The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has launched a major online drive to spur action to eliminate hunger and highlight the fact that one in six people worldwide go hungry everyday. Through its '1 billionhungry project' people can voice their opinions about world hunger by adding their names to an online petition. The campaign uses a yellow whistle as an icon encouraging people to blow the whistle against this global scourge. Events in support of the petition launch are organised through FAO offices around the world. International athletes, football players and recording artists will add their voices to the campaign. Civil society organisations, including the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, will also promote the campaign through their own networks.
Poverty and health
This communication lays out a new policy framework for European Union humanitarian action to strengthen efforts to tackle food insecurity in humanitarian crises. In it, the he European Commission reports its intention to strengthen four pillars of food security in general and emergency settings by increasing availability of food, improving access to food, improving quality and ensuring people eat nutritious food, and boosting the effectiveness of crisis prevention and management. Key points include the benefits of involving beneficiaries in operations and incorporating gender, livelihood and protection considerations in assessing needs and designing and delivering responses. The Commission draws attention to the needs of nutritionally vulnerable groups, including children under-two and pregnant women, while urging for integration of programmes so that needs are addressed holistically, and underlining the importance of linking relief with rehabilitation and development. The framework on food security spells out the need to support agriculture in poor countries to help them reach the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger and poverty by 2015.
This report examines the daily challenges urban refugees face, including police harassment, discrimination and limited livelihood opportunities. The report presents the challenges that affect refugees and explores the policies and current assistance government is giving to them, to identify ways of attending to their long-term and immediate needs. The authors suggest a gap in clear policy on the issue. They point to issues for policy attention: Many refugees have not registered with authorities and lack required identification documents. In addition, they experience difficulties in accessing formal employment and face problems of poor access to adequate health and education services and precarious living conditions.
Nutrition surveys carried out by the government of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with the support of the United Nations (UN) Children’s Fund and the UN World Food Programme, have found unusually high levels of malnutrition in children living in five provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Experts believe the basic structural causes of malnutrition have been aggravated by conflict, high food prices and the global financial crisis, which has shaken the mining industry in the west and south-east of the country. Some 530,000 children under five and more than one million pregnant women need urgent nutrition interventions, according to the DRC Ministry of Health. In several areas surveyed, global acute malnutrition rates are above the 10% threshold for intervention and also in some cases above the emergency threshold of 15%. The causes behind such high malnutrition rates vary from one territory to another and are identified in the survey as lack of access to healthcare and to safe drinking water, poor access to good quality food, non-optimal feeding practices of infants, young children and women, and lack of tools and seeds for agriculture.
According to this book, the abuse of alcohol has drastic consequences on the safety and health outcomes of nations. Road accidents, family and sexual violence and homicide and foetal alcohol syndrome, are some of the occurrences where alcohol tends to have a direct role. Working Together to Reduce Harmful Drinking contains nine chapters written by experts in the alcohol industry, government and academia. It seeks to contribute to a global strategy to reduce irresponsible and harmful alcohol consumption and its attendant risks.
Long, dry spells in parts of Africa have cast an uncertain cloud over crop yields for 2010 in some African countries. Food prices are lower than 2008 levels, but higher than in 2007. Abdolreza Abbassian, economist and secretary of the Intergovernmental Group on Grains at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) observed that it would take ‘two consecutive bad years’ for the 2008 food crisis to be repeated. Global cereal stocks were reported to be at comfortable levels, although reduction in producer subsidies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries has meant smaller surpluses in these regions, affecting overall available supplies.
In their new report, ActionAid estimates that, if all global biofuel targets are met, global food prices could rise by up to an additional 76% by 2020, causing an estimated 600 million extra people to go hungry. The report indicates that industrial biofuels are having disastrous local impacts on food security and land rights in many of the communities where they are grown. The scale of the current land grab has escalated in Africa – in just five African countries, 1.1 million hectares have been given over to industrial biofuels – an area the size of Belgium. Also, many industrial biofuels do not have lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to fossil fuels. The report puts forward a number of recommendations: placing a moratorium on the further expansion of industrial biofuel production and investment; ensuring that member states do not lock-in industrial biofuels to their 2010 national action plans; ending targets and financial incentives for industrial biofuels; and supporting small-scale sustainable biofuels in the European Union and abroad.
Unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene claim the lives of an estimated 1.5 million children under the age of five each year. Almost 884 million people are living without access to safe drinking water and approximately three times that number lacking basic sanitation. This report confirms that advances continue to be made towards greater access to safe drinking water. Progress in relation to access to basic sanitation is, however, insufficient to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. The vast majority of people without access to water and sanitation live in rural areas (eight out of ten and seven out ten people respectively). A similar disparity is found between poor and non-poor people. A comparison between the richest and poorest 20% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa reveals that the richest are more than twice as likely to use an improved drinking-water source and almost five times more likely to use improved sanitation facilities. Although there is insufficient data at present, country data available confirms similar disparities elsewhere.
Evidence from this South African study indicates that cash transfers achieve positive education, health and nutrition outcomes. South Africa's child support grant (CSG) is the country's largest social cash transfer programme and is regarded as one of the government's most successful social protection interventions. This study analysed panel data constructed from general household surveys (2002 to 2004), and compared eligible children who received the CSG in 2003 and 2004 with those who did not receive it. It found robust evidence that the CSG is improving nutrition and education outcomes for children. Hunger, as defined by the lack of food in a household, fell among both CSG recipients and non-recipients over the study period, but the reduction was found to be two to three times larger for children receiving the grant. Children under seven years of age who were eligible for the CSG were significantly less likely to be attending school in 2002 than those not receiving the CSG, but after receiving the CSG for two years there was a 6% increase in their pre-school and early grades enrolment by 2004. The study concludes that these effects are likely to be sustained over time among households receiving the CSG, with cumulative improvements in children’s nutrition and educational attainment in the future.
This short video about the story and challenges to local communities of production of bottled water was launched as part of World Water Day on 22 March 2010.