Agriculture & Nutrition

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...

Humanitarian agencies advocate for simplified treatment of severe malnutrition
Thirteen aid agencies have signed a letter to Samantha Power, the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), advocating a simplified treatment for wasting (severe acute malnutrition). These agencies propose five steps to fight severe malnutrition glo...

What If the world went to a plant based diet?
In this BBC article, Rachel Nuwer looks at the what might happen if the world suddenly went to a plant-based diet. Although according to a computer model, there would be a 70% decrease in emissions - good for the climate; the economic consequence would be hard on those already in poor areas. T...

Niger and Sahel use Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration Increase Yields to Improve Food Security
As described in this recent National Geographic article (see link below), farmers in Niger let cut trees regrow in their fields, leading to improved crop yields from retained soil moisture and fertilization by fallen leaves. Improved crop yields can improve food security. Over the past 35 years N...