food insecurity

Nearly half of the farm workers in Yolo County, California, face food insecurity, three times the rate of farm workers in the rest of California and in the United States, says a new report out by the California Institute for Rural Studies (CIRS).

In a report released in conjunction with its annual meeting, the Word Bank lists three related food challenges - hunger, obesity and deficiencies in vitamin and mineral intake. "Despite significant progress, 795 million people still are not getting the minimum dietary energy needs," said the report.

The cost of the food stamp program, the premiere U.S. anti-hunger program, is falling in tandem with the enrollment, says the think tank Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

"Extreme poverty, child mortality, and hunger all fell by around half between 1990 and 2015," thanks to the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2000, says the International Food Policy Research Institute in its 2016 Global Food Policy Report.

Nearly a quarter of the population of South Sudan, some 2.8 million people, urgently needs food assistance "and at least 40,000 people are on the brink of catastrophe," say three UN agencies.

Traditional studies may be underestimating the impact of climate change on agriculture, because they don’t take into account “farmers’ reactions to climate shocks,” says a new study in Nature Climate Change.

Yemen is "a forgotten crisis," says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which says the number of food-insecure people has grown 12 percent in the past six months due to armed conflict and restrictions on food imports.

The climate-change deal signed in Paris "is a game-changer" for the 800 million hungry people in the world, because it is the first global agreement to give priority to food security, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Fifty million Americans, including 15 million children, live in food-insecure households, meaning that from time to time they lack the resources to buy enough food. The "absence of food security in the U.S. carries enormous healthcare costs, more than $160 billion in 2014," says In These Times, pointing to the 2016 Hunger Report from Bread for the World Institute.

Because of the effects of "this pervasive problem,” the American Academy of Pediatrics is advising its 64,000 members to screen children for food insecurity and to familiarize themselves with community resources that could help the children. Doctors also are encouraged to speak speak in support of local and federal programs that provide nutritious food.

The U.S. intelligence community says the overall risk of food insecurity will rise during the next decade in many countries "of strategic importance to the United States" because of disruption in local food supplies, lower purchasing power and counter-productive government policies. "In some countries, declining food security will almost certainly contribute to social disruptions and political instability," said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Hunger levels in 52 countries are "serious" or "alarming" despite progress in reducing food insecurity around the world, says the new edition of the Global Hunger Index. "The countries with the highest and worst GHI scores tend to be those engaged in or recently emerged from war," says the report by International Food Policy Research Institute, Welthungerhilfe, and Concern Worldwide. An unheralded achievement of recent decades, says the report, is the seeming disappearance of "calamitous famines" that kill more than 1 million people.

The University of Kentucky will establish a Rural Child Poverty Nutrition Center to help local groups find ways to coordinate nutrition programs and reduce food insecurity among children in rural areas.

Rampant hunger is appearing in Liberia, one of the west African nations hit by ebola, says Mother Jones magazine. It cites a spot check by Mercy Corps, a charity, of three parts of the country heavily affected by the disease.