Tag Archives: hunger

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Bengal Famine in India and the less well-known Henan Famine in China, which together killed around 3 million people in Asia’s two most populous countries. Historical memory in India will not easily forget the callousness of Winston Churchill, who declined to intervene in what was then British India to save lives so …

Although awareness of food insecurity is growing, it is important to understand what is meant by the term and how it fits with other food access concepts, such as hunger and food sovereignty.

Ignoring hunger and malnutrition will have significant costs to any country’s development. Nutrition improvement has both intrinsic and instrumental value.

Despite being a middle-income country, South Africa has a long and shameful history of those in power ignoring the needs and the interests of the majority. Colonial and subsequent Apartheid laws reduced black people in South Africa to merely being cheap labor to service the needs of these economies. Poverty, inequality and hunger, while visible in the faces and cupped hands of people at traffic lights in middle-class neighborhoods, largely continue to be felt most in townships, informal settlements and rural areas which are often located far away from economic and suburban hubs.

Recent studies reveal rising inflation and unemployment creating high misery for people. Fueled by these adverse reports, food insecurity, poverty and malnutrition problems had again momentarily hit national headlines, as they periodically do before being quickly displaced by political scandals.   Measuring these problems in Pakistan is made difficult by competing concepts, definitions and measurement approaches. Food security represents “regular …

  Would you believe that the nation’s cabinet has approved an executive order defining food as a legal right? No, not our nation. India has taken this bold step. Malnourishment afflicts 42 percent of Indian children, and part of their government’s response to this entrenched problem is defining efforts to end hunger as more than a welfare challenge. Here in …

UPA2 regime’s flagship program on the ‘right to food’ is slated to create more problems than it will solve, once it kicks off across the country. A creaky public distribution system and the weak economy will not be able to sustain the scheme In 2009, the UPA2 Government led by the Indian National Congress promised this country pro-people policies — …