"Startling gap" in food aid to poor-Commonwealth

Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma said on Thursday there was a "startling gap" between pledges made by donors to help growing numbers of hungry people and funds received. Donors at a summit in Rome last month promised $22 billion (15 billion pounds) in agriculture and food aid after higher food prices left another 40 million people hungry in 2008. That raises the number of undernourished people in the world to 963 million, the United Nations says. The head of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has said only about $2 billion -- less than one-tenth of the funds pledged -- had been received to date, but more was due in coming years. [...] U.N Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon last week called on rich nations to do more to prevent the global financial slowdown from adding to a massive 1 billion people going hungry in the world. Food prices have come down for the time being but the number of hungry people was set to rise again, Ban said. The financial crisis will slash the poor's purchasing power and cause higher unemployment, according to the World Food Programme.

Japanese envoy visits conflict-torn Mindanao, pledges assistance

Japanese Ambassador to the Philippines Makoto Katsura today visited Filipino evacuees displaced by a chronic state of conflicts in Muslim Mindanao and pledged assistance valued at around $9 million. [...] The Japanese Embassy in Manila announced that Japan will provide 860 million yen (about $9.7 million) in emergency food aid through the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) to the displaced Filipinos in Mindanao. The aid in the form of 7,500 metric tons of rice is part of Japan's peace-building efforts in Mindanao, the embassy said.

Somali refugees put strain on camps in Kenya

A growing tide of Somalis fleeing conflict at home has led to overcrowding in refugee camps in neighboring Kenya and the United Nations does not expect the influx to ease soon, a U.N. official said. The Dadaab refugee camp in arid northern Kenya received 62,000 new arrivals from Somalia in 2008 compared with only 18,000 in the previous year, U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said. [...] Aid workers say Somalia's humanitarian crisis -- in which a third of the 10 million population needs food aid -- is the worst in the world.

Growing bananas on Ben Nevis

In the first of a new series of interviews on development, Anne Perkins asks Simon Maxwell, director of the Overseas Development Institute, what he thinks of the Guardian's Katine project.