A long dry spell in the El Chaco region of southern Bolivia has decimated maize harvests, threatening an entire culture of indigenous corn growers with destitution. As thousands sell their land and move to the cities, WFP is helping to make staying on their farms a real option.
The loss of seeds, crops and incomes are the three threats for Pakistan now, said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran on Tuesday after visiting one of the areas hit by devastating flooding. She called on the world to support Pakistan through the current crisis. View video
Amid growing concerns about disease and malnutrition among the millions of Pakistanis displaced by catastrophic flooding, WFP is providing nutritious ready-to-use foods designed to stem child malnutrition. The province of Sindh – which already had some of the worst nutrition indicators before the disaster – is particularly at risk.
As millions of flood victims across Pakistan struggle to feed their children, the country's already high levels of malnutrition risk climbing above the emergency threshold. A nutritionist working in southern Sindh province, Bilan Osman Jama explains what’s being done to keep this epic natural disaster from becoming a child-hunger crisis.
WFP video producer Marco Frattini is currently in Punjab, “the land of five rivers,” where epic floods have laid waste to millions of acres of farmland. In this video, he meets Moreed, whose family is living in a tent on the side of the road as they wait for the waters to recede. Watch video
After floodwaters washed over her home in the Sindh district of southern Pakistan, Menaz and her family sought refuge in the Sukkur camp for flood victims where WFP is providing them with nutritionally enriched wheat to make bread, oil, and high-energy biscuits tailored to her children’s nutritional needs.
As floodwaters continue to wreak havoc across Pakistan, hundreds of thousands of people have been cut off from help. WFP is stepping up airlifts of food and supplies for these isolated communities and bringing in more helicopters. Three new ones arrived on Sunday.
A massive feeding campaign in drought-stricken Niger is under way. It started in a small village east of the capital. Amont these who came to receive food rations for their families were Hadiza, a mother of four, and Shaibou, a grandfather of 50. For both the food was a life-saver. View video
WFP is fighting to overcome the weather, devastated infrastructure and the sheer scale of human need in providing food aid to as many as six million victims of the recent floods in Pakistan. Trucks, helicopters and even mules are being used to transport food around the country and reach those cut off from help.
“We never knew this rain would make us homeless – we are literally left with nothing,” says Shabbir Ahmed, a father of nine forced to flee the worst floods anyone in Punjab can remember. WFP is providing food to thousands of families like his as they wait for the waters to recede.
Thought-provoking articles that deal with hunger and the issues involved in meeting the hunger challenge.
The other day, I received a reminder from Burwinkel Farms about the "yummy fruits and vegetables" still available for the summer season. Burwinkel operates a stand around the corner from my home and they specialize in sweet corn!! (..) The World Food Programme (WFP) says: "Many smallholder farmers lose a significant percentage of their produce due to poor storage facilities and poor storage techniques. Crops rot or are stolen." WFP helps farmers to improve storage facilities through the Purchase for Progress initiative.
Fifty years ago, a billion people were undernourished or starving; the number is about the same today. That’s actually progress, since a billion represented a third of the human race then, and “only” a sixth now. Today we have another worry: roughly the same number of people eat too much. But, says Julian Cribb, a veteran science journalist from Australia, “The era of cheap, abundant food is over.” Like many other experts, he argues that we have passed the peak of oil production, and it’s all downhill from now on. He then presents evidence that we have passed the peaks for water, fertilizer and land, and that we will all soon be made painfully aware that we have passed it for food, as wealthy nations experience shortages and rising prices, and poorer ones starve.
It is no coincidence that a neighbor of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa here is Embrapa, the Brazilian agricultural research corporation. For Embrapa was one of the main players engineering the green revolution in Brazil. Embrapa was created in 1973 with a four-headed mission: guarantee food supply to Brazil’s teeming cities, where most of the country’s poor people live; help develop the rural areas; preserve Brazil’s natural resources; and, produce a sufficient surplus of food for export.
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.”
