Today’s heart-breaking New York Times story about Haiti’s orphans is a painful reminder of the earthquake’s enduring devastation. The article offers a harrowing portrait of Daphne, a 14-year-old girl who watched her mother’s mangled body get carted away in a wheelbarrow from a shattered marketplace. Daphne then lived in a makeshift orphanage founded by Frades—a …
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Climate change threatens to slash Bangladesh’s rice crop [AlertNet] Food, Inc.’s Eric Schlosser urges Senate to pass the Food Safety Bill [Civil Eats] “Haiti: The Aid Dilemma” [PBS]—This is the third installment of ongoing FRONTLINE reports on Haiti with correspondent Adam Davidson of NPRs Planet Money. Himalayan glaciers are melting, endangering the waterways of Afghanistan, …
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UCLA Law Professor Jonathan Zasloff discusses the success of Techno-Agriculture for Poverty Alleviation (TIPA) in Senegal [Legal Planet] G8 food security program can make or break PM Harper’s child and maternal health plan [AlertNet] Faces & Visions of the Food Movement: Jennifer Curtis [Civil Eats] Secretary Clinton announces the winners of the annual World Food …
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A piece recently published in Newsday—a Zimbabwean newspaper—poignantly expresses what we’ve been discussing a lot lately, particularly with regard to sustainable agriculture in Haiti: that food aid alone does not alleviate poverty. Though Zimbabwe has been plagued with food insecurity for quite some time, this year most farmers in northern Zimbabwe produced a bumper harvest of maize, while …
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The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization shares its global outlook on food security [Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN] NextBillion offers a private sector approach to malnutrition in BoP markets [NextBillion] A female farmer in Pakistan curbs the hunger cycle with food aid [World Food Programme] Beverly Bell discusses food sovereignty and land reform in …
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Late last week, NPR released a heart-wrenching report about how foreign aid is hurting rice farmers in Haiti. And this past Tuesday, another NPR report revealed how Haiti’s rice market is a mess and how farmers’ children are going hungry. Since the earthquake, free rice from foreign aid groups has made it harder for Haitian …
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Late last week, Dan Smith explained the most important impending crisis worldwide: the global competition for fresh water. The piece is a response to the Foreign Policy Center paper, “Tackling the World Water Crisis.” Water is our planet’s most essential resource—we depend on it for our health, agriculture, industry and infrastructure. A shortage, excess and/or …
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Helpful potato moths benefit Guatemalan farmers [Change.org] In Niger, children struggle to reach feeding programs [IRIN] In the aftermath of the tropical storm, Guatemala’s food crisis worsens [AlertNet] Urban farms aren’t just for yuppies [Civil Eats] Doctors Without Borders launches “Starved for Attention” – a global multimedia campaign on childhood malnutrition [Doctors Without Borders] Drought …
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“If $1 billion of the $11 billion pledged by international donors was put toward agriculture, the world could watch Haiti not only feed itself, but export billions,” said Haiti’s presidential candidate Charles Henri Baker in the Montreal Gazette’s feature “Can Farming Save Haiti?.” A future in which Haiti is not only self-sufficient, but is exporting …
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Land rights abuses in Cambodia rarely spill into the global spotlight, particularly in connection with food insecurity. In the absence of legal documents often lost or destroyed during decades of civil war, Cambodian farmers frequently struggle to prove their ownership of land. Many of these farmers along with Cambodian NGOs have accused Cambodia’s government of …
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