Food Security
EU agencies promote Aquaculture to fight against hunger in poor countries
An international initiative to create awareness on the role of aquaculture in food security in poor countries has been launched; the program will bring...
African Farmers are Desperate for Change
The use of GM (genetically modified) food crops is a highly emotive issue. What should influence the debate between those who support these developments...
Silence over Ethiopian land grab broken
A Saudi Arabian investor has broken the culture of silence surrounding a widely criticized farmland acquisition by foreign investors in Ethiopia, which had hitherto...
Africa: Unlocking the Economic Potential of Biotechnology
By 2050 population growth is expected to translate into a 70 percent increase in global demand for food. Add the estimated 27 percent...
Ethiopia’s grain market in danger?
A yellow wheat rust epidemic, a form of wheat fungus, is devouring crops in three major wheat-growing regional states of Ethiopia. Nonetheless, a grain...
Zimbabwe to suffer food shortages ahead of elections
Non-governmental organizations, which have for the past decade been saviors for starving Zimbabweans, now face a ban on their operations in the build up...
Cameroon suffers huge shortages in essential commodities
After gas and fish, sugar seems to have disappeared from Cameroonian shelves. The depletion of stocks and as well as the absence of essential...
Egypt’s conundrum over food security and the Nile’s water
Russia's decision this year to halt wheat exports has dealt Egypt a severe blow and brought many questions to the fore. Egypt’s population explosion...
Sweet treats and Sport: It’s all a matter of managing intake
A chocolate bar, a sweet pastry, cakes or savoury snacks … Athletes too are entitled to an occasional treat! Providing of course that they...
Maputo riots blamed on rising wheat prices in Southern Africa
Food riots in Maputo, Mozambique on Wednesday left at least six protesters dead including a female student as police sprayed bullets at demonstrators.
Reports from...
Ethiopian government reveals another ambitious economic plan
Ethiopia’s latest five year development strategy will see the laying of a 2,000 kilometer railway network as well as the construction of a huge...
Uganda’s remote drought-affected Karamoja region gets U.S. help
The United States Government has donated US$ 4.8million towards the
emergency relief operation of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in the drought-affected...
Ethiopian asceticism from India: Could this be the way out?
The last of my three part series deals with asceticism as practiced in India, especially after Yogi Prahlad Jani's 70 year fast. It holds...
Zimbabwe child food security dips
United Nations Food and Nutrition Council has said more than a third of Zimbabwe’s children aged below five are malnourished while 12 000 in...
Worldwide hunger on the rise
Hunger numbers are rising as the developing world continues to deal with the compounding effects of a global financial crisis and a global food...
U.S. – Ghana: The biofuel scam
US Department of Agriculture figures reveal that a quarter of US cereals grown in 2009 went to biofuel, turning cheap food into expensive fuel....
Zimbabweans: Why they Starve
Robert Mugabe’s brutal thirty year-old reign in Zimbabwe, compounded by a frenzied ten-year mutilation of property rights is once again on the cover page...
Sudan: 150 000 homes to get FAO seeds
Some 150,000 households in southern Sudan are to soon get seeds from the
Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
This has been revealed by Food and Agricultural...
An Ethiopian revolution and a national green hero
Gashaw Tahir was shocked when he returned to his native Ethiopia after living overseas and saw how the land had been degraded, as well...
Land grabs in Africa: “The stakes are huge”
The sale or lease of millions of hectares of African farmland to foreigners in recent years has set alarm bells ringing on and off...
Food could become scarce by 2050
By 2050, global food production will have to double from current levels to keep up with a hungry world, but the delicately balanced ecosystem...
US-Senegal: MCC to bring Senegal a step closer to greater food security
The board of directors of the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), chaired by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, approved a five-year, $540 million...
Top Ethiopian food scientist to be awarded World Food Prize
An acclaimed plant breeder and geneticist who was born and grew up in rural Ethiopia has won the 2009 World Food Prize for his...
Zimbabwe still in dire straits
The international humanitarian community's most important tool for raising resources for action in Zimbabwe, the Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP), is out of date and...
Nigeria’s tug of war with genetically modified foods
The plan by an American based biotechnology company to assist with the genetic modification of Nigeria's cassava into what has been termed "Super Cassava"...
Haiti: A mud eating population warns the world
At a corner street in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, a sweets vendor takes 5 cents from a schoolgirl and hands her what looks like a...
Egypt: Wrecking havoc through good intentions
The northern Egyptian governorate of Kafr Al-Sheikh is planning to establish fish farms in northern parts of Lake Burullus, but a local NGO says...
Ethiopia scores higher than expected in food security
The number of Ethiopians who will require humanitarian assistance in the next six months has dropped, mainly due to recent food harvests, an official...
EU’s move that could seal an already murky African fate
The EU plans to save its citizens from a hypothetical threat by banning a
fifth of pesticides, creating a real threat to crop yields, food...
Report forsees continuous famine trend in parts of Ethiopia
Ethiopia's famine appears set to continue into 2009 following a failed harvest this year, further worsened by the recent flooding of key agriculturally-productive regions...