By David Krantz (recipient of an ROI Micro Grant)

SEFWI WIAWSO, Ghana — When I told my friends and colleagues that I was coming here to learn lessons for Israel, many were puzzled. Surely, they thought, Israel should be teaching Ghana, not the other way around. But this remote corner of southwestern Ghana, near the country’s border with Ivory Coast, provided me with many lessons that will affect the policies promoted by the organization that I run, the Green Zionist Alliance. Thanks to fiscal support from ROI and NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, I was able to travel here to study international food policy and learn ways that Israel could become more environmentally sustainable by emulating this small country in sub-Saharan Africa.

For example, Joseph Armah, one of the leaders of Sefwi Wiawso’s Jewish community, is a photographer by trade, but he also grows his own fruits and vegetables — such as palm fruit, cassava, corn and plantain. He uses the palm fruit to make his own palm oil, one of the most common cooking oils in Ghana, and the cassava and plantain to make fufu, which is sort of like the Ghanaian version of the matzah ball, and also served in soup.

Armah’s farming plot isn’t unique among the Jews of Sefwi Wiawso — it’s actually rather common for people of all religions all across Ghana to grow their own food. More than half of all Ghanaians farm. By comparison, only about three percent of Israelis are farmers. Given that Israel is a far more-developed economy than Ghana, the low farming percentage makes sense. In the United States, less than one percent of the population farms as a vocation — but an estimated 13 percent of the American public grows fruits and vegetables in anything from windowsill pots to backyard garden plots and community gardens. With 22 percent of Israelis classified as food insecure — unable to access the amount of healthy food needed on a regular basis — widespread promotion and incentivization of fruit-and-vegetables plots, like what’s commonplace in Ghana, could help Israel’s poor meet their nutritional needs.
 
Ghana is more than 11 times larger than Israel, with only about three times Israel’s population, but in some ways land is more efficiently used in Ghana than in Israel even though Israel is more densely populated. Often, I observed that odd lots that would just be dirt in Israel are used for farming in Ghana. For example, in both the capital of Accra and the second-largest city of Kumasi, odd-shaped lots and sometimes even the spaces between the road and a house’s fence are used to grow corn and other vegetables. And in Accra, the wasteland between an electrical substation and a drainage canal — land on which Ghanaian law prohibits construction — a local farmers’ association of 31 farmers and 17 assistants grows lettuce, cucumber and other vegetables, utilizing crop rotation to help soil quality.

Life in Ghana is far from perfect — and, for certain, there remains a lot that Ghana can learn from more developed nations — but Ghana also represents a functioning example of some policies that Israel would be smart to adopt. Thanks to assistance from ROI and NYU, I found that the seeds for a greener Israel have been planted in Africa.