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JACKSON, Miss. -- More than 500,000 people in Mississippi struggled with hunger in 2006, making the state the hungriest in the nation, according to a federal report. The U.S. Department of Agriculture report released last week ranked Mississippi as the worst in the country, followed by New Mexico, Texas and South Carolina. The report stated 18.1 percent of Mississippi's households faced hunger in 2006, up from 16.5 percent in 2005. Warren Yoder, the executive director of the Public Policy Center of Mississippi, said the numbers are "really bad -- astonishingly bad. " The increase in Mississippi, the nation's poorest state,...

Venezuelan construction worker Gustavo Arteaga has no trouble finding jobs in this OPEC nation's booming economy, but on a recent Monday morning he skipped work as part of a more complicated search -- for milk. The 37-year-old father-of-two has for months scrambled to find basic products like cooking oil, beef and milk, despite leftist President Hugo Chavez's social program that promises to provide low-cost groceries to the majority poor. "It takes a miracle to find milk," said Arteaga, who spent two hours in line outside a store in the poor Caracas neighborhood of Eucaliptus. "Don't you see I'm here slaving...

Obesity is more dangerous than smoking and will dramatically shorten the lives of millions, a landmark study has found. While smoking reduces life by an average of ten years, the research says being seriously overweight can cut life expectancy by as much as 13 years. The Foresight report, written by 250 leading scientists, says Britain's obesity crisis is so severe that it would take at least 30 years to reverse. If current trends continue, by 2050 about 60 per cent of men, 50 per cent of women and 25 per cent of children in the UK will be clinically obese...

The New York Times is outraged: not enough New Yorkers are on welfare, and government needs to take an "aggressive approach" to pumping up the number of people on the dole. That's the gist of the Times editorial this morning, "Why the Hungry Refuse Help." The Times' recycles findings from the left-wing "Urban Justice Center" [emphasis added]: [O]f 9,500 recipients surveyed, more than 5,800 had their benefits cut off within 20 months of enrollment. The vast majority remained eligible for food stamps, but, in most cases, they simply did not show up to get their aid renewed. Many said they...

NAIROBI, Kenya - A humanitarian group has turned down $46 million worth of U.S. food aid, arguing that the way the American government distributes its help hurts poor farmers. CARE said wheat donated by the U.S. government and sold by charities to finance anti-poverty programs results in low-priced crops being dumped on local markets and small-scale growers cannot compete. Other experts said they share CARE's concern, but stressed that food donations are sometimes needed when a natural disaster harms a local area's agriculture, such as the flooding that North Korea says has devastated vast tracts of its farmland. The Atlanta-based...

UN in food aid plea for Zimbabwe Food shortages have become common in Zimbabwe The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is asking donor countries to fund an expanded aid operation in Zimbabwe. The WFP says a poor harvest and the country's worsening economic situation means hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans are running out of food. It says it will have to provide assistance to more than three million people over the coming months. Without additional funds, UN food stocks will be completely exhausted by the end of 2007, the agency says. According to the WFP an estimated 3.3 million...

Cost to nation is $90 billion, cost per household $800 WASHINGTON, D.C., June 5, 2007 — While thirty-five million Americans feel the physical effects of hunger each day, every household and individual in our nation feels the economic effects. So finds a new study released today by the Sodexho Foundation and researchers affiliated with Harvard University School of Public Health, Brandeis University and Loyola University. The study, titled “The Economic Cost of Domestic Hunger: Estimated Annual Burden to the United States,” finds that the U.S. pays more than $90 billion annually for the direct and indirect costs of hunger-related charities,...

ROME — Biofuels like ethanol can help reduce global warming and create jobs for the rural poor, but the benefits may be offset by serious environmental problems and increased food prices for the hungry, the United Nations concluded Tuesday in its first major report on bioenergy. In an agency-wide assessment, the United Nations raised alarms about the potential negative impact of biofuels, just days after a climate conference in Bangkok said the world had both the money and technology to prevent the sharp rise in global temperatures blamed in part on greenhouse gas emissions. Biofuels, which are made from corn,...

Food Security: There's never a shortage of dictators to hurl abuse at the U.S. for its food policies. But they have no right to do it. Marxism, not freedom, is the world's foremost creator of hunger. The blame-America-first crowd often zeroes in on U.S. plenty, calling our lack of want 'excess' and our great food productivity an ecological evil. There's been a malevolent new wave of this lately as more news of failed Marxist regimes and the hunger they create comes out. Another point in communism's favor: This Reuters photo of a neighborhood in central Havana came with a caption...

Severe hunger looms for Zimbabwe Many Zimbabweans look set to go hungry Zimbabwe is facing a food deficit of hundreds of thousands of tonnes - a third of its requirements - an international monitoring agency warns. The Famine Early Warning System says the cereal balance sheet projects a shortfall in maize - the staple food - of some 850,000 tonnes. By December only 152,600 tonnes had been delivered, meaning widespread hunger looks set to continue. The monitors say Zimbabwe's lack of foreign currency is a key problem. Crisis The Zimbabwean government has refused to allow outside agencies to carry out...

Soaring international demand for corn has caused a spike in prices for Mexico's humble tortilla, hitting the poor and forcing President Felipe Calderón's business-friendly government into an uncomfortable confrontation with powerful monopolies. Tortilla prices jumped nearly 14 percent over the past year, a move Mexico's Central Bank Gov. Guillermo Ortiz called "unjustifiable" in a country where inflation ran about 4 percent. Ortiz pinned the blame on companies monopolizing the market and blocking competition. Economists also blame increased U.S. production of ethanol from corn as an alternative to oil. The battle over the tortilla, the most basic staple of the Mexican...

Chris Wallace had Ted Kennedy cornered. The Fox News Sunday host displayed Kennedy's 1995 bitter condemnation of welfare reform: "legislative child abuse . . . let them eat cake." It should be noted that as Wallace began to reference the statement, Kennedy objected, blustering that "this is 2006" - as if his past misjudgments are irrelevant even though he would he has apparently learned nothing from them. Wallace went on to make the point that the employment rate among unmarried women has soared and the child poverty rate has dropped. He put it to Kennedy: "hasn't welfare reform worked?"...

Africa, a continent usually synonymous with hunger, is falling prey to obesity. It's a trend driven by new lifestyles and old beliefs that big is beautiful. More than one-third of African women and a quarter of African men are estimated to be overweight, and the World Health Organization predicts that will rise to 41 percent and 30 percent respectively in the next 10 years. Some 56 percent of South African women are now either obese or overweight, compared to fewer than 10 percent who are underweight. More than 17 percent of adolescents here are overweight _ for teenage girls, it's...

The US government has tweaked its terminology in referring to the nearly 11 million Americans who face a constant struggle with hunger to refer to them as people with "very low food security." According to a report released this month by the US Department of Agriculture, roughly 35 million Americans had difficulty feeding themselves in 2005 and of those some 10.8 million went hungry. But unlike last year's report on hunger in America, which labeled families who don't get enough to eat as having "food insecurity with hunger," this year's report referred to them as having "very low food security."...

Hunger stalks North Korea as food aid slows By Guy Dinmore in Washington Published: September 26 2006 03:00 | Last updated: September 26 2006 03:00 North Korea, which suffered mass starvation in the 1990s, risks facing widespread hunger again because of a smaller grain harvest and sharp cuts in international aid imposed in response to Pyongyang's July missile tests. The politics of food is taking centre-stage once more as pressure mounts on North Korea to return to the nuclear negotiating table after more than a year's absence. Analysts said North Korea's leadership might have miscalculated if it thought it could...

Obesity has reached pandemic proportions throughout the world and is now the greatest single contributor to chronic disease, an international conference was told here. "This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world," Australia's Monash University professor Paul Zimmet, chair of the 10th International Congress on Obesity, said on the opening day of the conference. The spread of the problem was "led by affluent western nations, whose physical activity and dietary habits are regrettably being adopted by developing nations," Zimmet told more than 2,000 delegates. The world now has more fat people than hungry ones, according to...

HARARE, Zimbabwe - President Robert Mugabe opened a new legislative year Tuesday with a speech to Parliament blaming economic problems on the U.S., Britain and other Western critics of his human rights record. Zimbabwe is in a state of economic collapse, suffering from the world's highest inflation rate — more than 1,000 percent — and shortages of all basic goods. A quarter of its 16 million people has emigrated since 2000 and millions more are dependent on aid. "My tribute goes to the gallant people of Zimbabwe for continuing to exhibit great fortitude despite the prevailing economic challenges which are...

Live 8 hero Bob Geldof has been forced to cancel two concerts in Italy because of lack of public interest, after only 45 people turned up to see him perform in Milan, Italy's La Stampa newspaper reported on Saturday. Geldof walked out of Milan's 12,000-capacity Arena Civica on Friday without playing, given the paltry attendance. His manager explained that a concert for less than 400 people would not be viable, the newspaper said. The 54-year-old Irish rocker, who said he had flown in from South Africa for the gig, sought to placate angry fans afterwards by promising to give a...

Conservative Michelle Malkin is joining Sheehan's hunger strike, view her video journal below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD9fqWh6hEc

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein ended a brief hunger strike after missing just one meal in his U.S.-run prison, a U.S. military spokesman said Friday. The former Iraqi leader had refused lunch Thursday in protest at the killing of one of his lawyers by gunmen, but the spokesman said he ate his evening meal.