Full Coverage: Food

30.12.2005 Several Kenyan MPs asked President Kibaki to declare the famine in various parts of the country a national disaster.

27.12.2005 Public investments which boost yields are falling thanks to rising subsidies, while the rising private investments actually reduce yields, through lowering of the water table, for instance.

27.12.2005 The World Food Programme (WFP) will continue to support improving immediate access of rural households to health, education and agricultural services in food insecure areas in 2006.

27.12.2005 Loss of livelihood is typically the key shock factor that then generates a process that culminates in greater hunger and malnourishment.

23.12.2005 It was in the year 1997 that the phenomenon of suicides by Indian farmers emerged. Since then it has assumed frightening proportions and till now more than 25,000 farmers have taken their own lives. Only the other day a member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly threatened to immolate himself in the house itself and a few days later, the news came that farmers in a particular village near Nagpur were preparing their own funeral pyres to immolate themselves

17.12.2005 The underlying causes of the current food shortage in southern Africa are political and economic, with lack of rain merely the final trigger, charges a development charity.

15.12.2005

© Lutheran World Relief

Lutheran World Relief has received a $640,104 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help nomadic communities in Niger avert food crises through new, innovative approaches that help bring vulnerable populations back from the brink of hunger.

12.12.2005
Taking an estimate of poor households in India as 50 million, the total demand for credit comes to around Rs.150 to 450 billion. The supply of credit, however, has not been commensurate with this demand. It has rather been declining at least from the commercial banksÂ’ side. The proportion of bank credit below Rs.25,000 has declined steadily from 18.3% of total scheduled Commercial Bank credit in 1994 to 5.3% by March 2002. The number of borrower accounts has reduced from 55.8 million to 37.3 million. Thus, there is a large-scale gap between the demand and supply position and the formal financial sector has almost failed to reach the unreached section of the rural poor. This gap is actually an opportunity for the corporates to bridge it by doing with ethical and responsible manner.

12.12.2005 Corporates can join hands with the development sector and fill up the void that governments have not fulfilled in meeting the developmental needs of the people. Professionals from the corporate and the development sector at a conference - Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Asia - agreed that corporations in todayÂ’s globalised world could respond to societal needs even while making profits. OneWorld South Asia's Rahul Kumar reports from the two-day conference.

12.12.2005 Britain has announced additional funding of more than US $12 million to address the growing food needs in drought-stricken Malawi and Zambia.

12.12.2005 UNITED NATIONS: Needy ex-fighters and their families in Afghanistan have begun receiving United Nations food packages under an initiative of the country's New Beginning Programme. Afghanistan has a population of 29 million people, and is one of the poorest countries in the world. The nearly 1,000 families benefiting from the distribution will receive wheat, oil, salt, beans and other foodstuffs. The assistance, which was provided by the UN World Food Programme (WFP), is surplus food left over from last year's distribution to demilitarized and demobilized Afghan Military Forces when they underwent the Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) process. The deliveries, which began last Wednesday, will run until mid-January.

11.12.2005 U.N. relief agencies are using video games to teach children in wealthy countries about the plight of the world's 852 million chronically hungry people. "Food Force" simulates the challenges faced by aid workers--such as negotiating with armed rebels and accounting for nutritional needs--and is available for free on the Internet.

09.12.2005 UNITED NATIONS, Dec 9 (OneWorld) - Though nearly one billion people worldwide still do not get enough to eat, there is some hope for some of them, a new study suggests.

09.12.2005 The heads of three of the largest UN agencies - UNHCR, UNICEF and WFP - have urged negotiators at the World Trade Organization to protect food aid donations through the world body.

08.12.2005 “Progress towards reducing the number of hungry people in developing countries by half by 2015 has been very slow and the international community is far from reaching its hunger reduction targets and commitments set by the MDGs and the WFS,”. wrote FAO Director-General Dr Jacques Diouf in the foreword to the report. “If each of the developing regions continues to reduce hunger at the current pace, none except South America and the Caribbean, will reach the more ambitious World Food Summit goal of halving the number of hungry people,” Diouf said.

08.12.2005 NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 7: After several studies, reports and even lobbying by MPs and states, the Planning Commission is finally ready with the list of 200 districts where the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the UPAÂ’s showpiece legislation, will be implemented.

08.12.2005 NEW DELHI: Hundreds of indigenous groups from the tribal-dominated States staged a dharna here on Wednesday, demanding "pro-people" changes in the Scheduled Tribes (Recognition of Rights) Bill, 2005.

05.12.2005 The MDGs are failing. A report by Action Aid International, entitled "Whose Freedom?" (Published in September 2005) is quite an eye-opener. This report is based on interviews with more than 350,000 people from 5,000 villages in 19 poor developing countries. It presents a stark and graphic picture of the continuing hardship faced by ordinary people in these countries. Almost all of the respondents to this survey felt that over the past five years, they have either remained where they were or are worse off in terms of access to food and basic services and fulfillment of fundamental human rights.

02.12.2005 Regional integration and cooperation in South Asia can become a reality if developmental issues are given primary importance. Issues like intra-regional trade can be taken up as secondary concerns for facilitating investment and helping development process.