July 29th, 2009 | by Coco McCabe
Ethiopian children play in the village of Gutu Dobi where some members of the community were surviving on just one meal a day. Photo by Sarah Livingston/Oxfam America
Months in the making, a story-gathering trip to Ethiopia that I’ve been planning is finally coming together. I fly out on Thursday. I’ll be visiting with farmers, often rain-parched, in the far north and herders in the south who have been struggling to overcome a drought and food crisis that left 13.5 million Ethiopians dependent on aid for survival last year. That’s close to 18 percent of the entire country of 77 million people. And news is now trickling in that the UN has just allocated $6 million from an emergency fund to address a new spike in hunger that could leave 6.2 million Ethiopians needing food aid in the coming weeks. Poor rains from mid-February to mid-May are part of the problem. Read the rest of this entry »
November 12th, 2008 | by Andrea Perera
At home in Zimbabwe, Lillian Pedzisa holds her grandson; her sons Tendai, 19, and Dennis, 17, prepare to cook maize. Photo by: Annie Bungeroth/Oxfam.
The New York Times reports that the food crisis is worsening in Zimbabwe where in “the hardest-hit communities, people are surviving on one meal a day and trading their cows for buckets of maize, the main staple food.” Read more about the crisis.
October 27th, 2008 | by Anna Kramer
Family members share a meal in a house where village residents are hosting refugees from the Casamance, in the village of Janack in the Gambia. Photo: Rebecca Blackwell / Oxfam America
There are a lot of problems facing our next president, none of them simple. Watching all the rhetoric flying around, I keep thinking that words only mean so much; whoever wins this election better be able to come up with some nuts-and-bolts solutions.
But here’s one issue we haven’t heard much about, yet would be relatively straightforward to tackle: the global food crisis.
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October 8th, 2008 | by Andrea Perera
Earlier this week, my boss, Jane, walked into the office carrying a big basket of pears. Picked from her tree and lovingly wrapped in orange towels — like babies in a Moses basket — they were small and a little dark. They reminded me of the food you get from a local farm, not quite as shiny and unblemished as the stuff in the grocery aisles, but better-tasting, perhaps, thanks to all that character.
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