NYAMATA, RWANDA — When he was a boy, Charles Munyawera's parents abandoned the Rwandan countryside in search of richer opportunities in Kigali, the capital city.
Now the 62-year-old entrepreneur is heading back to this nation's agricultural heartland, lured by a worldwide food crisis that is turning a backbreaking and often-unprofitable way of life into what may be one of the hottest opportunities around.
Munyawera recently invested $300 as one of about 140 participants in a farming cooperative that expects to reap its first corn harvest this summer. Although the cooperative remains untested in many ways, he's already lined up buyers and expects prices to be 35% higher than just six months ago.
"Demand is huge," Munyawera said, beaming.
In Africa, a place all too familiar with chronic malnutrition and recurring famines, the international food crisis is playing out in some surprising ways.
Soaring prices are pummeling urban dwellers who rely on imported food and often earn less than $2 a day. Riots have already rocked Somalia and Cameroon.
But in rural areas, home to most Africans, small farmers live largely on what they grow. The food crisis could be a boon for such farmers, who depend far more on last season's rainfall and the condition of local roads than on crude oil prices.
As governments focus on reducing their dependency on imports, small farmers are poised to receive some overdue assistance. And rising prices will mean farmers have incentives to plant more after decades of productivity declining under the weight of poverty, foreign competition and a marketplace flooded with subsidized food.
"This might be one of the best opportunities that poor subsistence-level farmers will ever have to claw their way out of poverty," said Josh Ruxin, founder of Access Project Rwanda, an anti-poverty advocacy group. "For the first time in years, they might be able to make some money."
Roots of the current food crisis are global: growing demand for meat in China and India, diversion of U.S. corn for ethanol, record oil prices and an Australian drought.
Helping African farmers help themselves will be far cheaper for the international community than a more drastic measure such as an emergency bailout, said Pedro Sanchez, director of tropical agriculture at Columbia University's Earth Institute, a poverty research and advocacy group.
