Author: WHES

he Vatican will be hosting a first of its kind conference next week to reexamine the Catholic church’s long-held teachings on just war theory, bringing some 80 experts engaged in global nonviolent struggles to Rome with the aim of developing a new moral framework that rejects ethical justifications for war.

Global water resource security poses a serious threat to the world’s population, even before we even factor in the effects of climate change. The global water consumption rate is double the rate of population increase. Demand is expected to outstrip supply by more than 50 percent by 2025, leaving 1.8 billion people in water scarce conditions. This trend has been driven chiefly by unsustainable agricultural water extraction, especially non-renewable groundwater pumping and flood irrigation, as well as increasing urbanization, as city living is associated with higher per capita water consumption.

This year is an important one for food security and nutrition. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were launched on January 1, 2016—which means that 193 countries are now working towards ending hunger, ensuring food security for everyone, and eliminating all forms of malnutrition by 2030. But what will it take to get there? Now is the time to take stock of what is working and what more needs to be done to achieve these goals

An important new report makes clear the principal cause of the water crisis in Flint, Mich.: the state government’s blatant disregard for the lives and health of poor and black residents of a distressed city.

Where rights are at stake, immediate action is required. Those who continue to uphold the existing, highly skewed international economic and financial order delay the realization of human rights by many decades, thereby becoming responsible for hundreds of millions of poverty-related deaths in the meantime.

The 2014 Africa Progress Panel report presents the two faces of Africa: robust economic growth and continuing poverty. But the report suggests Africa could change this duality by asking: how can resources make a positive impact on development? While impressive headline growth figures are reported, incomes do not trickle down to improve livelihoods of the majority of the population.

This month, 600 women gathered under a huge blue-and-yellow-striped tent in Baripada, a small city in Odisha, a state in India’s east. They were among India’s most neglected people. Widowed, abandoned or divorced, many had ended up living like servants in the households of their fathers, brothers or in-laws.

In fall 2011, in an act of what can be described only as hubris, I had the bright idea of teaching a course on the farm bill.For nearly 25 years, I had been writing and teaching about food politics and policy at New York University, and I knew that the farm bill dictated not only agricultural policy, but also such things as international food aid and feeding the hungry in America. It had to be one of the most important laws affecting food systems—if you care about such matters, likely the most important. With the 2008 farm bill up for renewal, I wanted to know more about it, and professor that I am, I thought: What better way to learn something than to teach it?

As Ethiopia faces its worst drought in 50 years, some of the ten million people in need of food, and the 400,000 children suffering from malnutrition, reside in the slums of Addis Ababa. Increasingly the face of hunger is in a slum or city. While it is important to fight hunger and malnutrition in rural areas, we must not forget to address food insecurity in growing cities.