Thought-provoking articles that deal with hunger and the issues involved in meeting the hunger challenge.
For anyone who doesn’t “get” the moral and economic imperative of ending hunger through agriculture development, here’s another motivating imperative: security, both domestic and global.
The phrase “food security” and the mission of helping countries feed themselves are mentioned multiple times in the recently released National Security Strategy of the Obama administration. Its Feed the Future initiative is a key weapon in the deployment of American “soft power” around the world. And “development experts who can strengthen governance and support human dignity” are included with soldiers, diplomats, law enforcement officers and intelligence gatherers as defenders of the nation’s security.
Lynet Nalugo dug a cassava tuber out of her field and sliced it open. Inside its tan skin, the white flesh was riddled with necrotic brown lumps, as obviously diseased as any tuberculosis lung or cancerous breast. “Even the pigs refuse this,” she said. The plant was what she called a “2961,” meaning it was Variant No. 2961, the only local strain bred to resist cassava mosaic virus, a disease that caused a major African famine in the 1920s.
Aid agencies and donors have warned of the possibility of a famine in Niger, evoking images of the last food crisis in the Sahelian country in 2005. (..)The "nutrition surveillance" approach relied on nutritional data [ particularly measurements of children against tabulated benchmarks,] and used indicators that could be applied universally. These were used by the UN [clearing house] Refugee Nutrition Information System (RNIS), and the World Food Programme, but had limitations in predicting or defining a famine, the researchers noted.
General Douglas MacArthur gave many orders during his career, including those as commander of American forces in the Pacific during World War II.(..)Low funding for the UN WFP is stopping school feeding programs in their tracks. In Yemen one WFP program has not seen a distribution since last June. In many other countries child feeding programs are at risk.
IRIN has asked a range of experts over the past year why malnutrition is recurrent in Niger even after decades of donor support and government programmes. Two of the hardest-hit regions were focused on - Diffa, which has borders Chad, and Zinder, which borders Nigeria.