I have read Walden Bello's 2008-08-05 article "The Destruction of African Agriculture" and the comments on it made by Regina Birner (IFPRI) and Dan Taylor (Find your Feet).

Analysis of cause is, of course, important. Yet the essence is to actually do something to solve the issues which have arisen.

NGO Stichting Bakens Verzet ("Another Way") promotes a Model for self-financing, ecological, sustainable local integrated development projects for the world's poor. The Model enables grass-roots NGOs and interested parties in developing countries to draft their own advanced integrated development projects and apply for their seed financing. The Model provides simple, down-to-earth practical solutions to poverty- and development-related problems. It sets out step by step how the solutions are put into effect. By following the steps social, financial, productive and service structures are set up in a critical order of sequence and carefully integrated with each other. That way, cooperative, interest-free, inflation-free local economic environments are formed in project areas. Local initiative and true competition are then free to flourish there.

This work is in the public domain. It can be accessed and downloaded from website and is available for use free of charge. The website is ranked by search engines as one of the world's leading resources on a wide range of development-related topics.

A series of four short Powerpoint presentations on the Model are directly acessible from the website homepage.

It is hoped Pambazuka and its readers will consider setting a link up with the website and that researchers may see fit to cite and make use of our work in their future publications.