November 5th, 2009 | by Coco McCabe
Medhin Reda depends on rain to water her fields of teff and corn. Erratic weather has a profound impact on the well-being of her family. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America
Climate talks in Copenhagen are just a few weeks away. Here at my desk in Boston, I’m hearing a growing urgency in the pitches from campaigners who have been working long and hard to get the United States and the European Union to own up to their responsibility for the future that is facing us all.
But what I hear louder, still, are the voices of the people I met in Ethiopia in August for whom changing weather patterns and increased cycles of drought mean failed crops, skipped meals, and deeper poverty. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
July 10th, 2009 | by Guest blogger
Families in the Honduran community of Copan used to survive on two or three small meals a day, but with support from Oxfam and a local partner organization, they now grow a wide variety of nutritious vegetables. Photo: Gilvan Barreto / Oxfam
Gawain Kripke is Oxfam America’s policy director focusing on hunger and food issues. At the G8 summit he’s lobbying government officials and talking to journalists to keep the pressure for action.
Newsflash: G8 and other countries commit to $20 billion over three years for agriculture development. This is $5 billion more than expected and came from “arm twisting” in the last few hours.
We still don’t have details, but this probably means more money – new money – for agriculture development.
This is a victory for President Obama who said, in his press conference today, “There’s no reason Africa can’t feed itself. They have lots of arable land.”
Although this is still a fraction of the annual additional $25 billion to $40 billion needed, it’s a down payment on the goal of ending hunger.
July 9th, 2009 | by Guest blogger
Gawain Kripke is Oxfam America’s policy director focusing on hunger and food issues. At the G8 summit he’s lobbying government officials and talking to journalists to keep the pressure on for action.
Intrigue is building on what, exactly, will be promised on hunger at the G8 summit. For weeks the rumors have floated that President Obama wanted to make a major announcement at the G8 on the issue of hunger. His staff said that he wanted to focus on aid to small farmers to help them grow their way out of poverty and feed themselves. It’s exciting and very welcome coming on the news that the world faces a sad milestone in 2009: This year more than 1 billion people will face hunger. That’s more hungry people than ever in human history. Read the rest of this entry »
June 26th, 2009 | by Coco McCabe
The system of rice intensification, or SRI, is an agircultural technique that improves the yields of farmers while using fewer seeds and less water. The method is improving the lives of more than 80,000 farmers in Cambodia. Photo by Isabelle Lesser/Oxfam America
“One sixth of humanity undernourished”
That was the stark headline on a news story put out at the end of last week by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. All it takes is some simple math, and suddenly the immensity of the global hunger problem is as clear as a line in the sand: five of us stand on this side, one of us on the other. Read the rest of this entry »
April 21st, 2009 | by Coco McCabe
A woman and a baby walk back to a camp for displaced people in Democratic Republic of Congo.
We spent Saturday at our house burning the branches and trunk chunks from a giant pine that a pair of spider-like tree guys, with spikes on their boots, had cut down for us. We were afraid a strong wind off the river would send the old tree crashing onto our house. So, we beat the wind to it.
It took all day to burn the tangle of boughs. And as each sap-soaked armful exploded into flame, the orange and gray smoke boiling above it, I thought about some of the women I had met in Ethiopia last summer.
They were trying to survive a drought that had wiped out their crops and killed their animals, leaving them with little to eat. Loko Dadacha’s family was down to one meal a day—a government-supplied ration of wheat boiled in water. With few options for earning money, she spent hours scavenging for wood to sell, as did many of the women, hauling their heavy loads home on empty stomachs. Read the rest of this entry »
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