hunger

Three U.N. agencies said war and a collapsing economy have put 100,000 people at risk of starvation in South Sudan. An additional 1 million are on the brink of starvation, said the agencies, which warned, "The total number of food insecure people is expected to rise to 5.5 million at the height of the lean season in July if nothing is done to curb the severity and spread of the food crisis."

Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern says he will employ six priorities as the House Agriculture Committee works on food stamps as part of the 2018 farm bill, beginning with "benefits should not be cut" and the monthly benefit of $126 "is inadequate." The lead Democrat on the nutrition subcommittee, McGovern released his list of priorities as a rebuttal to a report released in December by the committee chairman, Michael Conaway of Texas.

Corn, sorghum and other cereal grains are selling at record prices in East Africa, where drought has shriveled crops, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. High food prices "are severely constraining food access for large numbers of households with alarming consequences for food insecurity," said an FAO official.

The school breakfast program, an adjunct to the longer-established school lunch and school milk programs, is reaching a growing number of low-income children — 12.1 million daily during the 2015-16 school year — says a report from an anti-hunger group.

After food shortages turned to street violence, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro gave control of the country’s food supply to the military. Now soldiers are making money off of the hungry, the AP says.

Hunger experts at an FAO meeting in Rome said that if women farmers had the same access as men to land, tools, and credit, crop yields would rise by at least a third and there would be 150 million fewer hungry people in the world, Reuters reports.

The antihunger community asked President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to protect public nutrition programs, from food stamps and school lunch to commodity donation programs.

With record numbers of tourists traveling to Cuba, including from the U.S., visitors are eating more than their fair share of the island's food, says The New York Times. Onions, green peppers, garlic and avocados — staples of the local diet — are now scarce, since they’ve largely been sold to privately-owned restaurants on the island that serve tourists.

“About a third of the world's soils are degraded because of soil erosion, contamination, urbanization and other issues,” but planting pulses like lentils and chickpeas could help, says Reuters, quoting a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization report.

Some 10.5 million households lack the money or other resources to have an adequate food supply, says a Census Bureau housing survey that included questions about food security for the first time. Renters were three times more likely than homeowners to be food insecure.

After three years of drought and crop failures, nearly 850,000 people in Madagascar are experiencing alarming levels of hunger, with 330,000 of them on the brink of famine, says the Guardian. The outlet reported huge funding shortfalls for hunger relief work in seven countries across southern Africa.

Crop production in the Philippines will drop by 1.7 percent and put an additional 2 million people at risk of hunger due to climate change, "particularly troublesome in light of the Philippines' growing population," forecast to reach 142 million by 2045, said the think tank International Food Policy Research Institute. "Research also shows that effective policies can reduce those impacts."

An annual report on global agriculture says productivity growth is stagnating in low-income countries at 1.3 percent, far below the 1.75-percent increase needed yearly to assure enough food and fiber for a world population forecast to be 9.7 billion in 2050. The Global Harvest Initiative, a coalition of agribusinesses and consulting groups, says the productivity rate is growing at 1.73 percent worldwide currently, the third year in a row that it has run below the target.

Two-thirds of the cropland in the Gaza Strip has been damaged by shelling, razing, and vehicle traffic since armed conflict began a year ago in the territory, said two UN agencies. The escalating agricultural damage exacerbated a food shortage, said the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN Satellite Center.