The Promise of Peanuts

Case Study in Nutrition Assistance

By Roey Rosenblith

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"If you can design an inexpensive machine to shell peanuts, you will have discovered the 'holy grail' of sustainable development." Those are the words of Dr. Tim Williams, a professor at the University of Georgia and world-renowned expert on peanut agriculture in the developing world.

Jock Brandis, a film technician from Wilmington, North Carolina, had recently returned from Mali where he came face-to-face with the dire lack of appropriate peanut shelling technology. After a year of research and collaboration, he designed a machine called the "Malian Peanut Sheller." During this time he also co-founded The Full Belly Project, a non-profit dedicated to creating unique labor-saving devices for the developing world.

There are an estimated half billion people in more than 100 countries, primarily in the equatorial regions and particularly in Africa, dependent upon peanuts as a primary source of protein. Peanuts can also be made into marketable foodstuffs like peanut flour, oil, and peanut butter. Other benefits of peanut cultivation include soil conservation. Peanuts add nitrogen to the soil and their root systems prevent erosion. This increases the output of other cash crops.

The major limiting factor for growing peanuts has always been the labor-intensive process of shelling them, a job usually relegated to women and children. On average an individual woman or child can shell peanuts at a rate of only 3 lbs an hour. The Malian Peanut Sheller is a relatively small, hand-powered device made from two pieces of concrete and a handful of metal parts. A new model created in July 2005 can shell 150 lbs per hour. Furthermore, one set of two fiberglass molds priced at $600 can reproduce an indefinite number of machines, with the raw materials (concrete and metal) only costing $50 per machine.

Presently, machines have been distributed in Uganda, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Zambia and the Philippines. With a few easy manual adjustments the machine is also capable of processing wing beans and neem nuts. It can even produce peanut butter.  

Machine distribution has primarily taken place through partnerships between the Full Belly Project and organizations that have missions or operations already on the ground in these countries. The Full Belly Project has almost completed the design for another simple machine that grinds corn to obtain a feed digestible by livestock. All inventions of the Full Belly Project are registered as public domain, so the sole beneficiaries are the world's impoverished people.

Roey Rosenblith is the Director of Strategic Planning and Partnerships with the Full Belly Project. For more information go to www.fullbellyproject.org

This piece was originally published in Bread for the World Institute's 2006 Hunger Report, Frontline Issues in Nutrition Assistance. Find out more about the publication or order your copy from our online store.