FAO Calls for Local Food Production to Stave Off Famine

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization demands immediate action to protect the Earth's poor from steep escalations in food prices.. FAO is zeroing in on the need to boost local food production in 37 countries.

Food security is part of the right to life, and it is essential to women's good reproductive health and the healthy prenatal and postnatal development of children. Yet so many of Earth's poor are subject to famine, despite the fact that (at least now, this could change) it is a matter of distribution, not availability.

Historically, too, this has been true of many famines. As a boy, Amartya Sen witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed three million people. As part of his career as a Nobel Prize-winning economist, he researched the causes of this and other past Indian famines. He concluded that the problem was not so much lack of food, but overly high food prices and other preventable, addressable causes--meaning that millions of deaths were wholly unnecessary.

This gets personal for me, too. Some of my ancestors escaped An Gorta Mor, the Great Irish Hunger of the nineteenth century, which drove into exile or killed millions of human beings. Irishers will refer to 1847, the most deadly year of An Gorta Mor, as "Black '47" (that's what it's named for, the New York City band of Larry Kirwan and lawsuit-against-the-BBC-winnin' rapper Chris Byrne, aka Seanchai.)

The potato blight was but one cause of many. In fact, it was simply the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. The English colonizers forced the Irish to devote most of the land to export food, leaving very little land to grow their own food security. Even though political decolonization of the Two-Thirds World was at its height forty and fifty years ago, this economic scenario prevails today in so many impoverished, famine-threatened nations. Small wonder that so many Irishers, like the people of Concern Worldwide, are involved in hunger relief.

In other words, just as there was during these historical catastrophes--there's currently enough food and food production capacity to go around--the richer countries just don't have political or economic will, or enough of it, to ensure that poorer countries are not robbed of what is rightfully theirs. FAO is right to focus on local food production and security.

In part because I have a long memory...the Nonviolent Choice Directory offers numerous resources on Food & Nutrition (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/foodnutrition.html if the link doesn't work) not only for people who wish to get involved in this issue, but for pregnant, breastfeeding, and other humans in need of emergency food assistance; for anyone interested in learning about and promoting the nutritional needs of mothers and children; for anyone interested in the eco-friendlier, often less expensive option of vegetarian diet; and for anyone interested in feasible, practical ways to grow their own food security.

More Food and Nutrition Resources

Many more resources now appear in the Food & Nutrition section of the Nonviolent Choice Directory.

So many more resources that should be there, but aren't yet...Please forgive us if you needed something on this topic or any other and didn't find it. Please email editor@nonviolentchoice.info to let us know what's missing, and we will try to find it for you. Apologies, but that is about all we can do to atone for our shortfalls....Wish we were capable of so much more.....

How to Save 13 Million Lives A Year (Part Two)

In response to the World Health Organization report, I have expanded and improved the Eco-Friendly Living section(direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/ecolife.html) of the Nonviolent Choice Directory. Here you can find dozens of ways that you can foster life-saving environmental changes at every level from the individual and household to the widescale-institutional and global.

It took me a little longer than expected to do this because while rechecking one of the websites--an online listing of animals available for adoption from shelters--I began to think again about whether it was time to add to our household's small flock of guinea pigs. And I found--and adopted!-- a very sweet-natured little fellow. He will be ready to join the two girls (also adopted from a no-kill shelter) once his quarantine is over and he has properly recovered from his neutering surgery. He already contributes copiously to the local good cheer and to the compost bin, just like his pals.

Food: A Basic Human Right, Part of the Right to Life

The United States marked Hunger Awareness Day this week. As much wealth as there is in this country, one in ten Americans suffers from hunger or malnutrition. This reality is part of the urban "food desert" where I have spent much of my life. And in much of the globe, the situation is much worse.

America's Second Harvest is to be commended for having an annual Hunger Awareness Day. It has a good & necessary purpose, to be sure. But those of us who have enough to eat, and nutritious enough things to eat, need to practice hunger awareness every day.

Some ideas:

--Please visit the Food & Nutrition section (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/foodnutrition.html)of the Nonviolent Choice Directory and look at the programs and organizations there to see which ones you can benefit with your gifts of political support, time, money, expertise, or something else.

--Many more prosperous Americans wonder what to do in the situation when individual hungry people directly approach them and ask for some sort of aid. Even people with big hearts are reluctant to give money because they're afraid it will go to support someone's drug habit.

Well, why not offer food? Everybody needs to eat, right? You can do one to all of these things on a regular basis, whenever the occasion calls upon you.

A. Make a habit of carrying some lightweight, nutritious, nonperishable, easily consumed (no cooking, can openers, etc. required) but tasty (to a lot of folks, anyway) foodstuffs around with you--tuck a few bars of something that foots the bill into your purse, backpack, briefcase, whatever. If the person refuses, you can try (C) (but don't be pushy about it).

B. Make a habit of carrying cards, sheets of paper, etc. with the names, addresses, phone numbers, etc. of local food pantries and other helpful agencies on them. You can offer these, too, also some people will already know the resources. But you never know when someone will need and want the information.

C. Take the person to a nearby grocery store or restaurant so he or she can choose food s/he wants and likes and you can be right there to pay for it. Just because someone is poor and hungry, doesn't mean they are required to be Properly Grateful About and Unquestioningly Accept anything at all a richer person offers them.

D. Often another valuable gift you can offer is a listening ear. As in any other human encounter, that doesn't mean you have to believe everything you hear. But basic human kindness is quite distinct from being a dupe!


Food is part of the right to life. And we all need to fight for this part of the right to life (as well as all other parts) on every level from the individual to the global, for those who are born as well as those who are unborn.