The plants McCoy, 32, helps Afghani women and farmers harvest are familiar: wheat, strawberry, eggplant, tomato, and okra. She could grow them where she grew up in Fontana, California, or in her garden in Alexandria, Virginia, a home that is nearly 7000 miles away and where her husband lives. The Catholic Relief Services' (CRS's) Afghanistan program she works for is largely comprised of unmarried individuals living in Afghanistan, and its security protocol does not allow children. McCoy is able to visit her husband four times a year. "It can be hard living away from family and that is a choice sometimes going into international work, but I'm pretty content to stay here and not too freaked out by the security situation," she says. Stacy McCoy and colleague in Afghanistan She relies on her environmental science background to help Afghanis cultivate stronger, more resilient seeds and says her ability to speak French has helped immensely in her work in Africa and the Middle East. She believes her ability to speak a second language was a huge help in getting her first assignment, in French-speaking Morocco, through the Peace Corps. McCoy was 22 when she went into the corps after graduating with an international relations degree focusing on Africa and the French language from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. "I think what attracted me to the Peace Corps was this idea of wanting to work with people who were less fortunate than myself," she says. "The experience had a huge impact on my worldview."
Morocco RPCV Stacy McCoy is the agro-enterprise program manager for Catholic Relief Services' (CRS's) Afghanistan program
Working to Increase the Food Supply in the Developing World
By Sharon McLoone
September 25, 2009
Caption: Stacy McCoy (right) and Afghani colleague
"Agriculture is not a prestige area in science. But it's important to follow your passion, and I'm proud of trying to ransack everything I know about plant diseases and packaging it into curricula for farmers." --Rebecca Nelson
It's hot now in Afghanistan, where 35% of the population is chronically underfed. But soon it will be cold, and many of the country's roads will become inaccessible because of snow and landslides, making it difficult to get food to market.
Knowing these things gets Stacy McCoy out of bed every morning and out into the countryside, visiting Afghani women and farmers to offer new agricultural techniques and hardier seeds. She also works to bolster their marketing skills so that they can be exposed to new ways to sell goods in the marketplace. The marketing efforts have helped organize the women and farmers into teams so that they have more food to offer collectively and can work more closely together to share their knowledge.
McCoy is one of many American scientists who have dedicated their careers to international development in the name of making the world a better place. We profile three of these individuals here, people who have chosen career paths enabling them to help malnourished populations gain better access to food through science.
Familiar fruit in a strange place
The plants McCoy, 32, helps Afghani women and farmers harvest are familiar: wheat, strawberry, eggplant, tomato, and okra. She could grow them where she grew up in Fontana, California, or in her garden in Alexandria, Virginia, a home that is nearly 7000 miles away and where her husband lives. The Catholic Relief Services' (CRS's) Afghanistan program she works for is largely comprised of unmarried individuals living in Afghanistan, and its security protocol does not allow children. McCoy is able to visit her husband four times a year.
"It can be hard living away from family and that is a choice sometimes going into international work, but I'm pretty content to stay here and not too freaked out by the security situation," she says.
Stacy McCoy and colleague in Afghanistan
She relies on her environmental science background to help Afghanis cultivate stronger, more resilient seeds and says her ability to speak French has helped immensely in her work in Africa and the Middle East. She believes her ability to speak a second language was a huge help in getting her first assignment, in French-speaking Morocco, through the Peace Corps.
McCoy was 22 when she went into the corps after graduating with an international relations degree focusing on Africa and the French language from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. "I think what attracted me to the Peace Corps was this idea of wanting to work with people who were less fortunate than myself," she says. "The experience had a huge impact on my worldview."
She was sent to Morocco, where she became fascinated with the French-speaking, Arab/Muslim country while working on water shortage issues in a rural community there.
Her thirst for knowledge that could help developing nations prompted her to get an environmental sciences degree from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She then won a Catholic Relief Services International Development Fellowship in Rwanda, where she worked on a project proposal for 7 months to improve maternal and child health. Although her studies had not focused on that area, McCoy calls the experience "invaluable" for learning project management and reinforcing her commitment to improving health conditions around the world. After Rwanda, she was assigned to Afghanistan.
McCoy is now officially the agro-enterprise program manager for CRS Afghanistan. "Today, I'm helping people grow crops that will have a decent enough market value to sell at a profit," she says. She is particularly proud of her group's work to elevate animal husbandry as a viable economic avenue for the farmers. Her group was able to work with the farmers to find effective ways to yield more dairy, which in turn brings more revenue at the market.
"It can be tough getting an initial foot in the door in an international development program," McCoy acknowledges, "but it can help to take a post in a ‘difficult' country."
