 Welcome to another episode of In the Studio. I'm your host, Lynn Weaver, and the program is brought to you by Davis Media Access and broadcast on Davis Community Television, that's Comcast Channel 15, and AT&T U-Verse 99. We're also online at dctv.davismedia.org, so log on and check us out. You can find some of our other programs, our viewing schedule, and many episodes of In the Studio. Our topic today is fight global hunger and poverty, and we will be talking with three UC Davis students. We will be talking about a program at UC Davis and also nationally that allows students not to wait until they graduate to make a difference in the world. And the program at UC Davis specifically is called the Horticultural Cooperative Research Support Program, which together with the Trellis Fund allows students, or rather pairs, US students to go out on a project in a developing country and pairs them with an organization at the local level for a project on smart agriculture. So my guests today are Kelsey Borale, and she's a graduate student as well as a coordinator of the programs here at UC Davis. Welcome, and we also have Graham Savio, Savio, sorry. He's a graduate student, and he, last graduate students involved in a program in Uganda, as a matter of fact, last year he spent the summer in Uganda, and I believe you're going to go back this summer. Welcome. And then we have Sarah Selene, who's just come back from Uganda. I believe it was Sunday that you came back. Monday night. Monday night, and she's also involved in the program. Thank you all for being on the show, and you're a very impressive lot. So what we're going to do is we're going to talk about, first of all, I would like Kelsey to begin with you, and I would like to talk about, tell us a little bit about the background of the horticultural research, a cooperative research program, a sport program, as well as the Trellis Fund, so that we can get an idea how one program fit into the other, and how UC Davis fits into both. Yeah, so the horticultural collaborative research support program, or HORT-CRISP, is a USAID program. There's a bunch of different collaborative research support programs at universities all over the U.S., but UC Davis is the host for the horticulture program, and we work with different partner universities in the U.S. and all over the world to do research on horticultural crops, so fruits and vegetables, and we're focused on that because generally horticultural crops are very nutritious. Typically they can fetch better prices, so they improve family incomes than compared to grain crops, and then often women grow horticultural crops, so that's another gender is a big area of interest for HORT-CRISP. So we do a wide variety of projects, one of which is Trellis, and one of the neat things about Trellis is it was started by a graduate student, and it's grad student run, so the original Peter, the founder of Trellis, had done Peace Corps and he saw in his service that small organizations in the developing world do a lot of great things, but often the really small community-based ones just aren't competitive for really big grants, but they're doing great work in their communities, so he came up with Trellis, which matches these organizations with projects that their communities need with graduate students who might have great classroom experience, but haven't had the chance to go hands-on and actually work on what they've learned. I understand Kelsey, that you also coordinate some of the new projects, help coordinator, other people working with you. How many projects would you say are being funded at the moment? So we're in our second year this year, we had 10 projects the first year, and there's 14 right now, and then we're about to announce the third round grantees, so I think that'll come out in May, and we should fund 13 more projects in a variety of countries. When are you planning to graduate? You're getting a master's degree. Yeah, I am. Yes. I'll graduate next spring. Next spring, wonderful. Now, Graham, how did you get involved in this program, and more specifically in the UC Davis program? And what is your experience, especially in Uganda? Can you tell us how you felt about joining the program and going there? So I came to UC Davis with background working in agriculture in various capacities, but it was a year that I spent in Tanzania teaching math at a high school that really convinced me that developing world agriculture was an area where I wanted to focus. I felt like there was a lot of potential for growth in smart directions, and so the trellis project fits right in there. The trellis project puts out a call for graduate students to become involved, and it goes out to a number of universities around the United States, and they choose graduate students whose experience in region, in academic focus, in language, and all of these areas matches the area that they're going to. So I had spent some time in Uganda. I had spent about six months in Uganda working with a fair trade cocoa and vanilla company, and I think that was what sort of gave me the connection to this other organization working with trellis that's doing horticultural research in also Uganda. More specifically, do you work in the field, or do you organize, or you do research, or both? What do you do exactly? So with the fair trade company, I had been doing more data analysis type things, and now I'm doing some basic breeding, basic preliminary breeding trials for a crop called cowpea. And so the organization that I'm working with grows cowpea as a grain crop. Cowpea is a leguminous crop. It's a crop that's very versatile. So you can eat the leaves, you can eat the pods, people dry the beans, and sell the beans and eat the beans. It's a crop with an eight foot taproot, and it fixes its own nitrogen. So it's a very, it's drought tolerant, and it grows in nutrient poor soils. So it's a great crop. So it's a climate smart crop. I would say yes. Well, I just wanted to let you know that while we're talking about your activities and about these programs, we're going to show on the screen a slideshow of some of the images that the local organizations as well as students have taken in the various countries, not necessarily in Uganda, but on the various, it's a very beautiful slideshow that gives you an idea of some of the sites that we're going to see. Now, Graham, did you plant crops or not? So when I was in Uganda last year, that was primarily an initial contact visit just to get an idea of the project they had in mind and what role I might play. Returning to the US, I am actually running breeding trials at the student farm right on campus. They've given me some space, and so I'm growing 10 different varieties of cowpeas here with the idea to identify lines with promising characteristics along the lines of what they're looking for, what my partner organization is looking for. And then they will take those promising lines, and they will be the ones that actually breed them forward and do things that produce lines that are great for the farmers in that region. That's fantastic. Sarah, you've just come back from Uganda, and I was particularly interested in learning what you accomplished there, or you were in the process of accomplishing, namely allowing local women to sell the vegetables that they grow and hence have a little money for themselves. Can you tell us a little more about your experience there? And you're generally feeling about being in Uganda. I imagine you don't, you haven't lived in Uganda all your life, right? Yeah, so I was working with an organization called the Rural Agency for Sustainable Development, and they kind of identified this problem that culturally women have a lot of difficulty physically accessing market places. And so there was really a question of how to allow women to market the crops that they're already growing, and subsequently how to allow them to make money from that marketing process. And so we were really working on setting up Village Savings and Loan Associations, which allow women to save the money that they've made from their crops, access small loans that would go toward agricultural business purposes, and then also to make interest on their savings in a way that's really simple and very accessible to these groups of women. And then subsequently after that, setting up marketing committees that would access local markets, physically transport the crops and create a bit more access for those crops so that women can get them to markets where they'll be able to make a bit more of a profit. So would you say this is akin to microfinancing? It's very similar. There are some technical differences, but it's very, very similar along the same lines. And what is the reaction you're getting from the women who or have you been in contact with some of the women's who are going to get these loan and sell the vegetables? Yeah. Yes. So I've met with several different groups while I was in Uganda. And each of those groups, some of them had already set up a Village Savings and Loan. Some of them were interested but had not yet set up and some of them were just starting. And so there really is a lot of potential for these types of programs. If they're done in the right way and done in a smart way to really allow women a bit more access to capital and provide them with kind of the finances that they need to take the next step in terms of marketing and making more profit. And this is very interesting because it seems, it appears that data shows that when you allow women to be more successful and especially to have more money, they're able to feed their children and enhance the life of their immediate community. So wonderful. What else did, how did you come away from there? Do you miss it there? I do. I was, I was a bit sad that I had to return. Two weeks is not a long time to actually spend in, in a place like Uganda. It's a very, a very beautiful country and everyone was very friendly. The organization that I worked with was, was really wonderful and, and very, very smart people who are aware of their own community and aware of the problems in their community and really thinking up amazing solutions to these, these issues. Are you planning to go back? I am, I'm working on it. I'm working for us. I think this summer, I think this summer, when are you graduating? Tentatively in June. Oh, but possibly December. Fantastic. Yeah. So I just wanted to switch slightly on the topic of poverty and hunger. And just what I wanted to say, my perception is that in wealthy countries like ours, we tend to, we tend to stereotype poverty and hunger, the poor and the hungry. And what are your experiences in terms of what do you think, and I'll ask everybody, they're starting with Kelsey, what do you think are the causes for hunger and poverty in some of the developing countries as you perceive them? Yeah. Yeah, that's a big question. It is a big question. But just your perception, you know, you're what, what first comes to mind when you think of poverty and hunger, what causes it? Yeah, I guess so we're all in the International Agricultural Development Program. So we talk a lot about this. And I guess I would just say it's really, really complicated. So every country, every region is going to have, you know, different main constraints. So some places, it'll be access to markets, other places, it'll be policy, or unequal distribution of resources. And there's definitely no silver bullet answer. So it's a very, very complex question, of course, because it's not only the not the poor, who are not working, but also the working poor. And that's a problem. Graham, what are your thoughts on this? I mean, I think Kelsey captures it. It's a very complicated question. And there are no silver bullets. There's no panacea. There's no one right answer. But I think a big part of the process of ameliorating the circumstances of the poor in the world is going to be locally focused efforts. So something that works in Nigeria may not work in Uganda, or Tanzania, or Cambodia. So things that are locally focused. And that includes things like breeding efforts. And so one of the big things that I think has been lacking over the past 50 or 50 years or so in the world has been research. Research toward better varieties of the crops that people grow in tropical parts of the world. So in the United States, we've done a great job of putting money toward research for the crops that we grow, the crops that we focus on. But that research hasn't really happened for tropical crops. And so I think a focus on tropical regions, in terms of pushing money toward research in those areas, and then also allowing it to be regionally focused, I think, can do great things. Yes. And I think the time has come now for doing this research. And you're certainly contributing to that. Because finally, I wouldn't say finally, but because of the greatest impact of climate change on agriculture, especially these extreme events that are happening around the world, people, scientists, as well as policymakers and farmers are becoming very aware of finding better crops, crops that are resilient to resilient to climate, crops that are easy to plant and multiply. And then also water is a big thing. So finding crops that are resilient that don't need too much water. So it's a very good timely research at the moment. Do you think that climate smart or just smart agriculture alone is going to reduce and perhaps end hunger and poverty? I know it's a loaded question. Of course not. I think it can play a role, can play a role. But building capacity, building institutions that are functional, building people's ability to run their own lives, run their own countries, make decisions for themselves on a local level. And in a way that allows people to make decisions and do things that are appropriate for their situation, I think that's going to be a big part of it. It's not just agriculture. It's politics, it's markets, it's gender equality, it's climate change. There are many, many aspects to it all. Data keeping, seed storing and all that sort of thing. And Sarah, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I have to agree with my colleagues. I think there are a lot of different areas of international development that deal with hunger and poverty. It's not just actually agriculture. And so you have economists dealing with this, you have people who specialize in education, you have a lot of different specialists in different things. And so certainly using smart agriculture and appropriate varieties and all of these technological focuses are really important. But I mean, for myself I have to say gender issues are particularly important. Access to markets, making sure that people can access their markets and retrieve a fair price for their crops. And so it's not just the technological aspects, there are about a million other factors that kind of play into confronting hunger and poverty. And Kelsey. Oh yeah, just going off what Sarah said, we can even get and kind of see that through the diversity of the Chalice projects because they're all horticulture focused. But within that, like Sarah's project, her community identified that like the marketing and the gender was really their main constraint for horticultural production and other projects look at soil or plant disease or water. So it's a multifaceted, very complex. But if we all work together, you know, interdisciplinary research and policymakers and farmers with us, what I wanted to ask are the local organizations you've been working with and I'll start perhaps with Sarah, have they been very helpful and motivated to give you support when you were there? I had a very good experience when I was in Uganda and I think really it's not so much that the organization is helping me, it's my role to help the organization. They've already identified the problems that they want to take a look at and they've identified kind of the skill sets that they need. And so I would definitely say that I got a lot of support from them and they were very really wonderful and kind of showing me around and allowing me to kind of get a background sense of what was going on in this community and allowing me to kind of continue my research. But at the end of the day, the research that I'm continuing is for them and has been something that they've identified and so it's really, I think, my role was really to help them and to kind of fill any roles that they were looking for as opposed to them kind of helping me out. But they did facilitate you. Absolutely, yes, they were absolutely great. And you Graham, what was the impression of your local organization? My organization is actually a fairly large one. They're the National Seminary Resources Research Institute in Uganda, so they're a national organization, they're not a small NGO organization, yes. But the little piece you communicated with, was it supportive? Yeah, we were able to identify a role that I could play that seemed to be really helpful. But I think the focus of the Trellis Fund is less on graduate students providing vital information and giving all the answers to these organizations on the ground and more on building a relationship that can go forward. So in the future, ideally, you know, if this, if the organization that I'm working with has questions that they think I might be able to answer, or I can put them in touch with resources or other people who might be able to answer their questions and provide what they need, that's the focus, building that relationship that will go forward into the future. Kelsey, any last minute quick thoughts? Yeah, I think Graham said it really well. I guess as we're, as Trellis is kind of evaluating organizations to participate, we do look for organizations that really want a graduate student because it is a lot about the relationship. And hopefully the project is great for them and really benefits the community. But these are very small grants. So I think a lot of it is going to be the ongoing relationship. And, you know, Graham is able to give his organization access to articles or disconnections to other people. And hopefully that will continue way past. Well, it sounds, I'm afraid we're running out of time. So we have to leave it there. But thank you so much for being on our show. You are, as I said in the beginning, a very impressive lot. And oh, people rather. And Kelsey Borelli, Graham Savio and Savio and Sarah Saleni, all UC Davis graduate students involved in projects that are fighting hunger and poverty with smart agriculture. And thank you all of you for watching. You can stream this program again online on our website at DCTV.davismedia.org. And while you're there, you can also view some of our programs and our program schedules and many episodes of in the studio. Thank you so much for watching. I'm your host, Lynn Weaver. See you next time.