Shooing off a quartet of hens that come pecking, 24-year-old Kamala Batra sits guard over a sack of coarse rice spread out on the courtyard. After small black insects slowly crawl away in the sun’s heat, she gathers it to cook for the day’s free midday meal - a pan-India government food security scheme for students.
The
International Planning Committee for Food Security (IPC) is the largest organisation of small food producers in the world, representing 300 million people, including
La Via Campesina with its 200 million members.
Pope Francis has challenged the Food and Agriculture Organisation to end global food disparities, describing it as scandalous that despite food abundance, millions of people still die of hunger.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which works to end malnutrition among more than two billion people worldwide, is expressing strong support for enriching the micronutrient content of plants.
A spirited campaign by the World Rural Forum (WRF) - a grouping of civil society organisations - led to the declaration of 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming by the U.N. General Assembly at its 66th session in 2011.
The future of food security in the Mekong region lies at a crossroads, as several development ventures, including the Xayaburi Hydropower Project, threaten to alter fish migration routes, disrupt the flow of sediments and nutrients downstream, and endanger millions whose livelihoods depend on the Mekong River basin's resources.
If slavery was a scourge to humanity, denying legitimate tenure rights is the cancer eating away the future of smallholder farmers who feed the world, often under trying conditions, say civil society organisations.
Under the leadership of Brazilian Director General (DG) José Graziano da Silva, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has been engaged in a process of deep reform meant to make the organisation leaner and more effective in the fight against hunger.
The key to sustainable economic growth with an eye on fragile ecosystems is integrated management, FAO experts said here on Wednesday.
The world needs a more sustainable food production system based on knowledge that prioritises the conservation of natural resources to boost agricultural yields over the heavy use of pesticides and other chemical inputs, say experts promoting the concept of agroecology.
Each year, 12 million hectares of land - where 20 million tonnes of grain could have been grown - are lost to degradation.
In addition to the world’s 870 million hungry, many others are suffering from inadequate nutrition that does not allow them to live full lives, or find their fates highly vulnerable to price shifts on global food markets.
Nigeria -one of Africa’s most populous states and a major oil producer - learned hard lessons about under-investing in food security for its people: malnutrition went up; so did prices and corruption in the voucher system for farming inputs.
Nearly 300 km from Nepal’s teeming capital, Kathmandu, in a small village dug into the steep slopes of the mountainous Palpa district, 35-year-old Dhanmaya Pata goes about her daily chores in much the same way that her ancestors did centuries ago.
Since food and water are so closely interlinked, there is a lingering fear based on the assumption, if there is no water, there will be no food.
The Middle East and North Africa is the region
most affected by water scarcity in the world, and for the moment, the situation seems set to worsen.
Judging by the accolades and diplomas handed out to 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries by FAO, it would be easy to conclude that the region has taken a giant leap towards eradicating hunger.
“We do believe that it’s perfectly possible to end extreme poverty in Brazil by 2015,” Antonino Marques Porto, Brazil’s ambassador to FAO, tells TerraViva in Rome.
The world today faces a rather stunning paradox. We produce enough to feed seven billion people, but high prices and other factors have pushed adequate nutrition out of reach for more than one in 10, says Maria Helena Semedo, deputy director general-knowledge at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
For Catherine Dube, it is a good time to catch up on village happenings and sing-alongs when she meets with neighbours to dig basins in each other's fields in preparation for the planting season.
Closing the gender gap between women and men on agriculture and food security could free over one hundred million people from hunger.