The Hindu Business Line – The United Nations has supported India’s calls for change in World Trade Organisation rules to help secure right to food for developing countries without the threat of sanctions.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, has said that developing countries should be granted the freedom to use food reserves for securing food for its poor.
If Secretary of State John Kerry’s G.M.O.-boosting speech announcing the World Food Prize at the State Department last week is any indication of his ability to parse complicated issues, he might be better off windsurfing. Because Kerry appears to have bought into the big ag-driven myth that only by relying on genetic engineering will we be able to feed the nine billion citizens of our planet by 2050. And he enthusiastically endorsed granting this mockery of a prize to three biotech engineers, including Robert Fraley, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Monsanto and a pioneer of genetic engineering in agriculture.
Never mind that Monsanto is a sponsor of the prize (and that the list of other backers reads like a who’s who of big ag and big food), or that we never get to know the names of either the nominees or the nominators. [1] Never mind that we’re not feeding the seven billion now, or that we’re sickening a billion of those with a never-before-seen form of malnourishment. Never mind that we already grow enough food to feed not only everyone on the planet but everyone who’s going to be born in the next 30 or 40 years. And never mind that, despite the hype, there’s scant evidence that the involvement of genetic engineering in agriculture has done much to boost yields, reduce the use of chemicals or improve the food
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LILONGWE, Malawi, July 22 (UPI) -- A United Nations official is calling on the government in Malawi to release its plan to combat malnutrition to ensure food aid is reaching the needy.
More than a quarter of the African nation's 15 million citizens do not make enough money to buy food that meets minimum caloric intake amounts, U.S. Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter said. Malawi has one of the lowest minimum wage standards in the world, $1.16 per day, and about half the country's people live in poverty, a U.N. report
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BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Focusing the lens of social and economic development on women and girls is the most inexpensive and effective tool in the fight against hunger and malnutrition, says a new study on gender and food security in the Asia Pacific region.
Women’s education alone resulted in a 43 percent reduction in hunger from 1970 to 1995, while women living longer led to an additional 12 percent decline in hunger levels, according to the report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
