Black Star News
by Sifelani Tsiko
December 14, 2007

Industrialized countries are drawing up ambitious renewable fuel targets to reap huge rewards from the bio-fuels boom while avoiding discussion of the heavy price people in the Global South are paying to help sustain the consumptive oil-based lifestyles of the West.

Agronomists, ecologists, environmentalists and development activists who met recently in Mali called on African governments to resist pressure from the Industrialized North to grow food crops for the production of biodiesel.

By Mulugeta L Handino, Field Researcher and Development Expert with Food First

Updated by Holly Poole-Kavana based on the book World Hunger: Twelve Myths

Why so much hunger?

What can we do about it?

To answer these questions we must unlearn much of what we have been taught.
Only by freeing ourselves from the grip of ­widely held myths can we grasp the roots of hunger and see what we can do to end it.

Myth 1:

Not Enough Food to Go Around

Nizar Visram

Nairobi

originally published in The East African

According to the World Food Programme 25,000 people die from hunger and
poverty every day in Africa.

Food First staff and board extend the
survivors of Hurricane Katrina our deepest sympathies. We can only
imagine the pain and suffering Gulf Coast residents are facing. As
you rebuild your homes and communities, please know that you have the
support of all of us at Food First.

Many lives have been devastated by this
natural disaster. Food First will continue to explore the devastation
of the man-made disaster that made the hurricane worse: Poverty.

Please download the PDF and distribute widely.

Fact Sheet: Food Aid in the New Millenium

Genetically Engineered Food and Foreign Assistance

Disturbing evidence has come to light which suggests that US taxpayer dollars are being used through foreign assistance programs to subsidize the export of genetically engineered (GE) foods to the Third World and to finance GE research. This raises very serious ethical questions about our foreign aid dollars.

On August 22, 1996 in the Rose Garden of the White House, President Clinton signed into law the Orwellian-sounding Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, better known as Welfare Reform, the most sweeping change in our welfare system in sixty years. With his signature, Clinton's talk of "not punishing or preaching" became indistinguishable from the Republican Party's poor-bashing Contract with America. How Mr. Clinton slid from a welfare plan that would have added about $10 billion more in spending to embracing one that would cut $54 billion is a sad tale of American politics. Furthermore, it raises the specter of systematic violations of basic human rights here in the United States of America, if we are judged by the international standards of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted fifty years ago by the United Nations General Assembly.

In this report we tally the impact of welfare reform, expose seldom reported corporate profit-taking, and conflict of interest in privatizing parts of the system, and examine the human rights implications of current policies.

Here at home, just as in the Third World, hunger is an outrage precisely because it is profoundly needless. Behind the headlines, the television images, and superficial clichés, we can learn to see that hunger is real; scarcity is not.