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Pope Francis has warned “the powerful of the Earth” they will answer to God if they fail to protect the environment to ensure the world can feed its population. “The planet has enough food for all, but it seems that there is a lack of willingness to share it with everyone,” Francis said at a mass to mark the opening of the general assembly of the Catholic charitable organisation Caritas. “We must do what we can so that everyone has something to eat, but we must also remind the powerful of the Earth that God will call them to judgment...

Merchant vessels are taking weeks to deliver vital food supplies to Yemen as Saudi-led coalition warships search for arms bound for Iran-allied Houthi fighters and heavy fighting disrupts shipments in a worsening humanitarian crisis. The conflict has hurt imports to Yemen, where about 20 million people or 80 percent of the population, are estimated to be going hungry. The Arabian peninsula's poorest country, Yemen imports more than 90 percent of its food, including most of its wheat and all its rice - most of it by sea. It faces increasing problems as many shipping companies have pulled out and those...

On February 13, L’Osservatore Romano (English edition) printed a full-page text of Pope Francis’ message to the Milan “Expo of Ideas.” Its theme was: “Nourish the Planet, Energy for Life.” Pope Bergoglio brought up again his now familiar suggestions about how to handle poverty and hunger. Pope Francis recalled his address to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, November 20, 2014). There, he linked together “the production, accessibility, and availability of foodstuffs, climate change, and agricultural trade.” Our “first concern,” however, “must be the individual person, who lacks daily nourishment, who has given up thinking about life . . .and...

There is no “right to food”. Food never was any sort of fundamental “right”. Saint Paul already warned us that to those who do not want to work, we shall give no food. You can’t find any clearer evidence that food is not a fundamental right of the person. Of course, charity demands that we feed the hungry. But this is not a subjective right of the hungry, merely the result of the charitable help of those who feed them because – let us say this once again – consider them, in their charity, worthy of being fed. Charity is...

(CNSNews.com) - In a joint radio appearance with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday, President Barack Obama said there is a “worldwide epidemic of obesity” and that he looks forward to working with the government of India and non-governmental organizations on the “issue of obesity” in India.In 2013-2014, according to a survey conducted by UNICEF and India's Ministry of Women and Child Development, 30.7 percent of Indian children under five were underweight.That was a significant improvement for India, where 43.5 percent of the children under five had been underweight at the time of the last survey in 2005-2006. "India no...

I remember our daily food always coming from a long, long line at the end of which was a loaf of bread, a liter of milk, a stick of butter, a bottle of murky cooking oil, or a kilo of bones with traces of meat and fat on them. [...] If we wanted to eat, we learned at a very young age that we had to stand in long lines every day, often in bitter cold at 4 a.m. in hopes that the store would not run out of bread or milk by the time we made it to the...

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and possibly a slathering of bureaucratic buffoonery. As part of Obama's “Feed the Future” initiative, farmers in Ethiopia will be given bags of seed and will be trained on how to plant the seeds and apply chemical fertilizers. You know, because what is perhaps the oldest known civilization on the planet can't possibly continue to survive without the help of an “advanced” nation, its tax dollars and its corporate puppeteers. Reporter Philip Brasher writes ... President Barack Obama is counting on an unusual mix of taxpayer dollars and investments from profit-hunting...

The Food Network is currently promoting a crusade to end childhood hunger in America. Had the Food Network not been relentless promoters of the Obamas, I could almost see this as an ironic comment on the utter lack of appeal of the food being produced in schools across America in the First Lady's name. But the Food Network is serious. In their holiday promotion their spokespeople cite the much-debunked statistic that one in five children in America goes hungry on a regular basis. . Something is truly out of whack here. If one in five American children are going hungry...

Food banks across the country are reporting shortages as the holidays approach and the underemployed and the long-term unemployed are utilizing them to stave off hunger. Food bank lines continue to swell despite claims by the federal government that the economy is improving and increased spending on food stamps: Forty-six million Americans, or one in five, are now receiving food stamps. “The need continues to be strong. Even though the state level unemployment percent is low, this does not address the underemployed and long-term unemployed,” said Bruce Wilson, director of operations for the New Hampshire Food Bank. NHFB has already...

Egypt, famed for millennia as the “breadbasket of the Mediterranean,” now faces alarming food shortages. “Food for Stability,” a startlingly candid report by Gihan Shahine in Cairo’s Al-Ahram newspaper, makes clear the extent of the crisis. To begin, two anecdotes: Although compelled by her father to marry a cousin who could afford to house and feed her, Samar, 20, reports that they “have only had fried potatoes and aubergines for dinner most of the week.” Her sisters, ten and 13, who left school to take up work, are losing weight and suffer chronic anemia. Manal, a nurse and single mother...

Hunger and panic are spreading among people unable to work because of restrictions aimed at containing the spread of Ebola in Liberia and Sierra Leone, say church workers in West Africa. In Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, church groups “are trying to get food and distribute it to families who have asked us to help, but movement is heavily restricted and there is little we can do,” Salesian Father Jorge Crisafulli, provincial superior in West Africa, said in an Aug. 22 telephone interview from Accra, Ghana. Neighborhoods in Monrovia have been sealed off under terms of the government-imposed state of emergency. The...

More than a thousand locals lined up Friday morning for several hours under the scorching sun and heat in Miami for a box full of food. The event located at the Central Shopping Plaza at 3825 NW 7th Street started at 9:00 a.m.

Cases in West Africa's Ebola outbreak this year have risen to 2,240, including 1,229 deaths, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday, reporting the toll in four countries, including Nigeria. While Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and No. 1 oil producer, appears to be containing its smaller outbreak, Liberia and Sierra Leone are struggling to halt the spread of the deadly Ebola virus among their populations. On Friday, these small two West African nations and a medical charity chided the WHO for its slow response, saying more action was needed to save victims threatened by the disease and hunger.

A British medical journal announced a finding last month that might be the best news in the history of the world: Nearly one out of three people in the world is overweight. Members of the media responded to this thrilling discovery by lamenting the globe’s growing waistline. Pundits rushed to condemn widespread access to inexpensive food. Everyone seemed so excited to attack obesity that no one noticed the report’s incredible story of human achievement and hope. Throughout history, malnutrition and hunger-related health issues have killed more people than any other cause. Over the course of the past half-century, however, the...

It´s a quiet crisis. In a city of plenty, a staggering number of people are struggling to feed themselves and their families. Nearly one in five New Yorkers, 1.4 million people, now rely on a patchwork network of 1,000 food pantries and soup kitchens across the city to eat. That represents an increase of 200,000 people in five years — straining the charities that are trying to help. The two biggest, City Harvest and the Food Bank for New York City, now provide nearly 110 million pounds of food to soup kitchens and food pantries a year. Yet those working

What does that even mean? That some shall-remain-unnamed Republican colleague literally told her, presumably when asked why he supported the one percent budget cut to the federal food stamp program recently passed in the farm bill or why he did not support extending unemployment benefits or something, that his entire party’s policy platform is based off of its collective and utter indifference to the plight of families in poverty? …Why do I feel skeptical? Via RCP:(VIDEO-AT-LINK) "I asked a Republican friend why his party remains so opposed to extending the vital lifelines for struggling families and really hungry children. This...

Here Are The Countries That Spend The Most On Food Matthew BoeslerFeb. 24, 2014, 8:28 PM Renaissance Macro Research, Congressional Research Service This chart plots the share of household income in a given country spent on food against the level of household income in that country. Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro, warns that rising food prices may serve as an additional economic headwind to some of the emerging markets in the top-left region of the chart (India, China, Indonesia, and Nigeria, to name a few). "Food prices are climbing for a range of items including cattle,...

STAVANGER, Norway — Convicted Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik has threatened to go on a hunger strike unless he gets access to better video games, a sofa and a larger gym. In a letter sent to The Associated Press and other media, Breivik writes that the hunger strike would continue until his demands are met or he dies. Breivik’s lawyer Tord Jordet confirmed Tuesday that the letter was authentic and said his client was waiting for a response from prison authorities on 12 demands before deciding whether to begin a hunger strike sometime during the next eight weeks.

The United Nations estimates it would cost $30 billion a year [1] to end world hunger. That sounds like a lot, but the world spent more than ten times that amount in 2012 on global warming mitigation, according to a recent Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) study [2]. And the U.N. says the world needs to spend even more on global warming mitigation. Much more.According to the Reuters analysis [3] of the Summary for Policymakers of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report, due to be released this April, the UN is calling on the world to...

This past week I took my kids to see the second movie in the Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire. While it is a violent series, I cannot think of a better movie or book series to open the door to moral and political discussions with our teen and preteen kids. For those unfamiliar with the Hunger Games, it is the story of a gladiatorial competition in a futuristic totalitarian regime, which requires each of 12 isolated districts to select a teenage boy and girl by lottery to fight to the death until only one “victor” survives. The story centers on...