Follow the group's progress:
www.farmafrica.org/the-trekbale-blog
Meet the team:
Alan Gibson - Moy Park
Andrew Cracknell
Andrew Thompson - Booker
Charles Reed - William Reed Business Media
Colin Brereton - PwC UK
Graeme Pitkethly - Unilever plc
James Dallas - Openfield
Keith Packer - 2 Sisters Food Group
Mark Williamson - Waitrose
Nigel Dunlop
Owen Brennan - Devenish Nutrition
Richard Canvin - Dovecote Park
Richard Macdonald - Farm Africa
Tim Smith - Tesco
On the 6 November we will depart the UK for Ethiopia and the Bale Mountains. Our group, 14-strong, represents retailers, suppliers and producers from across the UK food industry, and we are uniting to help tackle the biggest issue facing the world today: hunger.
Nearly a billion people in the world are hungry and 1 in 4 people in sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished. With growing populations and climate change, global food production needs to rise by some 70% over 40 years to meet demand. Although Africa struggles with famine, it possesses 60% of the world’s uncultivated crop land and has huge capacity for development.
That’s where Farm Africa comes in. The charity takes a commercial and long-term approach to ending hunger for farmers and their communities in eastern Africa by empowering them to grow enough food to feed their families and to kick-start sustainable local businesses. This year Farm Africa will work directly with 1.5 million people in eastern Africa, and it seems fitting that, in the charity’s 30th year, we are returning to where it all began in 1985: Ethiopia.
The challenge we are undertaking - to trek 117km at altitude over just six days, summiting four peaks each over 4,000m - has, to our knowledge, never been undertaken. The route we are following is so remote that it has no access to vehicles. We will pass through the richly diverse, but threatened, Bale Mountains region where Farm Africa is running projects which will reduce deforestation, improving and sustaining the livelihoods of up to 878,000 local inhabitants and benefitting a further 12 million people living on arid land further downstream.
Following our trek we will visit a nearby Farm Africa project to see first-hand how local people are being empowered to change their lives and build better futures.
The challenge will be intense, both physically and mentally, however, we believe Africa has the power to feed itself, and need your support to make this a reality.
Thank you for your support.
