MADRID, Mar 3 2023 (IPS)* – The data is shocking: three-quarters of African Governments have already reduced their agricultural budgets while paying almost double that on arms.
Chronic underinvestment in agriculture is a key cause of the widespread hunger experienced in 2022, according to Oxfam report. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS.
Africa is home to a quarter of the world’s entire agricultural land. Nevertheless, in the 12 months that African leaders vowed to improve food security in the continent, over 20 million more people have been pushed into “severe hunger.”
(UN NEWS)* — The number of children worldwide without access to social protection continues to rise, putting them at risk of poverty, hunger and discrimination, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in a report published on Wednesday [].
Between 2016 and 2020, an additional 50 million boys and girls aged 15 and under missed out on child benefits, driving up the total to 1.46 billion globally.
Increased risk of hardship
Child and family benefit coverage rates either fell or stagnated in every region of the world during this period, according to the report.
For example, Latin America and the Caribbean saw coverage decline significantly, from roughly 51 per cent to 42 per cent, whereas rates remained around 21 per cent in Central and Southern Asia.
MADRID, Mar 1 2023 (IPS)* – Wildlife is indeed far much more than a safari or an ‘exotic’ ornament: as many as four billion people –or an entire half the whole world’s population– rely on wild species for income, food, medicines and wood fuel for cooking.
A million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, we have lost half of the world’s corals and lose forest areas the size of 27 football fields every minute, finds WWF report. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS
In spite of that, one million species of plants and animals are already facing extinction due to the voracious profit-making, over-exploitative, illegal trade and the relentless depletion of the variety of life on Planet Earth.
MADRID, Feb 23 2023 (IPS)* – While the world’s biggest powers and their giant private corporations continue to attach high priority to their military –and commercial– dominance, both of them being shockingly profitable, entire generations are being lost to deadly armed conflicts, devastating climate catastrophes, diseases, hunger and more imposed impoverishment.
In Nigeria’s Northeast the number of children suffering from acute malnutrition is projected to increase to two million in 2023. Credit: UNOCHA/Christina Powell.
Part Iof this series of two articles focussed on the unprecedented suffering of the most innocent and helpless human beings – children– in 11 countries. But there are many more.
According to the UN Children Fund (UNICEF), hundreds of thousands of children continue to pay the highest price of a mixture of man-made brutalities, with their lives, apart from the unfolding proxy war in Ukraine, and the not yet final account of victims of the Türkiye and Syria earthquakes, which are forcing children to sleep in the streets under the rumble, amid the chilling cold.
MADRID, Feb 10 2023 (IPS)* – The food industry continues to intensively use toxic chemicals in their products, some of them provoking heart diseases and death. Trans fat is just one of them, adding to contaminating fertilisers, pesticides, microplastics and a long etcetera.
Industrially produced trans fat is responsible for up to 500,000 premature deaths from coronary heart disease each year, according to WHO. Credit: Shutterstock.
“Trans fat is a toxic chemical that kills, and should have no place in food,” warns Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), informing that trans fat has no known benefits, and substantial health risks that incur enormous costs for health systems. “Put simply, trans fat is a toxic chemical that kills, and should have no place in food.”
Humans are capable of great compassion and unselfishness. Mothers and fathers make many sacrifices for the sake of their families. Kind teachers help us through childhood, and show us the right path. Doctors and nurses devote themselves to the welfare of their patients.
Sadly there is another, side to human nature, a darker side. Human history is stained with the blood of wars and genocides. Today, this dark, aggressive side of human nature threatens to plunge our civilization into an all-destroying thermonuclear war.
Humans often exhibit kindness to those who are closest to themselves, to their families and friends, to their own social group or nation. By contrast, the terrible aggression seen in wars and genocides is directed towards outsiders.
Human nature seems to exhibit what might be called “tribalism”: altruism towards one’s own group; aggression towards outsiders. Today this tendency towards tribalism threatens both human civilization and the biosphere.
(UN News)* — Activists working with sea-rescue charities in Italy should not be criminalized, a UN independent human rights expert said on Thursday [], ahead of a trial against crew members from several non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
IOM/Francesco Malavolta (file) | Migrants from the Mediterranean are rescued in the Channel of Sicily, Italy (file).
Preliminary criminal proceedings opened last May in Sicily against 21 people charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigration in connection with several search-and-rescue missions conducted between 2016 and 2017.
Those accused include four crew members of the Iuventa, a former fishing trawler credited with saving some 14,000 migrant lives in the Mediterranean Sea, and human rights activists from other civilian vessels.
Bangkok, 14 Januray 2023 (FAO)* – Asia’s cities are growing at such a fast pace that nearly 55 percent of the region’s enormous population is expected to reside in urban areas by 2030, and that will have equally enormous consequences for urban food security and nutrition, according to the main findings of a new report by four United Nations agencies.
MADRID, Jan 25 2023 (IPS)* – Gone are those times when catastrophes were measured in terms of human suffering. Now, with an exception: Ukrainians victims of the Russian invasion, everything is calculated in just money.
Billionaire wealth surged in 2022 with rapidly rising food and energy profits. The report shows that 95 food and energy corporations have more than doubled their profits in 2022. Credit: Clae
Following such a solid trend, major financial, business-oriented institutions, like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank, are now devoted to calculating if and how big the recession will be, ergo, how much money could be won or lost due, of course, to the Ukrainian proxy war.
They, likewise the establishment’s politicians and media, just talk about inflation, stagflation, economic (read financial) slowdown and commerce.
WFP’s school feeding programme has been a lifeline for many young Afghans, especially girls, who face shrinking opportunities growing up.
Afghanistan schoolgirl Hazra, 11, enjoys WFP’s energy-packed biscuits. She hopes to becomes a doctor when she grows up. Photo: WFP/Sadeq Naseri
Most school days, 11-year-old Hazra begins class in Chardahi village, in Afghanistan’s eastern Jalalabad province, on an empty stomach.
“Sometimes I have tea and some bread for breakfast, but most days I come to school without eating anything,” says the sixth-grade schoolgirl, who wears a white headscarf and long dark robe, like her fellow classmates.
“I am hungry,” she adds, “and it is difficult for me to concentrate on what the teacher says when I have eaten nothing.”
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 