of the world, not owning one's own land is more directly correlated to poverty than other factors such as illiteracy, but land reform is controversial, difficult, and expensive. A new program called Landesa is having success in India through a non-confiscatory model that gives families tennis-court size plots.

Soil in Bangladesh is becoming increasingly saline and infertile due to climate change. Bangladeshi farmers have begun using a saline-tolerant rice seed in order to produce an abundant crop despite salty soil.