On a visit to Ethiopia in 2009, I spoke with a citizen who told me that the problem was not so much the availability of arable land, but the lack of machines that would permit the production productively.
Marcin Jakubowski, a Polish expatriate living in Missouri, may have a solution to this problem: open source machines.
Jakubowski is the founder of Open Source Ecology, a consortium dedicated to the idea that sustainability should not entail sacrifices in quality of life. The network of farmers and engineers who managed to organize Jakubowski is building what could be described as the lego of agriculture, a set of industrial machines known as Construction Kit Global Village ("Global Village Construction Set," or GVCS)
The GVCS is a collection of 50 machines made to work with each other, and meet the needs of villages around the world, using only locally available materials and tools.
In fact, some of the tools in GVCS aim to maintain and make other tools, such as the 3D printer.
There is even an extractor aluminum clay kit and a compression block of land to make bricks.
Not all machines in the set is complete, although there are prototypes.
What is most important, all devices in the collection are free specifications. To the extent that more devices are built, bugs are resolved, and specifications developed.
I heard about the project in a video Jakuwski recent Ted Talks, although the project is being developed since 2003.
When you see the presentation of Jakubowski, I was impressed about how the simple concept of open source hardware could extend the benefits of Open Source solutions that can improve the lives of even more fundamental. Open source can bring knowledge and education, but the hardware can help to free food and shelter.
As with any project, there are challenges that the Open Source Ecology need to address. But the collaborative effort they have made so far is really impressive and worth being seen by their compatriots in the Free Software community.