Thought-provoking articles that deal with hunger and the issues involved in meeting the hunger challenge.
Seven billion people live on Earth, and the population is growing by 77 million every year. (..) Amid this rapid growth, more than 850 million people go to bed hungry. (..) Agriculture faces dual challenges: becoming more sustainable on a dwindling resource base while having to feed an increasing number of people. To provide food and nutrition security in the coming decades will require a major and sustained effort by all stakeholders, including business. (..) The good news is that food security is firmly on the political agenda of the Group of Eight, the Group of 20 and at this week’s U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20). And business has been invited to contribute. Written by Paul Polman, chief executive officer of Unilever and Daniel Servitje, chief executive officer of Group Bimbo. They are co-chairs of B-20, the food security task force for the Group of 20.
In the sweltering port city of Aden, about 300km south of Yemen’s capital Sana’a, two dozen international NGOs are struggling to meet mounting humanitarian demands caused by a war raging in neighbouring Abyan Governorate where government troops have for a month fought to crush a local Al Qaeda ally, Ansar Al Shariah. Few aid workers have been granted access to the governorate and those in Aden face growing security constraints due to organized criminal groups.
All these tensions over land, water and food are telling us something: The Arab awakening was driven not only by political and economic stresses, but, less visibly, by environmental, population and climate stresses as well. If we focus only on the former and not the latter, we will never be able to help stabilize these societies.
Last year, around 13 million people in the Horn of Africa needed food aid. Now aid agencies warn failed harvests in the Sahel, the band of desert and scrub that runs south of the Sahara, mean 12 million more people require assistance. (..) The world has more than enough food to feed itself. Redistributing it to those who lack their share is the job of large and well-funded international aid agencies, particularly the World Food Program.
The upcoming London Conference on Somalia is, potentially, a promising occasion to finally put the country on the road to peace, stability and democracy. Whether this opportunity is realised will be largely contingent upon the willingness and ability of the participants to chart a new course that takes full stock of the genuine and long term needs of the Somali people.