News

Thought-provoking articles that deal with hunger and the issues involved in meeting the hunger challenge.

2 November 2009

Devastating Drought Alters Life For Kenya Nomads

When 64-year-old Jimale Irobe was a young man, he guided his herds of cows and camels through knee-high grass. These days the scrubby blades barely reach his ankles even in the rainy season, and there is never enough grass to go around. The cattle cannot feed, and the nomadic families that depend on them for milk and meat cannot survive.(..) Aid agency Oxfam says 23 million people need food aid this year after the drought that swept across eastern Africa and the Horn region. Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia have been particularly hard hit. And a September report by the International Food Policy Research Institute predicted that the worldwide effects of climate change will lead to twenty-five million additional children becoming malnourished by 2050.
Associated Press (AP)
2 November 2009

Widows Support Themselves Selling Maize to WFP

Widows are often looked down on and pitied in Kenya. But the widows in the village of Angata Barakoi in the Transmara area of Kenya were determined to help each other (..) They were able to get loans from a local bank to buy seeds and other inputs. Finally, at harvest time, the World Food Programme (WFP) gave the group a contract to buy 250 metric tons of their surplus harvest through the Purchase for Progress programme.
All Africa
1 November 2009

Two years on, Katine offers much to celebrate – and much to feel frustrated about

Every time I visit Katine, in north-east Uganda, an image remains in the mind for months afterwards. In May, it was a long queue of girls laughing and chatting as they waited at a dirty water pump for hours to fill their jerrycans. In September, it was the eager face of an 18-year-old boy who proudly showed me his school report and told me how it took him three and a half hours to walk to school – and three and a half hours back. I looked with incredulity at the teachers' praise for his schoolwork. When could he find time to do his homework?
The Guardian
30 October 2009

Ending World Hunger: School Lunches for Kids Around the World

I was taking a graduate course at Mount St. Joseph in 2006 called the Spirituality of Leadership. In the class we discussed the situation in Darfur. This was around the time the refugees in Darfur faced a ration cut because of a funding shortfall for the United Nations World Food Programme.That same weekend I bought a book about the U.S. Food for Peace program. Within days, I was in touch with the U.N. World Food Programme and began writing an article.
American Chronicle
29 October 2009

Climate Change Will Devastate Africa

One of the world's most influential scientists has warned that climate change could devastate Africa, predicting an increase in catastrophic food shortages. Professor Sir Gordon Conway, the outgoing chief scientist at the UK's Department for International Development, and former head of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, argued in a new scientific paper (pdf) that the continent is already warming faster than the global average and that people living there can expect more intense droughts, floods and storm surges.
The Guardian
8 September 2009

Elimination of food waste could lift 1bn out of hunger, say campaigners

Eliminating the millions of tonnes of food thrown away annually in the US and UK could lift more than a billion people out of hunger worldwide, experts claim. Government officials, food experts and representatives of the retail trade brought together by the Food Ethics Council argue that excessive consumption of food in rich countries inflates food prices in the developing world.
The Guardian
21 July 2009

Africa’s New Path

President Obama was right to give his recent address in Ghana, highlighting an African success story rather than casting his speech against the backdrop of poverty and pity. One of the great underreported stories of the last decade has been the rise of this new Africa. In 2007, before the economic crisis hit, 37 countries on the continent were growing at 4 percent a year or more, and 34 countries there are classified by Freedom House as "free" or "partly free." The OECD reports that, in a first, Africa gets more money from investors than from foreign aid. The continent remains poor, disease-stricken, and often poorly governed. But for the first time in a long time, there is forward momentum.
Newsweek
6 May 2009

For all the debate on the worth of aid, we can well afford to pay the price

From a distance, it could have been a scene from a Constable painting: an idyllic pastoral of cattle feeding from a spring ­surrounded by green ­pastures and shaded by handsome trees. But we were in the middle of Africa and the cattle were paddling in the waters on which the local villages depend. More than 40 jerrycans were neatly lined up in a queue to fill up from the trickle of water coming from a dirty pipe. The chatter and squeals of laughter of a waiting crowd of girls reverberated across the marshes. They told us that it would be more than four hours before all would have had their turn. Four hours a day just to get water.
The Guardian
5 April 2009

Pregnant (Again) and Poor

For all the American and international efforts to fight global poverty, one thing is clear: Those efforts won’t get far as long as women like Nahomie Nercure continue to have 10 children. [...] As we walked through Cité Soleil, the Haitian slum where she lives, her elementary-school-age children ran stark naked around her. The $6-a-month rental shack that they live in — four sleep on the bed, six on the floor beside it — has no food of any kind in it. The family has difficulty paying the fees to keep the children in school. There’s simply no way to elevate Nahomie’s family, and millions like it around the world, unless we help such women have fewer children.
New York Times
3 April 2009

'Dead Aid,' Dead Wrong

The broad American belief that foreign aid is stuffed down tropical rat holes has been recently reinforced by a young Zambian, Oxford-trained economist named Dambisa Moyo. Her book, "Dead Aid," has launched her as a conservative celebrity, feted by Steve Forbes and embraced by the Cato Institute. And the book is something of a marvel: Seldom have so many sound economic arguments been employed to justify such disastrously wrongheaded conclusions.
Washington Post