"In the next 60 seconds, 10 children will
die of hunger," says a United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) online
video. It continues, "For the first time in humanity, over 1 billion
people are chronically hungry."
The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat.
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.
LONDON - Nearly 200 million children in poor countries have stunted growth because they don't get enough to eat, according to a new report published Wednesday by UNICEF.
The vast majority are in Asia and Africa: more than 90 percent of children with stunted growth live on those two continents.
"Unless attention is paid to addressing the causes of child and maternal undernutrition today, the costs will be considerably higher tomorrow," said UNICEF executive director Ann M. Veneman in a statement.
President Obama was elected with a large enough mandate for fundamental change that he could forge a fresh social compact, lock in place a new set of mutual obligations and rewrite the relationship between the state and the populace.
Close to a billion people in the world are hungry, and there is growing poverty, unemployment, and displacement in the rural sector. The world community is in widespread agreement about the urgency of more investment in agriculture. The food crisis, partly characterized by unstable markets and low reserves, has led governments to seek measures to meet their food security needs more directly than through global trade. Even though this year's harvest was good and there was some replenishment of global stocks, there's no certainty of what markets will look like next year.
"President Obama has promised to end child hunger in the United States by 2015. But you haven't heard about it. The media is writing about what Michelle Obama is wearing. Or what kind of dog they're going to get," Joel Berg almost shouted.
Fifty people showed up to hear Mr. Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, talk about his new book, "All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?" at WPXI last night.
