The Afican Union’s NEPAD and WFP organized a side event on food and nutrition during the AU summit in Kampala (24-26th July). The theme was: “Africa must feed itself. No child should go to bed hungry. Reduce child stunting by 50 percent in the next five years and beyond”
Hunger is an ever-present problem in extremely poor countries like Niger, but a hard drought last year has made a bad situation immeasurably worse. WFP’s Director for West Africa, Thomas Yanga, explains why so many people in Niger are going hungry and what’s being done to help them.
After 18 months in camps, many of the families displaced by conflict in Eastern Congo are keen to go home and restart their lives. WFP Executive Director Josette recently visited Katsiru in North Kivu and found that, while some are held back by fears over security, others are taking the risk. In either case, WFP is helping.
WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran promised during a visit to the village of Ruhiira to double the amount of food that WFP buys from local women farmers. The beans produced in this southern village -- part of the Millennium Village Project -- go to feed hungry children in the north.
During the second leg of her four-nation trip to Africa, WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeeran visited North Kivu in the east of Democratric Republic of Congo, highlighting the need for support and security to allow displaced Congolese to rebuild their lives.
Timor-Leste's first ever food processing plant is now turning out blended foods tailored to the nutritional needs of the poor Southeast Asian nation. The new plant, set up with crucial input from WFP, will cut the cost of distributing fortified foods, create jobs and provide a market for small farmers.
On his 88th birthday, former US Senator and presidential candidate George McGovern completed a skydive to raise awareness about hunger. The 18,000-foot jump, the first ever for the former US Air Force pilot, was recorded on video by the Skydive Space Center in Florida.
Baladi bread is the backbone of the Egyptian diet. Cheap, filling and ingrained into Egypt’s culture, it’s also the only food most poor Egyptians can afford. That’s why WFP and partners are enriching it with micronutrients to bring proper nutrition into the homes over 50 million people. Watch video
WFP is building its expanded operation in Niger around the need to reach malnourished under twos in the areas worst hit by the recent drought. Getting special nutritious food to these million children is part of a general scale-up which aims to feed 8 million people over the next six months.
Thought-provoking articles that deal with hunger and the issues involved in meeting the hunger challenge.
African farmers and American producers have different motivations and face unique challenges, but they are crucial to global food security and negatively affected by misinformation and innuendo that shape the current debates on how to feed the future. Three-quarters of the world’s poorest people derive their livelihoods by farming small plots of land. These resource-poor farmers typically farm fewer than 3 acres. They are vulnerable to hunger periods, experience post-harvest losses, depend on family labor, lack access to extension services and may be net buyers of food.
Countervailing winds have been blowing across the global efforts to reduce hunger through agriculture development. Here in the Ethiopian capital, scientists, humanitarians and politicians from across the continent and around the world gathered this week at a symposium titled “Taking it to the farmer.” They were honoring Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, by putting into action what we are told were his final words before he died last year: “Take it to the farmer.”
We need to build warehouses! We need markets!” Agnes Kalibata, Rwanda’s determined minister of agriculture, carried this emphatic and urgent message to the Kirehe district in the eastern part of the country. The bountiful maize harvest had overwhelmed the district’s storage capacity; bags of maize are piled up in farmers’ houses, crowding kitchens and bedrooms.
"Delivering food in dangerous places is challenging, and WFP has been doing it for almost half a century because, without us, nobody else is going to step forward and take up the responsibility of ensuring that the hungriest 100 million around the world get the food they need every year."
The most exciting new idea for tackling poverty and feeding billions around the world has got nothing to do with hydroelectric dams or back-slapping summitry. Instead, this one begins with a story about kung-fu movies. In the mid-90s, Claire Melamed was working in a village in the far north of Mozambique. Nacuca had no electricity, nor running water, and precious few distractions. As the development economist recalls: "Villagers would ask, 'We have to live here, but how come you've chosen to stay?" Then one day visitors came, bearing entertainment.
