Roger Thurow and Journal colleague Scott Kilman wrote a series of stories on famine in Africa. 

Pulitzer Prize Finalist in International Writing

Awarded for Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman.

Harry Chapin Book Award Recipient

The Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism is an annual award presented by the New York Public Library.

Finalist for The Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is "the first and only U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace."

Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

Huffington Post

Wall Street Journal

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Ending Hunger

At 4:00 am, Leonida Wanyama lit a lantern in her house made of sticks and mud. She was up long before the sun to begin her farm work, as usual. But this would be no ordinary day, this second Friday of the new year. This was the day Leonida and a group of smallholder farmers in western Kenya would begin their exodus, as she said, “from misery to Canaan,” the land of milk and honey.Africa’s smallholder farmers, most of whom are women, know misery. They toil in a time warp, living and working essentially as their forebears did a century ago. With tired seeds, meager soil nutrition, primitive storage facilities, wretched roads, and no capital or credit, they harvest less than one-quarter the yields of Western farmers. The romantic ideal of African farmers––rural villagers in touch with nature, tending bucolic fields––is in reality a horror scene of malnourished children, backbreaking manual work, and profound hopelessness. Growing food is their driving preoccupation, and still they don’t have enough to feed their families throughout the year. The wanjala––the annual hunger season that can stretch from one month to as many as eight or nine––abides.But in January 2011, Leonida and her neighbors came together and took the enormous risk of trying to change their lives. Award-winning author and world hunger activist Roger Thurow spent a year with four of them––Leonida Wanyama, Rasoa Wasike, Francis Mamati, and Zipporah Biketi––to intimately chronicle their efforts. In The Last Hunger Season, he illuminates the profound challenges these farmers and their families face, and follows them through the seasons to see whether, with a little bit of help from a new social enterprise organization called One Acre Fund, they might transcend lives of dire poverty and hunger.The daily dramas of the farmers’ lives unfold against the backdrop of a looming global challenge: to feed a growing population, world food production must nearly double by 2050. If these farmers succeed, so might we all.

The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change

For more than thirty years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet in Africa, more than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every year&#151;most of them children. In this powerful investigative narrative, Wall Street Journal reporters Kilman & Thurow show exactly how, in the past few decades, Western policies conspired to keep Africa hungry and unable to feed itself. Enough is essential reading on a humanitarian issue of utmost urgency.

Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty

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The Perseus Books Group

Roger Thurow is a Senior Fellow for Global Agriculture and Food Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.  He was for thirty years a reporter at The Wall Street Journal.  He is, with Scott Kilman, the author of Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Still Starve in an Age of Plenty, which won the Harry Chapin Why Hunger book award and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award.  Thurow is a 2009 recipient of the Action Against Hunger Humanitarian Award.  His most recent book is  The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change. He has spoken to 200 audiences over the past several years; his recent events are “transmedia” presentations combining speaking with short video clips and slide shows.  A graduate of the University of Iowa and a long-time resident of Chicago, Thurow now lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Anne, and their two children, Brian and Aishling.

Agriculture

Poverty

Transmedia

Africa

Food Policy

Outrage and Inspire

Book - The Last Hunger Season

Book - Enough

Articles from One: Join the fight against extreme poverty

Articles from The Huffington Post

Articles from Impatient Optimists

Articles on The Chicago Council on Global Affairs: Global Food for Though

Articles on Outrage & Inspire

Interview with One.org

Interview with Nourishing the Planet

Interview with Christianity Today: Rob Moll interviews Roger Thurow: ‘Hunger Can Be Conquered’

Interview with Humanosphere

Interview with Fivebooks

TEDx Talk: The Hungry Farmer: My Moment of Great Disruption

Senior Fellow 

Roger Thurow, author of The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change, talks about the smallholder farmers of Africa and...

The Hungry Farmer - My Moment of Great Disruption: Roger Thurow at TEDxChange

The Authors@Google program welcomed Scott Kilman and Roger Thurow to Google's New York office to discuss their book, "Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve ...

Authors@Google: Roger Thurow & Scott Kilman

When you look into the eyes of a starving person, you get a disease of the soul. This is how prize-winning journalist Roger Thurow describes the moment when ...

Roger Thurow - Hunger: A disease of the soul

McGovern Lecture UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome 14 October 2011 Opening remarks: US Ambassador to the UN Food Agencies in Rome Ertharin Cousin.

Ending hunger through agriculture - Roger Thurow

http://www.presstv.com/Program/206539.html In this edition of the show we discuss the book: Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, writt...

"Enough: Why World's Poorest Starve in Age of Plenty" by R. Thurow & S. Kilman-Epilogue-10-24-2011

2012 Borlaug Dialogue Wednesday, October 17, 2012 Sir Gordon Conway -- Professor of International Development, Imperial College London Jane Karuku -- Preside...

Setting the Stage: One Billion Hungry - Can We Feed the World Sustainably?

Prize-winning journalist Roger Thurow was covering famine in Africa for the Wall Street Journal when he had a revelation that he should work full time to bri...

Roger Thurow

Media

Social

Biography

Industry Expertise

Areas of Expertise

Accomplishments

Pulitzer Prize Finalist in International Writing

Harry Chapin Book Award Recipient

Finalist for The Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism

Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

Education

University of Iowa

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