Free Republic

N Korea 'develops special noodle' North Korean scientists have developed a new kind of noodle that delays feelings of hunger, a Japan-based pro-Pyongyang newspaper has reported. The noodles were made from corn and soybeans, the Choson Shinbo said. They left people feeling fuller longer and represented a technological breakthrough, the newspaper said. North Korea is dependent on foreign food aid. Last month the UN warned that residents were experiencing their worst food shortages in a decade. But the communist country remains reluctant to allow experts to fully assess the scale of the problem or give them adequate access to deliver...

Juxtaposed on opposite pages of the BBC International newspaper were two stories: "..thousands of people (in Seoul, South Korea) protesting against resumption of U.S. Beef imports..." and "The U.S. announced that it will send half a million tons of food aid to North Korea." How can two so closely connected groups of people hold such strong opposite opinions about the safety of U.S. food exports? Easy. It's the haves vs. the have-nots. South Korea is a strong democratic nation, our ally, who owes its existence to the U.S. and the United Nations. It has the luxury to be choosey. Its...

BLIMEY! BONNIE PRINCE CHARLEY DOTH FEAR HUNGER! Prince Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor, aka His Royal Highness, Prince of Wales, aka Prince of Rothesay, aka Duke of Cornwall, Prince of Perv, next in line to the throne of Great Britain, (when Mom Elizabeth, finally surrenders that throne and/or loses her mind), hath spoken: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/12/eacharles112.xml. The Bonnie Prince, perhaps best known for having his man servant hold the specimen cup while he peed in it and for expressing his written wish that he could be his mistress’, Camilla Parker Bowles, Dutchess of Cornwall’s tampon, has expressed his fear that genetically modified...

If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity? This is a small amount compared to rich-government budgets. But if we could set aside an extra $10 billion, we could achieve an awful lot. Would you spend your money tackling diseases like malaria, HIV and tuberculosis, which claim millions of lives each year? Would you battle hunger and malnutrition? What about climate change, which many believe is the biggest challenge facing the planet? ....more

rising prices and a global shortage of provisions. But yesterday the Prime Minister and other world leaders sat down to an 18-course gastronomic extravaganza at a G8 summit in Japan, which is focusing on the food crisis. The dinner, and a six-course lunch, at the summit of leading industrialised nations on the island of Hokkaido, included delicacies such as caviar, milkfed lamb, sea urchin and tuna, with champagne and wines flown in from Europe and the U.S.

Five million face hunger in Zimbabwe, UN says Last Updated: 3:39PM BST 18/06/2008 The United Nations has warned that more than five million Zimbabweans could be threatened by hunger next year due to a steady drop in food production coupled with the world's highest rate of inflation. Robert Mugabe's seizure of land continues to take its toll The Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Food Program said in a joint report that an estimated two million people in Zimbabwe will not have enough to eat in the summer months. That figure is projected to rise to 3.8 million people...

'India's GDP to grow at 9.5% in FY 09' Mumbai, June 16: India's real GDP is expected to grow at an impressive 9.5 per cent in FY 09, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) said in its monthly review in Mumbai. The Indian Economy is heading towards the fourth consecutive year of an over-9 per cent growth and like in the last five years, growth this year too was expected to be driven by capital investments happening in India, CMIE said. As per CMIE CapEx Service, projects worth Rs 3.4 lakh-crore are scheduled for commissioning in FY 09. This...

Food riots. Scores of panicked people protesting, burning effigies and chanting. Shops being ransacked, supplies running out as soon as they come in, and stricken communities stockpiling rice, bread and water for fear of going without. These have happened in Haiti and Egypt in recent months as the price of scarce food has soared. But what if they happened on the streets of Bromley? Or Newcastle? Or Bath? As bizarre as this might seem, the prospect of UK food shortages has started to be taken seriously by food manufacturers and retailers. The global food shortage has raced to the top...

RomeThe Summit on soaring food prices, convened by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), has concluded with the adoption by acclamation of a declaration calling on the international community to increase assistance for developing countries, in particular the least developed countries and those that are most negatively affected by high food prices."There is an urgent need to help developing countries and countries in transition expand agriculture and food production, and to increase investment in agriculture, agribusiness and rural development, from both public and private sources," according to the declaration. Donors and international financial institutions are urged to provide "balance...

No one has to starve in Africa. Hunger there results from the failures of unscrupulous rulers -- and their friends in the West. Paradoxically, it is the aid workers who are standing in the way of progress. If you follow the reasoning of the United Nation's World Food Program, then Kenya is a unique region when it comes to hunger catastrophes. In this east African country, a popular vacation destination with 32 million inhabitants, UN workers hand out more food on an annual basis than they do in southern Sudan, which civil wars have ravaged for decades. But is Kenya...

It’s like some surreal scene directly from the pages of an Ayn Rand novel. These are the knuckleheads that created the hunger problem. People like Robert Mugabe, who took the breadbasket of Southern Africa and turned it into a disaster area. He is in attendance, and has actually blamed the West for his country’s food shortages.

Gordon Brown says world 'cannot afford to fail' on food crisis By Tom Peterkin Last Updated: 11:54PM BST 03/06/2008 Gordon Brown warned that the world "cannot afford to fail" to deal with the global food crisis, which is resulting in 9,000 under-fives starving to death each day. Speaking as heads of state prepared to meet for a United Nations summit on soaring food prices, the Prime Minister said it was vital to increase food production in the world's poorest countries. "The fact that food prices have reached record levels can only worsen these already devastating figures," Mr Brown said in...

this site is personal to me it seems no strings attached, their sponsors take care of it all. just click and you will help many worthwhile causes, like hunger, breast cancer, literacy and pets. really, i run firefox with adblock plus and this site has given me no malware or issues/popups. it seems legit, if i can donate a can of food a day and more, i'm sure someone here can help spread the word. i appreciate it. and i'm in no way affiliated with them or paid, this isn't spam. i'm just a news junkie with this place and...

World food price crisis 'here to stay' By David Blair in New York Last Updated: 1:43AM BST 19/05/2008EPA Sir John Holme said the world needed a "green revolution" High food prices are here to stay and the world needs a "green revolution" to feed its rising population, the senior humanitarian official at the United Nations has told The Telegraph. Sir John Holmes, Britain's former ambassador to Paris who now serves as the UN's under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, said structural changes in the global economy are the cause of the sudden rise in food prices. "It is possible that in the...

The United States has reached a deal with North Korea to provide 500,000 tons of food aid over the coming year to the isolated communist nation. The U.S. administration says the aid has little to do with its nuclear disarmament deal with Pyongyang, although both have involved an unusual intensity of U.S. diplomacy with North Korea, a nation President George W. Bush once included as part of a rhetorical ``axis of evil.'' ``We don't see any connection,'' State Department spokesman Sean McCormack was quoted as saying. ``We're doing this because America is a compassionate nation and the United States and...

There are "seven meals between civilization and anarchy," says Josette Sheeran, executive director of United Nation's World Food Program. What takes those meals away, driving citizens to base needs and destabilizing countries? Growing demand, changing diets, weather disruption and, sadly enough, restricted trade. There has been little good news for food relief. A forecast today from Goldman Sachs said oil prices could rise to $150 to $200 per barrel in the next two years--dramatically driving up the price of producing and transporting food for the foreseeable future. The rising price of oil makes ethanol and other biofuels more viable, furthering...

Vast amounts of money are flooding the world's commodities markets, driving up prices of staple foods like wheat and rice. Biofuels and droughts can't fully explain the recent food crisis -- hedge funds and small investors bear some responsibility for global hunger. Not long ago, Dwight Anderson welcomed reporters with open arms. He liked to entertain them with stories from the world of big money. Anderson is a New York hedge fund manager, and as recently as last October he would talk with enthusiasm about his visits to Malaysian palm-oil plantations and Brazilian grain farms. "You could clearly see how...

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, April 27 (UPI) -- The Rev. Jesse Jackson and several leaders of Florida's Haitian community arrived in Haiti Sunday to study the country's food crisis, Haitian radio reported. Jackson and others are expected to discuss food-price inflation with Haitian leaders, according to officials of his Rainbow Push Coalition. Protests over spiking food prices left at least seven people dead this month and prompted lawmakers to oust Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis. On Sunday, Ericq Pierre, a former senior adviser with the Inter-American Development Bank, was named Alexis' successor.

Here’s an inconvenient truth: Long before man-caused global warming kills people and topples governments, the man-caused scare over global warming is going to have the same effect. Unlike the myth of man-made global warming, the scare is real, and it is here today. The secretary-general of the United Nations told reporters in Austria on Friday that the sudden and steep rise in food prices worldwide has developed into a global crisis. With shortages of affordable food spreading around the world, food-related unrest has broken out in nations as diverse as Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia and Afghanistan. One of the base causes...

The damage that trade restrictions cause is probably most evident in the case of rice. Although rice is the major foodstuff for about half of the world, it is highly protected and regulated. Only about 5 to 7 percent of the world’s rice production is traded across borders; that’s unusually low for an agricultural commodity. So when the price goes up — indeed, many varieties of rice have roughly doubled in price since 2007 — this highly segmented market means that the trade in rice doesn’t flow to the places of highest demand. Export restrictions send a message to farmers...

The globe's worst food crisis in a generation emerged as a blip on the big boards and computer screens of America's great grain exchanges. At first, it seemed like little more than a bout of bad weather. In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect -- one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania...

Ukraine's Pursuit of Genocide Designation Upsets Russians Who Say Others Died, Too MOSCOW -- Relations between Russia and Ukraine, bedeviled by disputes over natural gas supplies and NATO expansion, have lately been roiled by one of the great tragedies of Soviet history: the famine of 1932-33, which left millions dead from starvation and related diseases. Ukraine is seeking international recognition of the famine, which Ukrainians call Holodomor -- or death by hunger -- as an act of genocide. When Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin forced peasants off their homesteads and into collective farms, special military units requisitioned grain and other food...

Reporting on the food crisis in Haiti last week, The Washington Times introduced its readership to the term "Clorox hunger," described as "a hunger so painful it feels like your stomach is being eaten by bleach or battery acid." It's horrifying stuff. But that's what the global food crisis -- which many economists now believe will push 100 million people into "absolute poverty," and which will do far worse to those already below the absolute poverty line -- looks like. Higher food prices mean less food. In America, that's an annoyance. In other countries, that's a death sentence. And it's...

Despite bumper crops in Vietnam and India, export limits and bans have created a global shortage and driven up prices. At the Costco in San Francisco, rice is all the rage. Not long after the 10 a.m. opening on Apr. 24, the warehouse club was well on its way to selling out the day's supply of Thai jasmine rice. Within an hour, customers cleared three pallets loaded with 50-lb. bags of Super Lucky Elephant brand jasmine rice from Thailand. Real estate broker Mary Jane Galviso snapped up two bags—the limit imposed by this particular store. "This is very frightening," says...

The current food shortage is going to get worse before it gets better – at least that’s the way the founder of CNN sees it. Ted Turner was interviewed by CNBC’s Bob Pisani on the April 25 “Closing Bell.” He addressed the recent food shortages causing rationing and riots all over the globe and said it’s just a sign of things to come. “There are a lot of different problems being caused by an ever-increasing number of people in a finite-sized world,” Turner said. “The resources of the planet just can’t keep up with the demand and I’m afraid this...

An escalating global food crisis could bring the problem of hunger home to the US and other developed countries. Millions of poor Americans risk going hungry if food prices continue to rise and food agencies struggle to cope with rising costs, dwindling resources and a huge increase in demand. Already more and more poor people in the US are turning to charity and government assistance as they struggle with rising food costs and soaring fuel bills. Even some stores are restricting bulk rice purchases as the grain reached a fresh high on Thursday. Laurie True, executive director of the California...

David Kotok, chairman and chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors, said the deadly fungus, Puccinia graminis, is now spreading through some areas of the globe where "crop losses are expected to reach 100 percent.” Losses in Africa are already at 70 percent of the crop, Kotok said. "The economic losses expected from this fungus are now in the many billions and growing. Worse, there is an intensifying fear of exacerbated food shortages in poor and emerging countries of the world,” Kotok told investors in a research note. "The ramifications are serious. Food rioting continues to expand around the world. We...

Food Crisis Eclipsing Climate Change By JOSH GERSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | April 25, 2008 The campaign against climate change could be set back by the global food crisis, as foreign populations turn against measures to use foodstuffs as substitutes for fossil fuels. With prices for rice, wheat, and corn soaring, food-related unrest has broken out in places such as Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. Several countries have blocked the export of grain. There is even talk that governments could fall if they cannot bring food costs down. One factor being blamed for the price hikes is the use...

UNITED NATIONS - The World Food Program appealed for hundreds of millions of dollars to cope with rising food prices that have sparked protests and food riots and led to bans on food exports in dozens of countries. Josette Sheeran, the WFP's executive director, said the U.N. agency is facing a 40 percent increase in the cost of food and requests for food aid from countries unable to cope with the rising prices. It expects additional requests from nations like Haiti whose citizens are becoming part of "the new face of hunger," she told a video news conference from Rome...

World consumption of rice continues to rise and outpace production. The trend will continue in 2008, bringing with it a host of factors that will impact U.S. rice producers. Speaking at the recent Mid-South Farm and Gin Show in Memphis, Tenn., Carl Brothers, senior vice president of Riceland Foods, outlined the current status of the U.S. rice industry and gave a summary of key issues on the horizon. Global ending stocks finished in December 2007 at 72 million tons, an all-time low in supply/use comparison. “If we look at these low stock numbers and the demand we’re seeing around the...

Wheat prices climbed for a fifth consecutive session Thursday, and the most heavily traded contract hit a new all-time high on the Chicago Board of Trade as traders continue to price in robust worldwide demand and shrinking supply. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Thursday that wheat supplies available for export plummeted in July and said "stocks could be driven down to unprecedented low levels." Rain, frost and drought in different parts of the European Union ravaged wheat crops this year, leaving the EU with less to export and boosting its import requirements. Poor weather also ruined crops in the...

(BEIJING) — Potatoes may soon join rice as a staple diet for China's 1.3 billion people as the nation searches for alternative crops to deal with a sharp decline in farmland, state press reported Thursday. China is facing increasing difficulties in feeding its massive population partly due to the widespread conversion of its farming areas into industrial zones and residential areas, as well as the impacts of global warming. Potatoes, which can grow in dry areas not suitable for rice, are now being seriously looked at as a way to get more food from a smaller area, the China Daily...

World Bank president calls for action as food prices cause rioting Jenny Booth The president of the World Bank has called for immediate action to deal with rapidly rising food prices that have caused hunger and deadly violence and threatened the economic stability of the world's poorest countries. A doubling of food prices over the last two years was potentially pushing 100 million people deeper into long-term poverty, said Robert Zoellick. “We have to put our money where our mouth is now, so that we can put food into hungry mouths. It is as stark as that,” Mr Zoellick said...

As the world faces its first global food crisis since World War II, even American consumers are starting to fret. Media reports are starting to trickle in about grocers limiting some food purchases, while Costco Wholesale Corp. is seeing higher-than-usual demand for staple foods such as rice and flour as consumers appear to be stocking up. Costco Chief Executive James Sinegal told Reuters news service in an interview Tuesday that the Issaquah-based wholesale company is managing the situation. "If we run out, we're usually back in stock the next day," he said. The Reuters story followed a Monday article in...

DENILIQUIN, Australia: Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. "It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety," he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, "and now it has stopped." The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to satisfy the daily needs of 20 million people. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia's rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December. Ten thousand miles separate the mill's...

To paraphrase the late, great William F. Buckley, Jr., someone must stand athwart the federal ethanol program yelling, “Stop!” The emergency brake should be pulled -- NOW -- before ethanol wreaks further havoc. Poor Haitians rioted last week outside Port-au-Prince’s presidential palace, forcing Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis’ April 12 ouster. Haitians are enduring food prices 40 percent higher than last summer’s. Some have resorted to eating cookies made of salt, vegetable oil, and dirt. That’s right: Dirt cookies. Developing-world denizens are taking it to the streets with growling stomachs. In Bob Marley’s words, “A hungry man is an angry...

BRASILIA (Reuters) - President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva defended Brazil's production of biofuels on Wednesday, rejecting criticism that they are furthering a surge in global food prices and harming the environment. "Don't tell me, for the love of God, that food is expensive because of biodiesel. Food is expensive because the world wasn't prepared to see millions of Chinese, Indians, Africans, Brazilians and Latin Americans eat," Lula told reporters. "We want to discuss this not with passion but rationality and not from the European point of view." His comments follow a week of protests in Brazil and Europe against...

<p>The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War. Since then, the spectacle of hunger sparking revolutionary violence has been the stuff of Broadway musicals rather than the real world of politics. And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world. Ironically, it may be the very success of capitalism in transforming regions previously restrained by various forms of socialism that has helped create the new crisis.</p>

Bush Orders $200 Million Drawdown From Emergency Reserve to Help Nations Deal With Hunger WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush on Monday ordered the release of $200 million in emergency aid to help nations where surging food prices have deepened hunger woes and sparked violent protests. The move comes one day after the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, called on the international community to act urgently in helping needy people and "put our money where our mouth is." Haiti, Egypt and the Philippines are among the countries facing civil unrest because of food prices and shortages.

Finance ministers gathered this weekend to grapple with the global financial crisis also struggled with a problem that has plagued the world periodically since before the time of the Pharaohs: food shortages... Even as the ministers met, Haiti's Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was resigning after a week in which that tiny country's capital was racked by rioting over higher prices for staples like rice and beans... Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from...

Energy: The world's poor are learning what happens when government subsidizes the burning of food. It's time to end this madness and let the market decide if any biofuels make sense. For most Americans, the rising prices at the supermarket are definitely an annoyance, but hardly a threat to life and health. It's a different story in countries like Haiti, where food inflation has led to real hunger and, last week, to riots. News reports say the poorest Haitians are trying to get by on cookies made with dirt, vegetable oil and salt. Food riots also have roiled Egypt and...

Haitians say their hunger is real Thu Apr 10, 2008 4:45pm EDT By Jim Loney PORT-AU-PRINCE, April 10 (Reuters) - Elta Petithomme has been scouring the Haitian capital's garbage-strewn main market street for hours, searching for something to feed her four young children. Today, pickings are slim. Yesterday she sold a cellphone for 50 gourdes, the equivalent of about $1.30, enough to buy some bread, sugar and fried plantains. That's all the children, all under the age of 6, had to eat for the day. "Some days neighbors will cook and give us some food, as little as it is....

In the last year, the price of wheat has tripled, corn doubled, and rice almost doubled. As prices soared, food riots have broken out in about 20 poor countries including Yemen, Haiti, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, and Mexico. In response some countries, such as India, Pakistan Egypt and Vietnam, are banning the export of grains and imposing food price controls. Are rising food prices the result of the economic dynamism of China and India, in which newly prosperous consumers are demanding more food—especially more meat? Perennial doomsters such as the Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown predicted more than a...

Governments across the developing world are scrambling to boost farm imports and restrict exports in an attempt to forestall rising food prices and social unrest. Saudi Arabia cut import taxes across a range of food products on Tuesday, slashing its wheat tariff from 25 per cent to zero and reducing tariffs on poultry, dairy produce and vegetable oils. On Monday, India scrapped tariffs on edible oil and maize and banned exports of all rice except the high-value basmati variety, while Vietnam, the world’s third biggest rice exporter, said it would cut rice exports by 11 per cent this year. The...

As if a housing crisis, rising energy costs and a soft labor market weren't enough to cause economic anxiety for the average American, now consumers are feeling the pinch of rapidly escalating food costs. The United States has long prided itself in being the breadbasket of the world, and Americans have traditionally paid a smaller share of their income on food than citizens of other developed countries. But the days of cheap milk, bread, beef and poultry may well be over — and Uncle Sam is partly to blame. In 2007, the cost of a gallon of milk increased 26...

Nearly six million North Koreans are in chronic need of foreign food aid this year with children, nursing and expectant mothers and the poor most at risk, the World Food Programme said Sunday. The UN agency said the nation would be short of an estimated 1.4 million tonnes of food this year, nearly a quarter of its total needs, following severe floods last August which wiped out more than 10 percent of the grain harvest. "Young children, pregnant and breast-feeding women and poor families in both urban and rural areas will be most at risk of hunger," the WFP said...

The United Nation’s agency responsible for relieving hunger is drawing up plans to ration food aid in response to the spiralling cost of agricultural commodities. The World Food Programme is holding crisis talks to decide what aid to halt if new donations do not arrive in the short term. Josette Sheeran, WFP executive director, told the Financial Times that the agency would look at “cutting the food rations or even the number or people reached” if donors did not provide more money. “Our ability to reach people is going down just as the needs go up,” she said. WFP officials...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – More than $1.1 billion a year is spent on public programs in Missouri, yet a new University of Missouri study reports the state has a rising number of people worried about having sufficient amounts of food and coping with hunger. The MU Interdisciplinary Center for Food Security has released a new tool in the fight against hunger. The first Missouri Hunger Atlas details the distribution of hunger in the state and the success of programs trying to meet food insecurity and hunger needs. “This is a pioneering study because, for the first time, we have charted hunger...

CHIANG MAI, Thailand -- Crickets, caterpillars and grubs are high in protein and minerals and could be an important food source during droughts and other emergencies, according to scientists. "I definitely think they can assist," said German biologist V.B. Meyer-Rochow, who regularly eats insects and wore a T-shirt with a Harlequin longhorn beetle to a U.N.-sponsored conference this month on promoting bugs as a food source. Three dozen scientists from 15 countries gathered in this northern Thailand city, home to several dozen restaurants serving insects and other bugs. Some of their proposals were more down to earth than others. A...

I just returned from a Feed My Starving Childen meal packing event in Mt Prospect, IL (NW Suburb of Chicago). What a wonderful time had by all and such a worthy cause.