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.
Let's hope that the United States finally decides that it's going to
do what its president said it would do for Central America. It should
be a simple task, that of cutting off its support of the bad guys in Honduras
and starting to honour the commitment to democracy that Barack Obama
clearly announced when he met the leaders of Latin America at the
Summit of the Americas.
The Obama administration deserves praise for its response to the
coup in Honduras. It sends a hopeful signal that Washington's
traditional support for such undemocratic power grabs has ended.
Masked soldiers stormed the Honduran presidential palace in the early
morning hours of June 28 and violently seized President Manuel Zelaya.
Still in his pajamas, the president was forced at gunpoint onto a plane
and flown to Costa Rica.
WASHINGTON - The Group of Eight industrial nations are collectively off course in delivering on a 2005 pact to more than double aid to Africa through 2010, with France and Italy falling far short of their commitments, according to a new report released on Thursday.
The annual report by the ONE anti-poverty campaign charts progress by the G8 in meeting their aid promises made at a summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005 to more than double aid to Africa to reach $25 billion a year by 2010.
I'm a selfish bastard. At least, I've been feeling like one ever since I picked up Peter Singer's new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty.
In it, the Princeton philosophy prof directly challenges the
notion—popularized by all those late-night Sally Struthers Save the
Children ads—that helping others is as cheap and easy as giving up your
daily latte.
President Barack Obama's speech
in Cairo to the Muslim world marked a welcome departure from the Bush
administration's confrontational approach. Yet many Arabs and Muslims
have expressed frustration that he failed to use this opportunity to
call on the autocratic Saudi and Egyptian leaders with whom he had
visited on his Middle Eastern trip to end their repression and open up
their corrupt and tightly controlled political systems.
WASHINGTON - The government's food aid programs are spending more and delivering less to hungry people than they could, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Thursday.
The reason: U.S. agencies buy commodities here and ship them on high-cost U.S.-registered ships. Countries that buy food aid locally in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, the GAO found, deliver it for about a third less.
In addition, U.S. aid shipments reached their destinations in an average of 147 days, compared with 31 to 41 days for food bought locally.
Since
his inauguration in January, President Barack Obama has promised to
take the problem of climate change seriously and step into a leadership
role in the global negotiations. Congressional leadership on climate
has also swelled to deliver domestic climate change legislation. But a
"blind spot" seems to be emerging that may make it more difficult for
the United States to play the leadership role it wishes - and the world
needs it - to play.
BRUSSELS - None of a $4.5 billion package of reconstruction aid recently pledged for the Gaza Strip has got through because of border restrictions, a top U.N. official said on Thursday.
International donors pledged the aid money in March to help the Palestinian economy and rebuild Gaza after a three-week Israeli military offensive.
But John Ging, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, said Gaza had still not benefited from any of the aid because of restrictions on the flow of goods into the territory.
This month's G20 meeting ended with one overriding tangible agreement: A commitment by the rich countries to provide more than $1 trillion in assistance (mostly in the form of loans) to developing countries.
This money is desperately needed. Although they had nothing to do with mortgage-backed securities or credit default swaps, developing countries are getting worst hit by the global economic meltdown. The World Bank conservatively estimates that 53 million more people will be trapped in deep poverty due to the crisis.
