CCFC strategy does not focus on providing emergency supplies needed once widespread food shortages have taken root.  

Instead, we seek to set up a system and set of practices designed to protect our sponsor families from critical food shortages and cost increases, such as the ones being experienced today. 

Here is what CCFC has already done to help the poor accommodate and protect themselves from the food crisis our countries of operation:

COPING WITH COST INCREASES

• Provide Micro-Enterprise Development (MED) loans to the poorest of the poor, supplying new income generating activities to help them cope with the increases on their expenses.
  
  
• Provide skills training so poverty stricken people qualify to attain higher wage earning jobs. 
  
  
• In many cases, our work focuses on helping marginalized women become entrepreneurs; potentially doubling a household’s earning capacity.  Historically, we have focused on sectors that are not as affected by commodity price increases,  such as Shea butter production in Ghana and textiles in Sri Lanka

 

LESSEN FOOD WORRIES.  INCREASE REGIONAL SUPPLY

• Provide opportunities for farmers and food producers to combine their capital.
  
  
• This increases farmers’ purchasing power, and increases their access to new technologies and pesticides, allowing them to make their crops more resistant to threats.  Increased use of fertilizers also ensures a higher yield from limited local soil.
  
  
• Combined farms also help offset the costs of transportation to and from new markets. Often, local surpluses go to waste because poor, individual farmers can not afford to take their crops to other regional markets even with the current higher prices. 
   
• Introduced new crops and food sources to maximize calorie and energy outputs (especially protein sources) from a finite amount of fertile land, such as the increased soy production and expanded usage in traditional diets in Paraguay

 

MORE CONTROL FOR POOR OF DISTRIBUTION CHAIN

• We promote the formation of ‘savings clubs’ that promote entrepreneurship in commodity brokering, and provide leverage for small poor farmers against larger competitors.

 

IMPROVING UTILIZATION
It is important that the poor optimize limited food supplies by ensuring the efficient use of nutrients. 

• Educate communities about the kinds of foods that can increase the intake and absorption of vitamins and minerals, and help them to produce such foods beyond their traditional farm yields.  Consider this: In some Latin America countries, people are eating 30 percent fewer fruits and vegetables and 28 percent less milk because of rising costs. Instead they are consuming 38 percent more sodas.
  
  
• Increase public health education, especially amongst women, about what they can do to keep themselves and their children healthy, and existing food and water sources clean and safe.
  
  
• Reduce the potential of limited food and water stores becoming contaminated, by introducing environmentally friendly pesticides to control parasites and bugs.  
  
  
• Distribute bed nets and anti-malaria drugs to reduce the incidence of malaria, which steals already limited nutrients from the body through nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

 

Learn more about CCFC’s perspective on global food crisis.

Global food crisis backgrounder.