Thought-provoking articles that deal with hunger and the issues involved in meeting the hunger challenge.
During the lean season, WFP is providing special fortified food to prevent malnutrition to close to 1 million children under 2 as well as nursing mothers. (..) “Preventing and treating acute malnutrition is at the core of WFP’s response in the country,” said Darline Raphael, head of WFP’s nutrition unit in Niger. Malnutrition has always been a concern in the country, especially during the lean season.
With the worst drought in half a century withering corn across the Midwest, agricultural experts on Tuesday urged international action to prevent the global spike in food prices from causing global hunger. (..) “Countries must avoid panic buying and refrain from imposing export restrictions, which, while temporarily helping some consumers at home, are generally inefficient and make life difficult for everyone else,” said the directors of the United Nations programs, José Graziano da Silva of the Food and Agriculture Organization, Kanayo F. Nwanze of the International Fund for Agricultural Development and Ertharin Cousin of the World Food Program, in a statement.
The burning of America's corn belt in the worst drought in half a century is bad news for the world's poor, bad news for food security, bad news for inflation and bad news for the policymakers trying to nurse the global economy back to health. Central bankers and finance ministers have been crying out for something unexpectedly positive to happen that would make their job easier: as it is, the threat of a disastrous US harvest is simply the latest in a series of negative shocks.
"The contrast of these two neighboring villages makes me wonder about one simple part of the formula for building resilience: something to eat today and something to sell for tomorrow. Think of resiliency as concentric circles with households' agricultural production being the inner circle, one donor colleague explained to me. Building resiliency has to start with access to food -- we can't do much if we don't eat but it can't stop there."
Every time a drought has hit this elderly couple's village in northern Kenya they have had to rebuild their lives all over again. (..) By then Wacho and Dawe had lost 10 of their 15 cows, but they danced too. They knew they would struggle to support their nine children without these animals but this drought was different -- for the first time in their lives Wacho had taken insurance out on some of their cattle. (..) "Micro-insurance for agriculture is something that farmers in the rest of the world have had access to for sometime," says Challiss McDonough from the World Food Programme. (..) WFP and Oxfam America have their own micro-insurance initiative for agriculture in Ethiopia and it's now being expanded into Senegal.