The Women of the World are Depending on Us

Gender violence must cease to be a common currency, IDLO Director-General Irene Khan has said. (..) The WFP-hosted event, which focused on the negative impact of violence against women on food security, also heard from panelist Lourdes Tiban, an Ecuadorean lawmaker of indigenous descent. Gender violence, she said, is not ordained by destiny. (..) The event was opened by WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin. She later spoke to IDLO’s news editor, Andre Vornic, about the rationale behind today’s event. (..) "We keep doing the work. Every event like this is a stock-taking. It’s an opportunity to see whence we’ve come, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, but most important, how we go forward. And what excites me about opportunities like today is that they energize people to say we are making progress, but we must do more. Because the women of the world are depending on us," said Ertharin Cousin.

Global food prices stable in February: UN agency

Global food prices remained stable in February from the previous month and wheat harvests are set to increase by 4.3 percentage points this year, the UN's food agency in Rome said on Thursday. The food price index compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) remained at 210 points -- the same level as in January and five points lower than in February 2012. (..) Wheat production meanwhile was forecast to rise to 690 million tonnes this year, which would be the second largest global crop on record. This was mainly due to increased planting in Europe and a recovery in yield in some major producers like Russia and the United States.

Yemen's humanitarian crisis masked by faltering steps towards democracy

The difficulty is that Yemen faces a humanitarian crisis of a magnitude that could render political progress redundant. Figures compiled by the World Food Programme suggest almost half of Yemen's population of 25 million has fallen into debt as a result of buying food on credit

Philippine cities tackle climate change

When asked what resilience means, the head of city planning for the Philippines’ second largest city, Davao, said that for Filipinos it means how high floodwater reaches before they agree to be evacuated. (..) “Awareness is not enough,” said the World Food Programme’s (WFP) country representative, Stephen Anderson. “Local governments don’t act on information from climate hazard maps,” he told IRIN, explaining why WFP, along with the UN Human Settlements Programme, is helping to “climate-proof” four cities - Iloilo, Cagayan de Oro, Butuan and Davao - under a US-funded climate change adaptation programme that is helping city officials conduct vulnerability assessments and implement pilot projects based on identified climate threats.