An interesting article in the New York Times this week discusses the positive changes in Sauri, Kenya—one of the first of the Millennium Villages created by economist Jeffrey Sachs. In a nutshell, Millennium Villages offer an innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty through community-based projects related to health, education and sustainable agriculture.

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I recently attended an event promoting Eric Holt-Giménez's new book (co-authored by Raj Patel), Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice. Eric is the executive director of Food First and a powerful advocate for transforming our broken food system. His presentation unpacked the causes of hunger worldwide and promoted a reinvestment in local food systems as both a just and effective solution.

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Never heard of it? Me neither. But for farmers in Assam, India, it's become a life-saving—and crop-saving—phenomenon. Developed by crossing and refining local rice strains, flood-resistant rice varieties have undergone five years of testing and are intended to boost yields and ensure harvests despite worsening flood problems in the region. Pretty cool, right? According to estimates by the Assam agriculture department, over 5,000 farmers are now using flood-resistant rice, even though commercial-scale production of the seed has not yet started. Check out this article on AlertNet to learn more.

In response to the February 10th New York Times editorial "Hungry in America," Ruth wrote a letter to the editor putting hunger in global context. She asserts that "Band-Aid" solutions to food insecurity worldwide are not enough. And she insists that we "rethink the global food system." Check it out!

Just over a month after the earthquake, conditions for Haitians remain dire even as relief work, recovery and reconstruction efforts begin. Starvation and malnutrition persist in ways unimaginable. The situation is so bad that the country's poorest people have been subsisting on mudcakes or gato te in Creole. Made with a little salt, margarine and dried yellow mud from the country's central plateau, the cakes are baked in the sun and are a major income generator in Cite Soleil. How awful. Check out this article.

Imagine being chronically hungry, and then, after finally receiving a long-awaited plate of food, eating just one bean. According to The New York Times, this is precisely what happened to Maxi Extralien, a starving Haitian boy who received food from a Haitian civic group in the aftermath of Haiti's devastating earthquake. In the face of extreme food insecurity, thousands of other children like Maxi face the same dire situation: rationing one bean at a time to make food last as long as it possibly can.

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I am both deeply saddened and shaken by the powerful earthquake that hit Haiti on Tuesday afternoon. Three million people — about a third of Haiti’s population — have been affected by the quake. Hundreds of thousands of people are without food, water and other basic needs, and casualties have been estimated in the tens of thousands. It's very possible that they will exceed this number.

Haiti is the most marginalized country in the Western Hemisphere, plagued with crushing levels of poverty and disease, which makes this natural disaster all the more devastating. Haiti is also a country that is very dear to my heart; it’s a country in which I’ve spent a great deal of time. I was last in Haiti in September 2009 and wrote about my experience on From the Ground. As always, I was moved by the richness of its unique culture, the warmth and relational energy of the local Haitian community and the unyielding efforts to work for social justice in a country that has known so much instability.

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From joining CSAs in Seattle to developing school feeding programs in Bolivia, American Jews are making food justice an integrated part of their lives. The AJWS-AVODAH Partnership is proud to spotlight members of our community who are alleviating hunger and advocating for food justice locally, nationally and around the globe.

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With 2010 under way, Nicholas Kristof is filling us in on "the world's most scrumptious, healthful, gratifying food" – micronutrients such as folic acid and iodine. They're a lot cheaper than the ingredients that comprise our daily diets—a year's supply of micronutrients costs less than the cheapest hamburger—and yet their absence from the diets of people in Honduras and in the greater developing world is causing newborns to suffer terrible birth defects of the brain and spinal cord.

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Back in October, I attended a permaculture workshop at a retreat center in upstate New York. I learned all about food forests, grafting, sheet mulching and many other agro-ecological farming techniques about which I knew little. I was surprised—and delighted!—to learn that many of these techniques are being implemented in the developing world, too.

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