ROME - World farmers are not part of the official delegations at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) food summit on food security that opened here Monday. But they came anyhow to express their views, since, they say, it is their communities that are most impacted by the food crisis.
Small-scale producers from the Amazonian rainforest, from Africa, the Pacific islands and the Himalayas gathered in Rome for the Peoples' Food Sovereignty Forum (Nov. 13-17), held in parallel to the FAO meetings, to discuss the serious effects of the crisis in their communities.
Big news came on Friday, when the USDA announced that Deputy
Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan would lead the United States
delegation to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United
Nations Ministerial Conference in Rome, Italy, taking place this week
from November 18-23. She will chair the conference, the first time a
woman has done so. In the press release, Merrigan had this to say:
UNITED NATIONS - Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will join a
24-hour fast called by the U.N. food chief to show solidarity with the
world's 1 billion hungry ahead of a food security summit next week, a
spokeswoman said on Friday.
U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director-General
Jacques Diouf said on Wednesday he would not eat for 24 hours starting
Saturday morning, and called on people around the world to follow suit.
The leaked World Food Summit draft declaration falls short of a UN goal of eradicating hunger by 2025. Instead, leaders are expected to to sign a watered down declaration in Rome next week that calls for vague increases in aid for farmers in poor countries but sets no targets or deadlines for action.
Leaders are expected to reaffirm their commitment to the UN's Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of hungry people by 2015 - a target that is unlikely to be reached.
Tens of millions of the world's poor will have their food rations cut or cancelled in the next few weeks because rich countries have slashed aid funding.
The result, says Josette Sheeran, head of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), could be the "loss of a generation" of children to malnutrition, food riots and political destabilisation. "We are facing a silent tsunami," said Sheeran in an exclusive interview with the Observer. "A humanitarian disaster is unrolling." The WFP feeds nearly 100 million people a year.
UXBRIDGE, Canada - Rocketing food prices and hundreds of millions more starving people will be part of humanity's grim future without concerted action on climate change and new investments in agriculture, experts reported this week.
The current devastating drought in East Africa, where millions of people are on the brink of starvation, is a window on our future, suggests a new study looking at the impacts of climate change.
Twenty-five million more children will go hungry by the middle of this century as climate change leads to food shortages and soaring prices for staples such as rice, wheat, maize and soya beans, a report says today.
If global warming goes unchecked, all regions of the world will be affected, but the most vulnerable - south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa - will be hit hardest by failing crop yields, according to the report, prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.
The Global Harvest Initiative, founded by agribusiness interests DuPont, Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, and John Deere, will meet today
beginning at 9:00 am for a daylong symposium at which the focus is said
to be on finding “ways to sustainably double agricultural output to
meet rapidly growing global demand as anticipated by the United
Nations.” Are big corporations finally seeking to do what is right by
the nearly billion p
GENEVA - A group of 125 non-governmental organisations from 50 countries is calling on the governments participating in the mini-ministerial trade talks in India over the next two days to reject the further liberalisation of food and rather promote policies that will achieve food security and rural development and safeguard farmers' livelihoods.
Most of us would agree that there is a serious problem vis-a-vis access to food in the developing world. According to the UN food agency, there are now more than one billion undernourished people worldwide. The need to do something about the broken food system is especially apparent in Haiti, where I have been on a working assignment with Grassroots International for the past few weeks.
