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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.

Impoverished areas of Africa and Asia face severe crop losses from climate change in 20 years Many of the world’s poorest regions could face severe crop losses in the next two decades because of climate change, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University’s Program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). Their findings will be published in the Feb. 1 issue of the journal Science. “The majority of the world’s 1 billion poor depend on agriculture for their livelihoods,” said lead author David Lobell, a senior research scholar at FSE, which focuses on environmentally sustainable solutions to...

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau. The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene...

/begin my translation N. Korea, Rabbit Meat Popular, Becoming 'Another Sweet Meat' Yonhap News "Rabbit meat, unlike sweet meat(translator's note:sweet meat = dog meat), causes no heartburn afterwards, great for your health." Restaurant districts in Pyongyang are featuring rabbit dishes, and attracting customers, advertising it as 'another sweet meat,' spurred by the recent official drive to raise rabbits for food. Chosun Shinbo, the official newspaper of General Association of Koreans in Japan(pro-North front organization,) reported on Jan. 20, "Among Pyongyang's restaurants, there are quite a few service units which provide various rabbit dishes. These days rabbit stew is as...

Zimbabwe unveils plans to slaughter excess elephants for dried meat Posted : Fri, 04 Jan 2008 10:24:01 GMT Author : DPA Category : Africa (World) Africa World News | Home Harare/Johannesburg - Zimbabwe's parks and wildlife authority has announced plans to dry and sell elephant meat as a way of making use of the country's burgeoning elephant population, the official Herald newspaper reported Friday. The state-run body will apply to get a quota of elephants it can slaughter to make the delicacy, which is known in southern Africa as biltong. Abbatoirs will have to be specially constructed for the purpose,...

BMO strategist Donald Coxe warns credit crunch and soaring oil prices will pale in comparison to looming catastrophe A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club's 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto on Thursday. "It's not a matter of if, but when," he warned investors. "It's going...

Global food prices will come under further pressure on Monday as benchmark prices for cereals at much higher levels come into operation, making it almost inevitable that a second wave of food price inflation will hit the world’s leading economies. In Chicago wheat and rice prices for delivery in March 2008 have jumped to an all-time record, soyabean prices are at a 34-year high and corn prices at an 11-year peak. Knock-on price rises are set to hit consumers in coming months, raising inflationary pressure and constraining the ability of central banks to mitigate the slowdown in their economies. A...

I also lost about 18 pounds this month.

IT'S 11:30am. Three of Harare's main roads have been closed down, as have several stores. The occasion is the "Million Man and Woman March" to show support for the ruling ZANU PF party leader, President Robert Mugabe. A multitude of both the young and old, clad in a variety of ZANU PF regalia, is stampeding down the 10-km stretch to Highfield. But by the time the crowd reaches its destination, Zimbabwe Grounds, many do not have anything left in them. Hunger, ever present everywhere else in the country, is an integral part of the day's proceedings. ... The march also...

It's a holiday tradition: The hunger story. As winter sets in, the media discovers long lines and "critical shortages" at food banks, with blame placed squarely on federal budget cuts and lousy economic prospects. The latest entree came on Friday's New York Times front page, reported by Katie Zezima: "Food Banks, In a Squeeze, Tighten Belts." "Food banks around the country are reporting critical shortages that have forced them to ration supplies, distribute staples usually reserved for disaster relief and in some instances close." "'It's one of the most demanding years I've seen in my 30 years' in the field,...

Lester Brown, the president of the Earth Policy Institute wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that the amount of grain needed to make enough ethanol to fill a 25-gallon SUV tank "would feed one person for a full year. If the United States converted its entire grain harvest into ethanol, it would satisfy less than 16 percent of its automotive needs." Brown said the ongoing ethanol boom in the U.S. was "setting the stage for an epic competition. In a narrow sense, it is one between the world's supermarkets and its service stations." More broadly, "it is a battle...

Malthus may have been right after all, though two centuries early and a crank. Mankind is outrunning its food supplies. Hunger - if not yet famine - is a looming danger for a long list of countries that are both poor and heavily reliant on farm imports, according to the Food Outlook of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The farm crunch has been creeping up on the world for 20 years. Food output has risen at 1.3pc a year: the number of mouths at 1.35pc. What has abruptly changed is the twin revolution of biofuel politics and Asia's...

Operators of free food banks say they are seeing more working people needing assistance. The increased demand is outstripping supplies and forcing many pantries and food banks to cut portions. Demand is being driven up by rising costs of food, housing, utilities, health care and gasoline, while food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers are finding they have less surplus food to donate and government help has decreased, according to Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks. "I've been doing this for 20 years, and I can't believe how much worse it gets month after month," she...

Presidential candidate and former senator John Edwards (D-NC) has released a plan to fight domestic hunger and called on Congress to immediately take action to fund a program that would provide universal food services for all Americans. “Differences in nutrition are yet another manifestation of the ‘two Americas’ I’ve been talking about for the last four years,” Edwards declared. “On the one hand, there are those eating steak and caviar. On the other, we see people eating out of trash cans. We should be ashamed.” Edwards’ six-point proposal is modeled on the Canadian National Health Service. It calls for Congress...

As the U.S. celebrates Thanksgiving, one in six New Yorkers, some 1.3 million people, don't have enough to eat, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger said. The number of people lining up for food in soup kitchens "soared" this year, and federal aid cuts have led to declining food stocks and increased rationing, the group said. The city spends $2.65 billion a year on health care, lost productivity and other costs related to food insecurity, the Manhattan-based group that campaigns against hunger said in a report. "When the economy gets a cold, people in poverty get pneumonia," the coalition's...

Barely three years from now, China is facing a possibility of a 4.8 million ton grain shortage, translated to almost 9 percent of the country's grain consumption. Amidst this forecast released by the Study Times, a newspaper affiliated with the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, an official of the country's top economic planning agency on Wednesday assured the region will remain self sufficient in grain in the future. "As rural populations move to urban areas, fodder grain and oil-bearing crops such as soybeans are already in short supply. Domestic supply of grain was...

CARRBORO — Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on Wednesday released his plan to fight domestic hunger and called on Congress to immediately take action to fund programs that provide food services for millions of Americans. His six-point proposal urges Congress to pass a farm bill that would provide food stamps and support food banks, and asks lawmakers to reform the food stamps program to help more families get more assistance. The plan also tells politicians in Washington to quickly provide $5.1 billion to help low income families pay their winter heating bills to free up extra money for food. The...

Sweet Potato Promises Hunger Relief In Developing Countries ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2007) — Sweetpotatoes, often misunderstood and underrated, are receiving new attention as a life-saving food crop in developing countries. According to the International Potato Center, more than 95 percent of the global sweetpotato crop is grown in developing countries, where it is the fifth most important food crop. Despite its name, the sweetpotato is not related to the potato. Potatoes are tubers (referring to their thickened stems) and members of the Solanaceae family, which also includes tomatoes, red peppers, and eggplant. Sweetpotatoes are classified as "storage roots" and belong...