10 million euros human aid to Sahrawi refugees (Google Alert / Echorouk)

Read at :

Google Alert for Western Africa

Echorouk Online

http://www.echoroukonline.com/english/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7149

10 million euros human aid to sahrawi refugees

Ten million Euros have been devoted by the European Commission as humanitarian aids for the Western Sahara refugees. The European assistance includes basic food and medical care requirements. This aid is the first of its kind since more than ten months. By February 2006, unusually heavy rain storms destroyed refugees’ camps where more than 120 thousands Sahrawi families were living. Seven months later, most of countries and humanitarian organisations stopped their assistance, without caring about Sahrawi people who can no longer afford to survive. Among them, the European Union and UN Food Agency that started for the first time its assistance for Sahrawi refugees by 1986. There has been a sharp decrease in the level of food buffer stock. As a result, there has been a huge increase in the number of people who have anemia.

Tackling hunger in the Horn of Africa (FAO)

Read at :

FAO Newsroom (see my Blogroll)

 http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2007/index.html

Tackling hunger in the Horn of Africa

Governments, UN agree on road map

26 June 2007, Nairobi/Rome – Six African governments and the United Nations today agreed on a road map to tackle the root causes of rising hunger across the drought-plagued Horn of Africa, warning that the next major crisis could force more than 20 million people into needing emergency assistance. The road map was the result of months of planning capped by two days of talks in Nairobi that ended today between government representatives of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda, regional bodies, donors, international financial institutions, research organizations, the private sector, non-governmental organisations and the United Nations.

Drought and food crisis in Zimbabwe (afrol)

Read at :

afrol News

http://www.afrol.com/articles/26022

Zimbabwe confronts food crisis

afrol News, 6 July – The government of Zimbabwe has accepted a looming severe food shortage in the country. The ZANU-PF government said it would accept food aid from the international community but only on humanitarian grounds. Over the years, Zimbabwe had been at the daggers’ end of rights activists for trampling on the rights of citizens, especially the opposition, civil society and the media. Knowing fully that the donor community would press for political and human rights corrections to prevail as a condition attached to their food aid, the government was quick to sound the bell that they would not welcome such donors. No aid with political strings attached are welcome even Zimbabweans will die of hunger.

Pictures of UNICEF-project “Family gardens and school gardens in Algeria” – (Willem)

You want to have a look at a series of pictures, illustrating the progress made at our UNICEF-project “Family gardens and school gardens in the refugee camps of the Sahrawis” in S.W. Algeria ?

Please go to the bottom of the left column on this blog. You will find

“Flickr photos”

Double click on the picture to start viewing the first series. Enjoy and learn a lot about that nice project, combating malnutrition in the refugee camps ! This project also gets the attention of UNHCR and the WFP.

Tackling children’s malnutrition (dgAlert / WHO / WFP / SCN / UNICEF)

Treatment at home with highly fortified, ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTFs) can certainly bring relief in the dramatic situation of malnutrition of some 20 million young children. “Families may not have easy access to health facilities that could provide such care in the poorest countries where the majority of children with severe acute malnutrition live.” Therefore, I agree that “community-based management of severe acute malnutrition could prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children each year.” However, although strongly supporting this idea of implementing ready-to-use therapeutic foods, I would like to recommend a combination with the creation of family gardens and school gardens in the rural areas. This integrated system would certainly enhance the opportunities to provide fresh food on a continuous base. Malnutrition can significantly be reduced by offering every family a small garden and each school a school garden, in which sufficient fresh vegetables and fruits are produced to complete the diet of the children with vitamins and mineral elements.

This would really be a tool for integrated sustainable development. Why aren’t we giving it a try ? See our former messages on the UNICEF project in Algeria !

Willem

Read at:

dg Youth and Development

http://topics.developmentgateway.org/youth/rc/ItemDetail.do?itemId=1104672

WHO

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2007/pr27/en/index.html

Innovative approach tackles malnutrition in the community

7 JUNE 2007 | GENEVA/NEW YORK/ROME — An innovative approach is showing progress in addressing severe acute malnutrition, which affects an estimated 20 million children under the age of five worldwide. The approach combines community-based care for severely malnourished children with traditional hospital-based treatment.

A statement by the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition (SCN) and UNICEF issued today highlights new evidence that about three-quarters of children with severe acute malnutrition – those who have a good appetite and no medical complications – can be treated at home with highly fortified, ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTFs).

Swaziland: lowest annual harvest and need of food assistance (dgAlert / WFP)

 Read at :

dgAlert for Food Security

http://topics.developmentgateway.org/foodsecurity/rc/ItemDetail.do?itemId=1103123

 WFP – World Food Programme

http://www.wfp.org/english/?ModuleID=137&Key=2490

Swaziland’s worst harvest ever – 400,000 people in need of assistance

Rome, 23 May 2007 – A prolonged dry spell and high temperatures ravaged Swaziland’s maize crop in 2007, resulting in the lowest annual harvest on record and leaving more than a third of the population in need of food assistance, according to a report issued today by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and WFP. Around 400,000 vulnerable people will require approximately 40,000 tonnes of food assistance to meet the needs from now until the next harvest in April 2008, according to the report, based on a joint assessment mission to Swaziland by the two UN agencies – the first in a series conducted in southern African countries. Maize production in 2006/07 is estimated at about 26,000 tonnes, nearly 60 percent below last year’s level.

Child hunger, a moral and humanitarian issue with economic consequences (Google Alert / WFP)

Read at :

Google Alert for Poverty

WFP – World Food Program

http://us.oneworld.net/external/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wfp.org%2Fenglish%2F%3FModuleID%3D137%26Key%3D2507

Study finds child hunger costs Central America billions of dollars every year

“Child hunger is not only a moral and humanitarian issue, but has economic consequences as well.” – WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran

Panama City, 3 June 2007 – A new study has found that child undernutrition in Central America and the Dominican Republic in 2004 alone cost those economies US$6.7 billion – or 6.4 percent of the region’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – a burden that severely undermines international and national efforts to eradicate hunger and poverty. The in-depth study , which was carried out by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), is the first of its kind in the region.

Food from urban gardens or from food aid? : my comment

I am really impressed by the nice ideas expressed in the article:

Urban farms empower Africa

Aid providers in Congo and elsewhere are discovering that lessons in farming can succeed where food handouts have not.

By Stephanie Hanes | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

(see my former posting)

I agree fully that urban farming has a lot of potentialities to solve a number of problems about malnutrition in the cities of the developing countries. Provision of food and nutrition becomes a fast-growing major problem in the slums. Transport of fresh food from the rural areas to the cities and the high prizes at the city markets cause a serious barrier for most of the city dwellers.

Projects to encourage these poor people to start producing food crops in small gardens (UNICEF, WFP, FAO and NGOs) merit our full support. Urban agriculture networks should be built on all continents, particularly in the developing countries of the drylands.

Taking into account that not all these city dwellers of the slums get a chance to find a small piece of land to start urban gardening, I would like to recommend considering the type of “bottle gardening” I have described in former posting on this blog.

Different vegetables simply growing in a plastic bottle: a method to have food produced by any family in any place of the world, also in the cities, but also a method to get rid of littered plastic (bottles and bags).

I am convinced that collecting empty plastic bottles and bags will never be a problem in the cities. Billions (trillions?) of those are littered continuously. Should the agencies and organizations, concerned with urban gardening, also teach the undernourished people and the kids at school how to grow their fresh food and herbs in plastic bags or bottles, a big step forward would easily be put forward in the shortest time.

Combating malnutrition, even hunger or famine, to improve public health does not demand considerable investment. It suffices to teach the people of the slums and the school children some “bottle gardening skills” to see food production taking off, even in the poorest parts of the quickly growing cities. It would offer numerous possibilities to significantly improve the quality of the meals at school.

Looking forward for reactions on this suggestion.

Willem

Food from urban gardens or from food aid? (IISD / Linkages Update / Christian Science Monitor)

Earth Negotiations Bulletin <enb@iisd.org>

Linkages Update – Thursday, 24 May 2007

Africa’s urban poor get valuable lessons in farming
UN agencies, such as UNICEF, the World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization, and local NGOs are looking to urban gardens as an alternative to feeding programs targeted at poor city dwellers in developing countries. Urban gardens have low start-up costs, and in some cases locals have scaled them up into a full-fledged businesses. Examples of locals growing their own food rather than relying on aid can be found from the slums of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Accra, Ghana, to Hyderabad, India.

Urban farms empower Africa

Aid providers in Congo and elsewhere are discovering that lessons in farming can succeed where food handouts have not.

By Stephanie Hanes | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

 

KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo

The fields that ended hunger for Hen­riette Lipepele’s family are squeezed between a trash-strewn dirt road and a cluster of one-room cinder-block houses. They are not exactly pretty, at least not in the wide, pastoral way that one might imagine fields and farms. Ms. Lipepele’s beds of sweet potatoes and leafy bitekuteku are narrow and not quite straight; the patch where she added bananas and sugar cane seems almost overgrown with competing greenery. The setting is hardly bucolic. But these plant beds wedged into the Quartier Mombele – one of the unpaved slums of Kinshasa, the sprawling capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo – are examples of what many aid experts believe could save hundreds of thousands of people from hunger and malnutrition: urban gardens in the developing world’s fast-growing cities.

Artwork and food security (allAfrica)

Read at :

allAfrica

http://allafrica.com/stories/200705071339.html

Ghana: Artwork – Tool for Fighting Food Insecurity

Public Agenda (Accra)

4 May 2007
Posted to the web 7 May 2007

Frederick Asiamah
Accra

Progressively, artwork is emerging as a pivotal aspect of winning the war against hunger. It is being used to create awareness about food security across the the globe through the collaborative efforts of the three United Nations food agencies: the World Food Programme (WFP), Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). In addition, Artwork is being used to raise funds to provide food aid for the world’s 1.1 billion extremely poor people, three quarters of who live in rural areas and depend on agriculture and related activities for their survival.

Nepal : UNDP, WFP funded projects satisfactory (Google Alert / The Rising Nepal)

Read at :

Google Alert for : desertification

The Rising Nepal

http://www.gorkhapatra.org.np/content.php?nid=18267

UNDP, WFP funded projects satisfactory   [ 2007-5-7 ]

RSS

DHULIKHEL (Kavre), May 6: The implementation of the projects launched with the economic and technical support of the UNDP and World Environment Fund Small Grant Programme (WEFSGP) has been found satisfactory. At the review workshop which lasted for three days here, progress of the projects run and future action plans of the newly approved projects were presented.  On the occasion, UNDP Assistant Resident Representative, Bijaya Singh said the programmes launched by the UNDP will be accomplished within 2007 and it has been thought that help in the projects to run from 2008 to 2012 will be provided in projects such as climate change, and establishment of peace. National Coordinator of WEFSGP, Gopal Sherchan informed that the Fund has been providing help to some 80 projects as the minimisation of the problems of climate change, desertification and renewable energy for the past eight years. The cooperation will be further extended in the days to come, he added.