Background
Turkana District of Kenya covers approximately 77,000 square kilometers lying almost entirely within the Gregory of the Great Rift Valley.

It is bordered by Ethiopia in the North East, by Sudan in the North and by Uganda in the West.

The Turkana District is hot and dry, and subject to periods of severe draught. Rainfall is unreliable, and unpredictable in amount, duration and periodicity.

There are no permanent rivers in the district, and only two rivers, the Kerio and the Turkwel, carry any surface flow for more than a few months each year. Most smaller drainages carry water only for a few days during the year when they are subject to flash floods during the rainy season.

Climatic conditions described here fit clearly within the framework of arid land ecosystems as non equilibrium ecosystems. The aridity, frequency of drought and extreme coefficients of variance in the rainfall pattern lead to unstable and unpredictable system dynamics.

In severe frequent droughts population fluctuations prevent plants and herbivores from developing closely coupled interactions, ecosystem development and succession are limited or non existent and ecosystems hardly reach a climatically determined equilibrium point.

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Hello everyone out there in Terra Madre blogland. I’m Gary, UniSG Masters student and ‘owner’ of the mouth2mouth blog over on the blogroll. I’m off on Monday 21st August to start my final stage project in Kenya with Samuel Muhunyu and Ugo Vallauri. We’ve got lots of stuff planned based around the subject of general communications and knowledge sharing for food communities, but we’ll be posting more of that as we go one, but we have one rather pressing requirement.

We need to raise USD3,000. Like, now…

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Many Terra Madre delegates and food communities are widely written about and more than a few of them write quite a bit themselves. Back in February, Samuel Muhunyu, the Kenyan leader of the Network for Ecofarming in Africa and leader of the Community of Seedsavers from Molo and Makueni, was profiled along with his organization in the pages of Spore, a newsletter about agricultural development in ACP countries. The article is also available in Français and Portoguês.

On Sunday, California peach and grape grower Mas Masumoto’s moving essay about farming with his father was published in the New York Times Magazine. Masumoto has written a number of books – some award-winning, even – about his farming experiences. You can read more about him here.

Tell us if you’ve been profiled or if you’ve written something we can link to – you can email us at tmblog AT slowfood DOT com with the link if you need help posting it.