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Hunger in the news

A daily selection of news reports from the world's media dealing with hunger and responses to it.
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Focus on Women
27 May 2013

Le coq chante sur RFI - la digue anti sel de Fayil

Le village de Fayil se trouve dans la communauté rurale de Diouroup, qui fait partie département de Fatick au Sénégal. Fayil compte une population de 6472 âmes. Le village est inséré dans la vallée de Fayil. Une position qui permet l'agriculture et le maraîchage, principalement de la riziculture. Voilà, pour la théorie. Car, dans la pratique, les terres cultivables sont envahies par la langue salée du Sine. Pour cultiver, les habitants des villages de Fayil, Dioral, Ndioudiouf et Sowane étaient obligés d'aller ailleurs pour avoir des terres. Il fallait donc faire quelque chose. En 2009, ont commencé les travaux de construction d'une digue anti-sel. Ce qui a permis de récupérer des terres et renouer avec la pratique de la riziculture interrompue, il y a maintenant quarante ans.
RFI
Purchase for Progress
21 May 2013

Solvable Problem

Whenever I have the privilege of spending time among the people that the World Food Programme (WFP) serves, I come away enriched with precious extra knowledge and inspired by the new ways in which governments are tackling the world’s greatest solvable problem – hunger. (..) We at WFP have seen farmers’ capacity to prevent food loss transformed thanks to the Purchase for Progress (P4P) pilot project, which we launched with partners five years ago to test new ways to buy food that could enable smallholder farmers to achieve better yields, improve the quality of their crops and sell to reliable buyers for a fair price. (..) The experience of P4P is showing us clearly that, with the right support and knowledge, it is possible to prevent losses of precious food in poor countries struggling to achieve food security.
UNEP
Hunger in the news
20 May 2013

The Politics of Aid in a War Zone

The UN estimates that there are now almost 7 million Syrians who, like Raja, depend on humanitarian assistance to survive. (..) A multitude of small NGOs, like the Jana Foundation—the organisation that provides food for Raja and her family—and larger organisations such as the World Food Program (WFP) are desperately trying to reach all the people in Syria who need their help.
Asharq al- Awsat
Hunger in the news
17 May 2013

Syria crisis threatens Palestinian refugees

The Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila is perilously wedged along one of Lebanon's many sectarian fault lines. (..) Although Shatila was founded as a Palestinian refugee camp, many non-Palestinians now live there as well.
Al Jazeera
Hunger in the news
16 May 2013

Mali receives pledge of 520 million euros from EU

Ertharin Cousin, of the World Food Programme expressed her concern as the money pledged so far is only a quarter of what the nation is looking for. “The challenge is that there are 300,000 people who are still internally displaced from the north living in the south of Mali, there another in the 175000 living in the surrounding countries and today we are also feeding another 700,000 who are entire need of food assistance.”
Euronews
Hunger in the news
15 May 2013

UN finds critical shortages of food, other supplies on visit to Syrian village of Houla

Elisabeth Byrs, spokesperson for the UN World Food Programme (WFP), said that the mission monitored the distribution of an inter-agency food convoy that left on 8 May, consisting of nine trucks of food, hygiene items and water supplies sufficient for 25,000 people. (..) It was a region that normally lived on agriculture and cattle-farming but its economic cycle had been interrupted. There was no harvesting, many cattle had been lost, and because of the high prices of petrol and gas, people were using animal faeces for heating.
UN News Centre
Hunger in the news
14 May 2013

Syria's internally displaced

As the conflict in Syria drags on, more and more people are becoming displaced and the United Nations is having increasing difficulty in providing all of them with the aid they need to get by. (..) "We are being hindered in some areas of the country simply because we can't move around easily. (..) The other key challenge we have is funding," says WFP Deputy Country Director Kate Newton
CNN International
Purchase for Progress
14 May 2013

Lesson From A Famine: Markets Matter

Sidama Elto is one of 16 cooperative unions in Ethiopia that have signed forward contracts with the WFP for the purchase of more than 28,000 metric tons of maize grown by their smallholder farmer members. The maize, which is part of 112,000 tons of food the WFP purchased in Ethiopia last year, will be used for WFP relief distributions in the country. Ten years ago, many of those farmers and their families were receiving food aid from the WFP. One of the major lessons in agricultural development over the past decade is this: Markets Matter.
Huffington Post
Hunger in the news
30 April 2013

Running the Gauntlet: Delivering Food in Syria

Aid workers in Syria are struggling to navigate a lawless archipelago of armed groups to get food to Syrians trapped in a fast-intensifying civil war, the head of the World Food Programme's Syria operation says. (..) Matthew Hollingworth said in an interview last week that WFP is trying to feed 2.5 million people every month inside Syria - a tenth of the population - and a million outside, in a conflict that has left 70,000 dead. (..) "We are trying to keep up with the enormity of the crisis and the impact of the brutality," he said.
The New York Times / Reuters
Hunger in the news
29 April 2013

Egyptian wheat farmers face a hard time

Egypt imports roughly 10 million tonnes of wheat a year.(..) But this year, officials have cut imports of key commodities like wheat, betting that a big local harvest will make up the difference. If farmers cannot make money growing wheat, many of them might switch to more lucrative crops in the future.
Al Jazeera

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