Crying Over Spoilt Onions
It was the get in of onions that made me cry.
Not in the way you might think—I wasn’t standing over a cutting quarter, knife in hand, sobbing my way through an extended dicing job. The onions that made me cry were whole, bagged and stacked about 5 feet high, in a short village in Western Senegal, where I was travelling with American Jewish Just ecstatic Service .
I cried because of the story behind this stack of onions, a release of thwarted ambition, injustice, and our broken global food system. Working with a neighbourhood Non-Governmental Organization called GREEN Senegal , farmers from this village had implemented new agribusiness practices, such as drip irrigation that vastly improved their proficiency and productivity. With much less time and effort, they had increased the quantity and trait of their onion crop, and were ready to bring their goods to market. In in to the economic gain the villagers hoped to see through their efforts, the new efficiencies had the side benefits of allowing children to lavish more time in school, rather than in the fields helping with the harvest, and mothers to dish out more time in the home caring for their families.
Source: Forward (blog)