Dr. Kostas Stamoulis is the Director of the Agricultural Development Economics Division of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Dr. Stamoulis’s department produces the annual FAO publication, “The State of Food Insecurity in the World,” whose most recent edition, to be published in October, will indicate that the number of hungry people around the […]
Taste, cost, health benefits, nutritional value, accessibility and the speed of production. These factors, in no particular order, are fueling the debate between industrially produced food and organic food. Looking at both sides of the debate, Time Magazine asks readers to consider what the production of food means to the well-being of those who eat […]
The two UN organization’s aiming to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to halve hunger by 2015, will publish a report detailing a improvement in global hunger numbers from 2009 to 2010. The overall number of hungry people around the globe, however, remains remarkably high. Anticipating the release of the joint report in October from […]
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has paved the way to end years of blocking approval of genetically modified (GM) salmon, making it the first GM animal introduced into the U.S. food supply. GM animals like the salmon, which can grow faster and larger than in nature, have raised public concern, not only for […]
What if there were a product that could beat back the costly effects of malnutrition? What if this product could be made cheaply, anywhere in the world and have a near-indefinite shelf life? The New York Times Magazine’s recent article “The Peanut Solution” describes how this product may have already been created. Plumpy’nut, “…an edible […]
Standard Bank Africa announced a major private sector and purely Africa-based initiative for aiding African farmers with a $100 million pledge. The pledge came is support of the goals of African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), which convened its inaugural session in Accra, Ghana, starting on Thursday. “The scheme will hand out loans to some 750,000 […]
Anna Lappé is the co-founder, along with her mother Frances Lappé, of the Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute, an international network for research and popular education about the root causes of hunger and poverty. They have also founded the Small Planet Fund which has raised more than $500,000 for democratic social movements worldwide. Anna’s first book […]
The future of the world’s first seed bank, maintained by the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry near St. Petersburg, Russia, is threatened by real estate developers looking to build new homes on the prime real estate owned by the Institute. According to the Washington Post, The station was founded in 1924 by Nikolai Vavilov, a […]
The Global Food Security blog will be running a “Five Questions for…” series beginning with Anna Lappé, co-founder of the Small Planet Institute and author of Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of your Fork and What You Can Do about It. The format will consist of a short profile […]
The British research agency Maplecroft released a report ranking the countries most likely to experience food shortages. The list is topped by Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia, Angola, Liberia, Chad and Zimbabwe. In addition to taking 9 of the top 10 spots on the list, African countries come in 36 of […]
To date, over 1,600 people have died and around 14 million people have been affected by the floods in Pakistan which have followed the country’s worst monsoon rains in 80 years. Sir John Holmes, the Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and the Emergency Relief Coordinator at the UN, has stated that “if we don’t act […]
With Russia’s worst heatwave on record expected to last for the next ten days, experts begin to worry about the potential for devastating economic losses; in this case, a possible $14 billion off economic growth. On August 5th, Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, announced a ban on grain exports after more than a third of […]
A recent BBC article reports that more people are classified as “poor”in India’s eight poorest states than Africa’s 26 poorest countries. In this case, an estimated 421 million Indians are in poverty. Recently, many have argued that the Indian government should replace its inefficient social safety net of subsidized government food, cooking fuel and education […]
As Russia fights to protect land sown with wheat, barley and other crops from record high temperatures, seventeen regions have declared emergencies because of the severe heat and drought. Summer heat may destroy crops in Russia With temperatures likely to remain as high as 36° Celsius (96.8° degrees Fahrenheit) for days to come, Russia’s Agricultural […]
While tackling drought and famine may be some of the top concerns for today’s developing nations, the steady growth of the demand for specialty foods in the United States over the past decade may have the potential to assist in the growth of their economies. Now making up almost 16% of U.S. food sales, the […]