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Filed under: risha | Tags: current events, Ethiopia, food, food mileage, hunger, land, land rights
With a growing global population and decreasing arable land space, agriculturalists have been throwing around the ‘food crisis’ term for a while. Observer reports on a worrying trend- one with several implications- about how food and water are the driving forces behind an industrialised land-grab attempt in Africa.
Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13 million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 3m hectares of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world’s most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations.
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The land rush, which is still accelerating, has been triggered by the worldwide food shortages which followed the sharp oil price rises in 2008, growing water shortages and the European Union’s insistence that 10% of all transport fuel must come from plant-based biofuels by 2015.
Read the full, worrying report here.
An old-school thought, but one that needs constant reiteration- especially in today’s financial climate.
How far does your produce travel before it’s on your plate?
Good.is have an infographic on how far produce travels in the United States. Can you do one for your town/city?
Eritrea, March 2003 - Women carry buckets of water from a waterhole near Kuluku, Eritrea. Some girls walk over an hour everyday to gather water.
Women produce 60-80% of food in developing countries. Yet, 60% of the world’s chronically hungry are women and girls.
In most societies in the developing world, a patriarchal system is predominant. Within these structures, the women and girls often eat last and after all the male members of their family have had their fill. Thus, women and girls eat the ‘leftovers’- if any. The ‘leftover’ food is often without nutrition and does not satisfy the daily requirements of a woman’s body. Women are also unable to negotiate over food consumption, the gender inequity and lack of involvement in decision making processes making her an extremely vulnerable victim in the fight against hunger.
With food and cooking often relegated to women as their ‘domain’, women are also expected to travel for up to miles to collect water. This is an added strain on an already heavy burden. Often, women are allowed to work on farms, sometimes in exchange for grain or vegetables. Women often make up the largest part of the agricultural sector- 8 out 10 people engaged in farming in Africa are women, 6 out of 10 in Asia. This backbreaking work and effort further compounds the problem, severely compromising the health of these women who do not get enough nutrition in the first place. Yet, these women offer the sole food security that the family has.
Children are also at a higher risk, especially when their mothers are unable to access food and nutrition. Women who are unable to access proper food and nutrition during pregnancy, have been documented to give birth to children with a very low birth weight. These babies are 20 times more likely to die in infancy. Those who survive are condemned to a life of chronic malnutrition.
If these babies are girls, they are further disadvantaged and are more likely to die due to lack of proper nutrition.
Thus, focusing efforts on women and investing in women to empower them can have a huge, cascading and almost immediate impact on the fight against hunger. Investing in women and in their health would ensure healthier children, healthier families and healthier lives.
This women’s day, fight hunger and put women on the frontline.
photo credit: WFP/Evelyn Hockstein-Polaris
Filed under: risha, Uncategorized | Tags: hunger, MDGs, nutrition, poverty, statistics, videos, world food programme
Of the world’s total of 6 billion people, over 1 billion people suffer from hunger every day. Despite it forming part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger), the world is far away from feeding the hungry. And feeding isn’t enough- it needs to be nutritious food. Statistics estimate that one in six people do not have access to healthy, nutritious food.
The gender disparities don’t just exist within the thinking processes of academia- in reality, more than 60% of the chronically hungry are women. That means: menstruating women are not able to replace essential nutrients that are lost, women’s reproductive health is severely compromised, young girls experience an increasing number of health risks, the immune systems of women are practically non-existent, pregnant women are at greater risk of delivering malnutritioned babies; possibly with severe disabilities, babies are unable to receive the nutrition they need from nursing mothers, women are unable to work and are less empowered… the list is endless. As has been much documented, these concerns are then connected to larger, more endemic disempowerment faced by women the world over.
Statistics show that every six seconds a child dies because of hunger or related causes. It is estimated that 684,000 child deaths worldwide could be prevented by increasing access to vitamin A and zinc. These are preventable deaths. This is not something we don’t have a cure for- these deaths should not be happening.
As an integral part of the development framework, it is essential to realise and acknowledge the links between a hunger-free world and a happier, healthier world. We are not dreaming of the impossible. We do not need a cure– we need commitment and resolve.
Towards greater understanding, the World Food Programme launched an International Video Competition. Watch the submissions for a more in depth insight into food and the way it shapes our world. Watch the videos here.
more statistics, facts and figures can be found here.
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