As the famous poem, “Sometimes” (which the author famously doesn’t want her name to be associated with) goes,

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.

Sometimes — or at least now — tens of thousands of African farmers can eat better, send their kids to school, mend the roof, and have some hope: in this case thanks to a sweet collaboration with some visionary people from our side of the North-South divide. I was just about to celebrate it on this blog when my eye caught another project by American graduates that is really helping.

Selling safou (an African fruit like plums) in Cameroon. Credit: Hannah Jaenicke/World Agroforestry Centre

IF YOU had come here 10 years ago, says Thaddeus Salah as he shows us round his tree nursery in north-west Cameroon, you would have seen real hunger and poverty. “In those times,” he says, “we didn’t have enough chop to eat.” It wasn’t just food – “chop” in the local dialect – that his family lacked. They couldn’t afford school fees, healthcare or even chairs for their dilapidated grass-thatch house.

Salah’s fortunes changed in 2000 when he and his neighbours learned how to identify the best wild fruit trees and propagate them in a nursery. “Domesticating wild fruit like bush mango has changed our lives,” he says. His family now has “plenty chop”, as he puts it. He is also earning enough from the sale of indigenous fruit trees to pay school fees for four of his children. He has been able to re-roof his house with zinc sheets and buy goods he could only dream of owning before. He even has a mobile phone.

The article, by Charlie Pye-Smith, is in one of the few magazines I read regularly (what magazine editor has time or brain cells to read as widely as necessary? not this one), and one which I recommend to spiritual and social change activists. (Because science and its use and misuse is shaping our world and the New Scientist, based in England, has an instructive mix of rah-rah promotion and sociological caution about it.) Back to the wild African fruits:

Sparsely funded and largely ignored by agribusiness, high-tech labs and policy-makers, it is a peasant revolution taking place in the fields of Africa’s smallholders.

The revolution has its roots in the mid-1990s, when researchers from the World Agroforestry Centre conducted a series of surveys in west Africa, southern Africa and the Sahel to establish which indigenous trees were most valued by local people. “We were startled by the results,” says Tchoundjeu. “We were expecting people to point to commercially important timber species, but what they valued most were indigenous fruit trees.”

In Cameroon, people eat fruits and seeds from around 300 indigenous trees. There are 3,000 species of wild fruit tree in Africa, many of them ripe for domestication. While that may sound a slow process, there are ways of speeding it up by grafting or “marcotting,” simple techniques any farmer can learn.

The programme has been a huge success: in 1998, there were just two farmer-run nurseries in Cameroon; now there are several hundred. Many are independent businesses, making significant profits and providing enough trees to transform the lives of tens of thousands of rural families.

The World Agroforestry Centre was started in the 1970s in response to a study by a visionary Canadian forester. It is now based in Kenya, but is involved with projects all over the world.

Priya Haji, co-founder of World of Good, visits a woman in northern India who is learning how to sew clothing for her family through an artisan co-op. Photo: Manav Parhawk / World for Good

The other article that caught my eye in the good-news-for-the-global-South department concerns a couple of grads from the Haas School of Business (an easy walk from my office, and one I’ve done a few times to see my friend Jerry Engel who runs a program there). Priya Haji and Siddharth Sanghvi set up World of Good in 2004 to promote fair trade in handmade items.

Thousands of artisans in 70 countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe fabricate the handmade jewelry, clothing, housewares and art that World of Good sells online and in stores. The craftspeople, mainly women working in existing cooperatives, earn at least 20 percent above the local minimum wage and are guaranteed a safe working environment. Those conditions are verified by outside authorities such as fair-trade groups.

I have a strong resonance for this since one of the first activist things I got involved in was opening a store for exactly these items in my college town in 1973. Two of our group went to Tanzania to contact coops and purchase craft goods for sale. Later we bought tons of instant coffee from a Tanzaian coop factory and sold it across England as Campaign Coffee. Those ideas were very new then, and we had no business training. Now I read on my Starbucks cup that by buying it I am supporting ethically traded and ecologically responsible coffee: I am glad to know that is considered a good way to sell coffee, and just caution that we all need to be aware about greenwashing to press such companies to live up to their own hype.

World of Good, from what I can see, is well worth supporting. They have gone to great lengths to support their producers during this economic downturn and they need the holiday business. I think we could give anyone a special pass, a Tikkun dispensation, to buy World of Good products if you are thinking of ignoring our Tikkun Holiday Guides’ encouragement to give non-monetary presents this year.