Our picture shows Abdul Phiri and his wife and three of their four sons.
Abdul will have to find school fees for all of them if they are to be able to go to secondary school. Rice has proved an invaluable cash crop for him and enabled him to build secure housing and a fine toilet, to buy a bike and a plough and develop his farm into a viable business.
Celebrating the World’s Harvest
Harvest time is a time to celebrate the amazing wealth of plants and food which the world contains. It’s also an opportunity to examine the very complex questions of justice which surround food distribution across the world. For rice farmers and their families in Malawi getting a fair price for their rice cannot be taken for granted. There are vendors who go around with dodgy scales exploiting farmers who live away from the main markets. In the ‘hunger months’ when food is running low before the next harvest, the vendors will offer loans to farmers against their next harvest and then charge excessively high rates of interest.
A Harvest Opportunity
For churches, there’s a great opportunity here to bring home what fair trade with fair prices means to smallholder farmers in countries like Malawi. Taking up JTS’ 90 kg rice challenge at Harvest time can focus people’s attention wonderfully. John Bell of the Iona Community has produced a worship booklet with special notes for including the rice in Harvest services.
One of the things that John Bell brings out is the Bible’s emphasis on these very questions of justice. Micah’s saying is well known: ‘What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?’ Perhaps less well known is the fierce attack which follows on the rich city dwellers who exploit the poor farmers with their dodgy scales: ‘Can I forget the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked, and the scant measure that is accursed? Shall I acquit the man with wicked scales and with a bag of deceitful weights?’ Micah came from the country and doubtless knew what he was talking about. Over two and half millennia and the issues are still alive today!
An Inspiring Example
The story of today’s rice farmers in Malawi, their struggles to get a fair price to make a living for their families, to turn their farms into businesses which can help them work their way out of poverty and the way in which farmers’ associations like NASFAM can help them achieve these goals, can inspire and motivate people to work for fairer patterns of trade in today’s globalised world.
Plan your Harvest celebration
Click the image above for details on how to get in touch for information and to get a challenge pack.
A 90kg challenge pack consists of:
Ninety 1kg bags of rice and a promotional pack consisting of:
- Information sheets
- A PowerPoint presentation
- Leaflets, posters & a countdown poster
- John Bell’s worship booklet,‘Harvesting the World’.