Tag Archives : food security

Water scarcity has ceased to be a desertification issue in dry regions. The phenomena of climate change and global warming have now come into consideration. Arching over these serious problems are the twin realities of food shortage and hunger. All these are connected to the most basic problem of water shortage. Scott James in blue living ideas reports [...]

TIME has picked its choices for best inventions of 2009. Those that got the votes range from best new gadgets to best new breakthrough ideas of the year. Here are some: The breeding population of the highly migratory southern bluefin tuna has dipped to more than 90 percent since the 1950s. It seemed that the southern bluefin tuna, prized for its ‘buttery [...]

Bill Gates reveals that the debate and conflict over GM foods are threatening the efforts of The Gates Foundation in its attempt to end world hunger. ‘An “ideological wedge” threatens his global effort to help farmers.’ Over the recent years, The Gates Foundation has been ‘helping alleviate hunger and poverty by giving small farmers [...]

The problem of food insecurity affects the world’s small-scale farms and rural areas the most. This is because these places are also where ‘70 percent of the world’s hungry live and work.’ As the world commemorates World Food Day on October 16, some depressing statistics confront the governments of the world: an estimated increase of 105 [...]

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) has developed an index of economic shock and food entitled ‘Economic Shock and Hunger Index.’ Based on a study of the five countries of Armenia, Bangladesh, Ghana, Zambia, and Nicaragua, the responses of households reveal a rather similar pattern: reduction in the number of meals, option for cheaper but [...]

In 2006, Beijing signed agreements on agricultural cooperation with several African countries that led to the installation of 14 farms in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Tanzania. By 2010, there will be one million Chinese peasants in Africa. The official goal: to help host countries increase production through Chinese technologies. The hybrid varieties [...]

There was a time when the Saudi kingdom made food a national cause in spite of unfavorable natural conditions. In the three decades between 1971 and 2000, thanks to a policy of irrigation supported by public funds, agricultural land rose from 0.4 to 1.6 million hectares, with concentration in the provinces of Hail and Qassim which are north of Riyadh, [...]

Malnutrition in the world is progressing. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), more than one billion people will suffer from malnutrition in 2009, against 963 million at the end of 2008. There would be a need for 30 billion euros per year to fight hunger and boost family agriculture. Just a year ago, images of food [...]

Ubiquitous in the African landscape, sorghum is a grass that is native to Africa and feeds millions of people in the continent. Recently, scientists from Rutgers University have described the genome of the ‘ Sorghum bicolor,’ and say that they have opened up new possibilities by which to exploit the potential of the plant as both food and [...]

Crop diversity is at an all time low. When farmers and growers favor planting a high-yield crop variety, they also irreversibly killed off the other species of that crop. This form of farming, long been a practice in commercial farm production, eventually led to the loss of agricultural sustainability all over the world. Potato and rice, for example, [...]