Anti Hunger Programme

More food is produced throughout the world than is required to ensure everyone has an adequate diet, yet 840 million people (almost one in seven people) do not have enough to eat, mostly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The major challenge is to implement policies, institutions and resources that promote the interrelated goals of agricultural productivity growth, hunger reduction and the sustainable use of natural resources. The Anti-Hunger Programme sets out five priority areas for action that need to be taken in order to achieve the World Food Summit target of halving the number of chronically undernourished by 2015, and argues that the benefits of reducing world hunger will far outweigh the costs of the proposed programme.

How to focus anti-hunger efforts not on charity but on the root causes of food insecurity, improving public health, and reducing income inequality. Food banks and food pantries have proliferated in response to an economic emergency. The loss of manufacturing jobs combined with the recession of the early 1980s and Reagan administration cutbacks in federal programs led to an explosion in the growth of food charity. This was meant to be a stopgap measure, but the jobs never came back, and the “emergency food system” became an industry. In Big Hunger, Andrew Fisher takes a critical look at the business of hunger and offers a new vision for the anti-hunger movement. From one perspective, anti-hunger leaders have been extraordinarily effective. Food charity is embedded in American civil society, and federal food programs have remained intact while other anti-poverty programs have been eliminated or slashed. But anti-hunger advocates are missing an essential element of the problem: economic inequality driven by low wages. Reliant on corporate donations of food and money, anti-hunger organizations have failed to hold business accountable for offshoring jobs, cutting benefits, exploiting workers and rural communities, and resisting wage increases. They have become part of a “hunger industrial complex” that seems as self-perpetuating as the more famous military-industrial complex. Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and economic democracy. He points to the work of numerous grassroots organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the rest of the anti-hunger sector. It is only through approaches like these that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it.

Hunger and Markets is the third volume of the UN World Food Programme's World Hunger Series - created to help promote a better understanding of the choices confronting leaders as they work to fight hunger. It appears at a crucial time, with food prices at high levels, a severe global financial crisis and vulnerable households around the world endangering their future health, education and productivity by reducing both the quality and the quantity of their food intake. Hunger and Markets explores the complex and multifaceted interactions between the availability of and access to food and the operations of markets. The structure and dynamics of food markets and the threats and opportunities markets generate are crucial for the access to food for billions of people. Markets are also critical in averting or mitigating food shortages and hunger by adjusting to shocks, reducing vulnerability and coping with crises. Whether markets help or harm the hungry poor is a function of markets' institutions, infrastructure and policies. This volume analyzes the workings of markets in order to identify the sources of market failures in addressing hunger and malnutrition, and to highlight the ways in which they can be improved. The report sets out the ways in which programme design and policy formulation can build on the strengths of markets to prevent possible negative effects, and will be essential reading for all those involved in the fight against world hunger. Published with World Food Programme

Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Environmental Sciences, grade: 1,3, Cologne University of Applied Sciences (The present paper evaluates the two approaches Fome Zero and Oportunidades of Brazil and Mexico as strategies to improve food security. The analysis shows that various significant differences but also similarities exist in the structures of both countries), language: English, abstract: The present paper evaluates the two approaches Fome Zero and Oportunidades of Brazil and Mexico as strategies to improve food security. The analysis shows that various significant differences but also similarities exist in the structures of both countries. The Brazilian strategy, which was established in 2003, achieved exemplary good results in the fight against hunger and poverty because the food security strategy combines structural with emergency policies and includes various approaches in order to strengthen rural development. The extensive inclusion of family farmers for the supply of the national food demand keeps Brazil relatively independent from food imports and prevents the direct transmission of extreme international price fluctuations of essential food items to low-income households. The good result in poverty alleviation in Brazil caused a significant strengthening of the people’s purchasing power and thus provoked an economic growth in recent years which exceeds the capacities of the prevailing infrastructure and leads to a high demand of natural resources. This current situation provokes an unsustainable development. Mexico’s joining of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 confronted millions of farmers with cheap, subsidized corn which is imported from the United States. This situation weakened the agricultural food production in Mexico and caused a dependency on international food products. Extreme price shocks provoked a considerable increase in national poverty rates in recent years, especially among rural farmers. The government’s efforts in poverty alleviation by the establishment of the Targeted and Conditional Cash Transfer Program (TCCTP) Oportunidades in 1997 are insufficient, because this strategy principally suppresses the consequences of poverty but does not counteract its most important reasons. Additionally, in Mexico, overweight is not recognized in a sufficient manner as part of food insecurity. Furthermore, the country shows fundamental deficiencies in rural development and in the provision of adequate infrastructure. Finally, the country lacks of exit strategies and thus prevents low-income families from getting out of poverty. In the end, within this paper a framework of eight essential steps of a food security strategy was elaborated, which is considered not to be country-specific and therefore be useful on an international level.

... Reports on global and national efforts to reach the goal set by the 1996 World Food Summit: to reduce by half the number of undernourished people in the world by the year 2015 ... [It addresses] three questions: Who are the food-insecure? Where are they located? Why are they food-insecure? -- p. ii.

The Quest to End World Hunger explores the crisis of world hunger and the people and organizations that are working to eliminate the problem. This title also focuses on people who have been helped, the progress that has already been made, and the challenges still left to be met. The young reader analyzes the stories and develops his or her own opinion of what can be done to solve the world hunger crisis. The book has been developed to address many of the Common Core specific goals, higher level thinking skills, and progressive learning strategies from informational texts for middle grade and junior high level students.