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The economic situation in Africa has improved a lot since the 1990s.  Yet rampant poverty and food insecurity still impact millions of lives there. Currently, there is a huge demand-supply gap in the agricultural sector.  At least three hundred million are malnourished. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization defines food security as "a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life." Africa's agricultural sector needs to be strengthened to meet the demand for quality food.  In...

"In March we panicked," said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. "Not just in America, the world panicked and threw out the old plan." Dr. Bhattacharya teaches medicine at Stanford University, where he researches the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. With 135 articles published in top peer-reviewed journals, his credentials are impeccable. "The old plan" relied on the time-tested public health measures that successfully eradicated diseases like polio and smallpox, not the total lockdowns implemented in 2020. In response, Dr. Bhattacharya and colleagues from Harvard and Oxford authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which expresses "grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental...

Ana Nuñez, a 62-year-old retired municipal worker in western Venezuela, says her meals often consist of just a few corn-flour pancakes, known as arepas. Even when she has money to buy groceries in the city of Maracaibo’s teeming flea market, she said that “instead of quality food they sell garbage, like animal hides and rotten cheese.” A widespread scarcity of gasoline is the latest blow to domestic food production in Venezuela, preventing goods from getting to market and farmers from filling up their tractors. Food production in this oil-rich nation, led by its socialist president, Nicolas Maduro, had already been...

U.S.—Communist marches around the country are peacefully intensifying. But the marchers have found a new target of their ire: restaurants. Never having seen people with plenty of food to eat, the commies are becoming agitated and confused and are calling for the closure of the evil capitalist eating establishments. The communists were confused and frightened by the sight of people eating food aplenty. Concluding it was part of a sinister capitalist plot to take over the world and then raise the living standards for everyone, they demanded the restaurant be shut down. "You guys are eating food? Smells like evil...

A depressionary perfect storm continues to crush households as tens of millions of Americans are reporting they didn't have enough to eat last week (the seven days through July 21). Bloomberg cites the Census Bureau's latest weekly Household Pulse Survey, revealing almost 30 million Americans went hungry last week. About 23.9 million of 249 million respondents said they had "sometimes not enough to eat." Around 5.42 million indicated they had "often not enough to eat." This is the highest total of hungry Americans in the survey since early May, which was around the time when food bank lines across...

OAK PARK, Ill. (AP) — Kate Maehr has never seen anything like it: lines stretching for blocks as people, many with children, inch forward to get boxes of food they hope will last until the next giveaway, until the next paycheck or until they can get government food assistance. “It’s just heartbreaking,” said Maehr, executive director of the . “They’re finding themselves in a set of circumstances where they have no income and they also have no food, and it happened in an instant.” The number of people seeking help from her organization and affiliated food pantries has surged...

(CARACAS, Venezuela) — The Univision television network said Thursday that it has recovered the video of a contentious interview with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that was confiscated after he cut it short, angered by critical questions from journalist Jorge Ramos. Ramos said the recovery of the video was “a real triumph against censorship” and that it was returned by “confidential sources” who cannot be named out of concern for their safety. On its website, Spanish-language Univision showed an excerpt of the 17-minute interview in late February in the presidential palace in Caracas. Ramos said the video will be broadcast in...

The millions donated to Ethiopia in 1985 thanks to Live Aid were supposed to go towards relieving a natural disaster. In reality, donors became participants in a civil war. Many lives were saved, but even more may have been lost in Live Aid's unwitting support of a Stalinist-style resettlement project Isn't it better to do something rather than give in to despair or cynicism and do nothing? This is the reproachful question familiar to anyone who has criticised organisations that view themselves as dedicated to doing good in the world. To those UN agencies, relief organisations and development groups working...

As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown to the average person. That was about to change. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. Initially it was ignored. But over time Ehrlich’s tract would sell millions of copies and turn its author into a celebrity. It would become one of the most influential books of the 20th century—and one of the most heatedly attacked. The first sentence set the tone: “The battle...

Four climate activists on hunger strike have pledged to continue going without food for a second week as they call on political leaders to act on the environmental crisis. More than 520 people in 28 countries, from Barcelona to Stockholm, joined Extinction Rebellion’s global hunger strike a week ago. Most of them - including at least 260 in the UK - signed up to go without food for seven days, but four of those in London say they intend to continue. In the UK, protesters camped outside the headquarters of the main political parties, including 83-year-old Ursula Pethick. **SNIP** After...

NEW YORK, Nov 12 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Climate change opponents plan to stage a hunger strike to demand a meeting with U.S. Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi, they said on Tuesday, in the political battle over global warming. The protesters said they want a one-hour on-camera meeting with Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, to discuss reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2025. "You have yet to pass even symbolic legislation recognizing the climate crisis as a national emergency. With all due respect, you have failed," they said in an open letter. "Meet with us or leave...

The massive Baby Boomer generation which brought America the happiness of rock & roll and the Ford Mustang en masse is poised to trigger a surge in a scourge: Senior hunger.

Over the past half-decade or so it’s become fashionable to claim that millions of Americans, including many families with kids, are mired in “extreme poverty” — they’re not just below the poverty line, and they’re not even in “deep poverty,” defined at half the poverty line; they’re making do on less than $2 per person per day, the kind of threshold we use to measure deprivation in the Third World.I wrote last year about some research led by the American Enterprise Institute’s Bruce Meyer that devastates these claims — research that he and three coauthors have now expanded and updated....

In the coming weeks, thousands of college students will walk across a stage and proudly accept their diplomas. Many of them will be hungry. A senior at Lehman College in the Bronx dreams of starting her day with breakfast. An undergraduate at New York University said he has been so delirious from hunger, he’s caught himself walking down the street not realizing where he’s going. A health sciences student at Stony Brook University on Long Island describes “poverty naps,” where she decides to go to sleep rather than deal with her hunger pangs. These are all examples of food insecurity,...

**SNIP** Venezuela is ‘an ice cube’ The end result of the country’s decline, in terms of society, has been extreme poverty and hunger. In 2017, the average Venezuelan citizen lost around 24 pounds in 2017, about 73 people were murdered a day. And the rule of law is also breaking down: According to the country’s Prosecutor General’s office, 98% of crimes in 2014 were not prosecuted. Hyperinflation and the introduction of President Nicolas Maduro’s unique cryptocurrency has made the bolivar essentially worthless. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) noted that three million Venezuelans have sought refuge, hoping to find a...

Around 80 percent of Venezuelans are now short of food, according to the new data compiled by NGO Human Rights Watch on Tuesday. Following a trip to the Venezuelan border with Brazil by a team of health experts from John Hopkins University, researchers found that malnutrition continues to rise aggressively, with 80 percent of households unable to access enough food and rates of malnutrition among five years now over the World Health Organization’s crisis limit. In 2017, the average person lost around 11 kilos (24 pounds). In 2016, that number was 19 pounds; it is expected to have risen in...

The longtime family-owned Chicago grocery chain Treasure Island Foods informed employees last week that it will permanently shut down its six remaining locations next month. “Unfortunately, given the current industry conditions, it has been impossible for us to continue to operate without losing money.”

The committee that monitors sanctions on North Korea for the UN Security Council approved new U.S.-backed guidelines Monday to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to millions of hungry and impoverished civilians. The guidelines were crafted by U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley and experts with the U.S. mission to the UN as tensions between the U.S. and North Korea remain high. Despite the new guidance on humanitarian aid, "the United States has been very clear that we will continue to enforce the current sanctions until we achieve the final, fully verified, denuclearization of North Korea," a U.S. official told CBS News...

The hundred-some billion dollars that President Obama sent to Iran apparently has come and gone, leaving the Iranian economy once again desperate to avoid collapse.  The pallets containing more than a billion dollars in hard currency have funded terror groups, and the rest of the haul apparently has gone to pay for debts, spending, and graft, leaving the real economy gasping for air, unable to generate hard currency yet dependent on imports. Steve Hanke reports at Forbes: Iran's rial plunged from 98,000 IRR/USD on Saturday to 112,000 IRR/USD on Sunday on Tehran's Ferdowsi Street.  That stunning 12.5% one-day plunge has pushed the...

Owing in large part to the generosity of the American taxpayer, worldwide starvation and chronic hunger have dropped notably. According to estimates by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the number of undernourished people in the world fell by over 100 million from 2003 to 2016. While we’re making progress in the global fight against hunger, clearly much more needs to be done. Congress enacted the Global Food Security Act (GFSA) in 2016 to help countries achieve food security, self-sufficiency, and, ultimately, political stability. Joined by Rep. Betty McCollum (DFL-MN), I recently introduced the bill to reauthorize the GFSA...