Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Winter 2015 | Page 34

meet the now-steady demand.”
In East Africa, smallholder farmers supply nearly 90 percent of regional
produce and encompass 80 percent of the population. According to
Philipp, these farmers face three major issues: no reliable market, lack of
the right agricultural knowledge, and lack of cash input to finance their
operations. The Joseph Initiative provides all three.
By helping farmers increase production and by formalizing systems to
match supply to demand, Philipp hopes the initiative will help Uganda
achieve its potential to become the breadbasket of East Africa, ultimately
supplying grain domestically and to neighboring countries, including
Kenya and South Sudan, where food insecurity is a deeply felt problem.
He believes projects like this one could help alleviate the structural
food deficit in East Africa and many other parts of the world. These
deficits, Philipp explains, are a result of dramatic urbanization, where
people (mainly youth) move into cities and become increasingly
dependent on markets to meet basic needs while the number of
producers remaining in the villages to produce raw goods diminishes.
“In an environment where there’s less food, less producers, and more
people dependent on markets, we’re increasing productivity per capita,”
Philipp says. “Then we are more efficiently matching supply which is
fundamental to the markets on which these new urban consumers depend.”

Restoring Hope to War-Torn Places
As vice president of Land O’ Lakes, Inc.’s International Development
Department Division, Jon Halverson ’89 aims to link smallholder farmers
to markets in some of the most difficult and desperate places in the world
including Yemen, Liberia, Zimbabwe, and Sri Lanka.
Land O’ Lakes, Inc. enters these post-conflict regions with the aim of
establishing sustainable market systems. In the dairy sector, smallholder
farmers form cooperatives that establish milk collection centers, help
farmers achieve best practices around sanitation, animal husbandry, and
cold storage, and connect farmers to rapidly growing dairy markets.
Farmer aggregation, Jon says, is critical to developing scale advantages and
giving farmers access to finance, technology, and training. More importantly, it brings people in war-torn regions together across ethnic and tribal lines

and provides people once living hand-to-mouth with hope for the future.
Oftentimes in post-conflict zones, a whole generation has grown up
without an understanding of peace, stability, and productivity.
“When they achieve food security,” Jon says, “they can start to take care
of their own health, put their kids in school, upgrade their homes, and
contribute to their community.”
In 2014 alone, the company has reached over 200,000 households in over
20 countries around the world through its work.

Beyond Food Security
What are the ultimate ends of feeding a growing global population? Dr.
Norm Ewert, business and economics professor emeritus, notes that from a
Christian perspective, the ultimate ends are reconciliation with God, others,
and creation. Part of the challenge for the Christian, then, becomes not only
feeding the hungry in ways that are sustainable and economically inclusive,
but also in ways that reflect good stewardship of God’s created order.
“Wheaton’s liberal arts education best positions students to respond to
these challenges,” Dr. Ewert says.
Philipp could not agree more. He draws from philosopher Nicholas
Walterstorff ’s concept of “shalom”—the ultimate end of true peace through
right relationships—t