International Environmental Data Rescue Organization Website

		PREVENTS STARVATION
		Subsistence Farming	Some years Bangladesh farmers' fields are green and there is plenty of water for crops and fishing.
		Within early foraging communities, such as hunter-gatherer societies, people consumed only what was hunted or gathered by members of the community. As the domestication of certain plants and animals evolved, a more advanced subsistence agricultural society developed in which communities practiced small-scale, low-intensity farming to efficiently produce adequate quantities of goods to meet the basic consumption needs of the community. For many undeveloped nations, subsistence farming represents the only option to prevent starvation and famine. For countries like Botswana, Bolivia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Mexico, and Vietnam, however, subsistence farming continues to be a way of life far into the twenty-first century.
		Tasin is one of 1.8 billion subsistence farmers in the world. He lives in Bangladesh, a country in South Asia bordered by India on all sides. Ninety percent of the people in Bangladesh grow their own food. The country is among the most densely populated in the world and has a high poverty rate. Although Bangladesh’s weather is dominated by annual monsoon floods and cyclones, it is also plagued by periodic droughts.	Some years nothing grows...
		Tasin, his wife, two boys and three girls, plant rice every year, and like all subsistence farmers, Tasin makes planting decisions with an eye towards what the family will need during the coming year.
		...and children die.	When we interviewed Tasin, we asked how he planned for the droughts. He said he saved 10% of his rice every year. We asked him how he decided on this amount. He answered, "Since Bangladesh gets a drought once every ten years, we make it through." We asked how he knew he would have a drought every ten years. He answered, "I've been here for 12 years and we've had one drought."
		What Tasin didn’t know is that to validate his conclusion, he would have needed to accumulate 100 years of data. In fact, an in-depth examination of the data showed that droughts occur on the average of once every six years in his part of Bangladesh. Two years later, there was another drought and two of Tasin's children starved to death.
			Complete historical climatological information, if used as a basis for these subsistence farmers when planting, could guide them as to how much to save from year to year for the lean years. If one-tenth of one percent of subsistence farmers took this data and altered their planning practices, it would be possible to save 2-3 million lives every year.
		Take a look at where the hungry people live. The World Food Programme of the United Nations makes it easy to find out. Where the hunger is greatest, the need for data rescue is also the greatest. The farmers must have this information to lessen the chances of their families going hungry. Please donate what you can so families, especially children and the elderly don't starve.