Agriculture & Nutrition

In Memoriam: The US Famine Early Warning System, Known as FEWS, as well as SERVIR
The program which many experts considered to be the most effective at stopping famines and starvation and arguably the single most valuable aid program of all time, has ended its 40 year run of success, as the White House shut it down, alongside hundreds of other global initiatives, without review, ...

Questions to Ask about Aid from USAID
The US Government Agency that Brings Aid - USAID USAID, started in 1961 under President John F. Kennedy. Estimates are that some 3 billion people in 150 countries have benefited directly from U.S. food assistance . The Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, a part of USAID, identifies fo...

USAID Adds Value in Disaster Response, Says Former Hunger Notes Chair
Opinion piece from the former WHES Board Chair: Most people do not realize what a huge mistake it would be to eliminate the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), as appears to be underway here in February 2025. It would be like throwing the prove...

Hunger Notes’ New Fact Sheet about Famine
WHES researched this new fact sheet about famine: https://www.worldhunger.org/famine-fact-sheet-dec-2024/...

Regenerative Agriculture to Mitigate Hunger: Thurow’s Latest Book
Book Review: Roger Thurow’s Against the Grain: How Farmers Around the Globe are Transforming Agriculture to Nourish the World and Health the Planet (2024, Publisher: Agate Surrey) American journalist, Roger Thurow, has written consistently about global hunger...

Past World Hunger Prize Winners
Thirteen winners of the World Hunger Prize issued an appeal on October 30, 2024 at the Borlaug Dialogue gathering in Des Moines, Iowa. The annual gathering, this year from October 29-31, showcased over 50 speakers from around the world, including the 2024 World Food Prize winners Dr. Geoffrey ...

Why Nations Fail, Famine and the Nobel Prize
The 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded in October to the authors Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson in part for the analysis of international inequalities in their best-selling 2012 book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (Crown Publishers), which arr...

Book Classic: Famine, Conflict and Response by Fred Cuny
Book Classic: Famine, Conflict and Response: a Basic Guide By Fred Cuny, with Rick Hill (West Hartford, CN: Kumarian Press 1999) This basic, extremely readable text about famine prevention and relief remains a preferred textb...

BOOK REVIEW: The Enduring Struggle: The History of the U.S. Agency for International Development and America’s Uneasy Transformation of the World
BOOK REVIEW: The Enduring Struggle: The History of the U.S. Agency for International Development and America’s Uneasy Transformation of the World, by John Norris. 2021. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publisher. America's primary international assista...

USDA Improving nutrition standards for school meals
The Washington Post recently reported that the USDA has announced new, more stringent, national nutrition standards for its school feeding program. This program reaches 30 million students at 100,000 schools nationwide. The new standards propose to lower sugars, fat and salt, while in...