- Countries
- Africa
- Algeria
- Benin
- Burkina Faso
- Burundi
- Cameroon
- Central African Republic
- Chad
- Congo, Democratic Republic Of
- Congo, Republic Of
- Côte D'Ivoire
- Djibouti
- Egypt
- Ethiopia
- Ghana
- Guinea
- Guinea-Bissau
- Kenya
- Lesotho
- Liberia
- Libya
- Madagascar
- Malawi
- Mali
- Mauritania
- Mozambique
- Namibia
- Niger
- Rwanda
- São Tomé And Principe
- Senegal
- Sierra Leone
- Somalia
- South Sudan
- Sudan
- Swaziland
- Tanzania, United Republic Of
- The Gambia
- Togo
- Tunisia
- Uganda
- Zambia
- Zimbabwe
- Americas
- Asia
- Middle East
- Africa
- Our work
- Hunger
- Get Involved
- News
Worth reading
Thought-provoking articles that deal with hunger and the issues involved in meeting the hunger challenge.
5 September 2012
Experts Issue a Warning as Food Prices Shoot Up
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 New York Times
14 August 2012
America's disastrous corn harvest will hit world's poor hardest
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 Guardian
3 July 2012
In Niger: A Tale of Two Villages
"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."
the Huffington Post
18 June 2012
Insurance helps Kenya's herders protect against drought
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.
CNN
18 June 2012
The global challenge of food and nutrition security
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.
The Washington Post