Skip to main content

Global Hunger

What report could be more appropriate, in the current economic hubbub worldwide, than the one released yesterday? - on global hunger.

Whilst bankers and governments around the world deal in billions of dollars to rescue companies - and countries [witness Iceland] - from going to the wall, there are still millions of people around the world who go to bed hungry every day.

oneworld.net reports:

"Despite significant progress in global efforts to reduce poverty, hundreds of millions of people across the world are still going to sleep hungry at night, according to a new study by a group of international food policy think tanks.

The "2008 Global Hunger Index" released today points out that more than 920 million people -- an overwhelming majority of them living in developing countries -- go hungry every day.

"Hunger is one of the most important problems the world faces, and rapid progress in overcoming it is long overdue," said the authors of the report highlighting the countries and regions facing the risk -- and now confronting the added burden of rising food prices and a global economic downturn.

The Index also notes, however that many countries in South and Southeast Asia, the Near East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean have made significant headway in eliminating hunger over the past two decades.

The report identifies as many as 33 countries that have levels of hunger that are "alarming or extremely alarming." Most of those countries are located in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...