May 26th, 2009 | by Guest blogger
Many US farmworkers—like these North Carolina tobacco pickers—face low pay and hazardous working conditions, but a new bill called AgJOBS could help improve their situation. Photo: Liliana Rodriguez / Oxfam America
Sarah Zipkin is the project officer for Oxfam’s decent work program in the US. This is the second of two guest posts by Sarah about food, farms, and what it means to support workers’ rights in 2009.
Less than a week after I marched for workers in North Carolina–complete with tobacco leaf sign around my neck–I was back in Boston representing Oxfam at a pre-release screening of Food, Inc, a film opening soon that takes a disturbing look at the mechanized food industry in this country, from field to fork.
As I watched it, I was glad I’d eaten a veggie pizza beforehand, since I learned that a lot of our meat comes from mechanized slaughterhouses–often the site of inhumane conditions and questionable practices. I am already obsessed with looking over labels in the grocery store, but since seeing this film, I’m even more fixated. Now that I’ve actually started thinking about where our food comes from, I can’t help but wonder: what dark secrets hide behind those colorful packages?
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December 17th, 2008 | by Anna Kramer
Maleka Khatun sits in the doorway of her home near Kurigam, Bangladesh. Though Khatun said she completed her cooking an hour ago, there was too little left for her after her husband and children had eaten. She feared that this might be her family’s only meal that day. Photo: Oxfam
OK, so you know the global food crisis is affecting millions. But did you know that the crisis affects women even more than men?
That’s the subject of a recent brief by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Helping Women Respond to the Global Food Price Crisis. According to IFPRI,
Higher food prices increase the burden for women, who must stretch the limited food budget even further. Women often end up being the shock absorbers of household food security, reducing their own consumption to leave more food for other household members. In Bangladesh, even before the crisis, almost 60 percent of households reported that women skip meals more often than men.
As food prices rise and staples consume more of the food expenditures, households frequently cut back on both food quantity (caloric intake) and quality (dietary diversity), which provides micronutrients that girls and women particularly need…
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November 26th, 2008 | by Zeenat Potia
Right on the verge of the holiday gorging season, I’ve gotten a glimpse of what it means to be hungry.
It all began with a knee injury earlier this year. Deprived of my usual stress busters–running and yoga—I took to filling that extra time with food. So a few weeks ago, I decided to embark on a “cleanse.” Based on a book called If the Buddha Came to Dinner, the cleanse prescribed a restricted diet as a means of transformational nourishment: renewed energy; healthy eating; and clarity of mind, body, and spirit.
No matter how much and how often I ate, the first five days—when you can eat only fruit and vegetables—were tough. Caffeine withdrawal gave me headaches and nausea. Instead of my old friends, sugar and wheat, I had to turn to kale and beets. My dreams of chocolate croissants remained unfulfilled. Slowly, I began to get into the groove, but I was always hungry.
One Sunday, on a walk through the vast, tree-filled Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, I came upon a couple sitting on a blanket unwrapping sandwiches. My heart skipped a beat: Was that bread? Indeed, I saw olive bread glistening in the sun. Bits of juicy avocado. Potato chips…
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October 31st, 2008 | by Chris Hufstader
An improved irrigation system in Shasha Korke is a significant improvement for a modest investment. (Photo by Petterik Wiggers/Oxfam America)
When I visited Shasha Korke in Ethiopia a few months ago, I had what I call a good Oxfam Day. A good Oxfam day is when I get to meet people and organizations that take a little help from Oxfam and achieve something positive. It doesn’t mean that everything is perfect now, but there is a significant improvement and people feel good about what they have done. And they can show that when they work together, they can accomplish something important.
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October 15th, 2008 | by Coco McCabe
At a camp for displaced people in Democratic Republic of Congo, sacks of grain and jugs of oil await distribution. Photo by Liz Lucas for Oxfam America
I’m on the road doing some reporting and woke this morning still full from a late supper last night: a hefty hamburger, a heap of greasy fries, and a crisp, green salad. Lord knows how many calories I packed away. That’s not the kind of thing I usually think about. But I did this morning when I opened an e-mail from my colleague Ian Mashingaidze in South Africa.
It included a link to a report just issued by the International Food Policy Research Institute: an index measuring the state of hunger globally. It ranks countries using three indicators. One of them is the proportion of people who are calorie deficient, or undernourished.
Called the 2008 Global Hunger Index, it is not a snapshot of what’s happening this moment because its most recent data is from 2006. It does not reflect the current wild gyration in food prices and what that means for the ability of families to feed themselves. But the index does paint a picture of how bad things were for many people—before they began to get worse.
And this is what got me: In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 74 percent of the population is calorie deficient. Basically, that means three-quarters of the Congolese people are undernourished.
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July 7th, 2008 | by Guest blogger
Katie Taft is the regional communications officer for Oxfam America in its East Asia office in Phnom Penh. Here is her account about one way to predict the size of a harvest.
Groundhog Day is the one holiday when Americans put their faith into a small furry creature to tell them if winter will last six more weeks, or if they will finally see the sunshine melt the snow away. But we all know that it is only a bit of superstitious fun.
I am thinking of this holiday as I push my way through throngs of schoolchildren waving small Cambodian flags and holding plastic flowers to cheer on the sacred cows that are making their way a second time around the Royal Palace lawn. Read the rest of this entry »
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