The Rising Nepal
आश्विन २०७८

Afghanistan facing desperate food crisis, UN warns

Millions of Afghans will face starvation this winter unless urgent action is taken, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has warned. More than half the population, about 22.8 million, face acute food insecurity, while 3.2 million children under five could suffer acute malnutrition, the WFP said.

पूर्ण विवरण

सम्बन्धित सामग्री

Humla hit by food crisis

HUMLA, Dec 6: A food crisis has surfaced in the mountainous district of Humla as the district failed to see the food supplies on time.

Republica कार्तिक २०८०

Humla hit by food crisis

HUMLA, Dec 6: A food crisis has surfaced in the mountainous district of Humla as the district failed to see the food supplies on time.

Republica कार्तिक २०८०

Sri Lankans face food crisis amid economic crunch

The Himalayan Times मंसिर २०७९

US announces USD 15 million aid to Nepal to help it deal with food crisis

The United States Embassy in Kathmandu says the US government is giving USD 15 million in aid to Nepal to help it deal with the food crisis here. The post US announces USD 15 million aid to Nepal to help it deal with food crisis appeared first on OnlineKhabar English News.

Onlinekhabar English श्रावण २०७९

Five countries, five meals - tackling a food crisis

Late-night runs to Walmart in the US It's 04:00 and the air is already sticky with the heat of a Georgia summer when Donna Martin arrives at work. Another day means another battle to get the children in her school district fed. Ms Martin is a food service director responsible for 4,200 children, all of whom are on a federal free school meals programme. "We have two grocery stores in our entire community of 22,000 people," she says. "It's a real food desert." And in the past year she's been struggling to get what she needs. Annual food inflation hit 10.9% in July, the highest it has been since 1979. As prices soar, some of Ms Martin's food suppliers are no longer interested in feeding schools. "They're telling me: 'Ya'll are so picky, and the margins just aren't there,'" she says. The federal school meals programme in the US is strictly regulated. That means that products like the breadcrumbs on a chicken nugget have to be wholemeal and foods must be low in sugar and salt. So Ms Martin has to source specific types of everything, from cereal to bagels or yoghurts. She recognises that her suppliers are struggling too. A chronic labour shortage means they can't find drivers and fuel prices have increased by 60% since last year. When suppliers don't deliver she has to be resourceful. Recently she couldn't get peanut butter, which the children love, so she replaced it with a bean dip. "I know the kids aren't going to like it as much, but I've got to feed them something," she says. Often she and her staff have to spend early mornings and late nights raiding the shelves of local stores such as Walmart. "Every day for a week we had to buy the entire town out of yoghurt. "There's a lot of kids really excited to go back to school and I don't want them saying: 'Mom, we didn't get our smoothies today.'" Jackfruit comes to the rescue in Sri Lanka In what was once a rice paddy just outside Kandy in central Sri Lanka, Anoma Kumari Paranathala is plucking green beans and fresh mint from the rambling foliage of her vegetable garden. From here it's hard to imagine the chaos elsewhere in the country, as the government and economy crumble. There are shortages of everything - medicines, fuel and food. Even people with good jobs are struggling to buy the basics. "Now people are worried about their future," Ms Paranathala says. "They're afraid there will be nothing to eat." The land belongs to her family. They started planting during the pandemic just for fun - now it's a matter of survival. Ms Paranthala taught herself how to grow vegetables from books and YouTube videos. Now she has tomatoes, spinach, gourds, taro root and sweet potatoes in her garden. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a large patch of land, but many Sri Lankans are turning to another source of food - jackfruit trees. "In every other garden, there is a jackfruit tree," Ms Paranathala says. "But until recently, people took no notice of jackfruit. They just fell from the trees and went to waste." he has started making a creamy coconut curry with the fruit, substituting it for vegetables that would now be expensive to buy, or meat. Jackfruit also now appearing in kottu - a popular stir-fry dish that's sold as street food. And some people are grinding the seeds to make flour for bread, cakes and roti. Jackfruit surfaced on the menus of hip restaurants around the world as a meat substitute a few years ago, but it took a crisis to make it popular here, where it grows. So, what does the fruit taste like? "It's something that cannot be described," she says. "It's heavenly." Bakeries in Nigeria are 'going extinct' Usually Emmanuel Onuorah has little interest in politics - he's a baker and just wants to sell bread. But recently in Nigeria, his job has become close to impossible. "In the past year, wheat flour has gone up by more than 200%, sugar has gone up by almost 150%, eggs that we use for baking have gone up by about 120%," he says. "We are running at a loss," he says. He's had to lay off 305 of his 350 staff. "How will they feed their families?" As the president of the Premium Breadmakers Association of Nigeria, he's at the centre of a movement. In July, he rallied close to half a million bakers to close their doors for four days in a "withdrawal of services" action. He was hoping the government would take notice and reduce taxes on the products they import. A combination of bad harvests and increased demand after the pandemic caused wheat and vegetable oil prices to soar all over the world. The invasion of Ukraine made things even worse. In Nigeria, most of the ingredients in a bakery are imported. But a loaf of bread sells for a fraction of what it does in Europe so it's much harder to absorb price increases. The country also has an erratic public power supply, so most businesses run off private generators that burn diesel. But the price of fuel has increased by 30%. Though it's oil-rich, Nigeria has no fuel refineries and has to import all of its diesel. Despite his costs tripling, Mr Onuorah says he can only raise his prices by 10-12%. His customers can't afford more than that. "Nigerians are impoverished, businesses are shutting down and wages are stagnant, you can't overburden them," he says. On average, Nigerians spend almost 60% of their income on food. In the US by contrast, that figure is closer to 7%. Continuing like this is unsustainable for bakeries. "We're not a charitable association, we're in business to be profitable." "But we keep trudging on," he says, "so that Nigerians can eat." A communal pot feeds 75 people in Peru Clambering up a scraggy path on a hill looking over the foggy city of Lima, Justina Flores is trying to figure out what she's going to cook today. It's a problem that gets harder to solve every day. At the height of the pandemic she got together with 60 of her neighbours to pool whatever food they had to cook. The majority of residents of San Juan de Miraflores are domestic workers - cooks, maids, nannies and gardeners - but like Ms Flores, most lost their jobs during the pandemic. Families were hungry. They started cooking in a pot outside Justina's home, with wood they gathered for fuel. Then they built a small hut and a local priest provided a stove. Ms Flores asked market traders to donate food that would otherwise have gone to waste. Two years later they are feeding 75 people, three times a week. Ms Flores, who worked as a kitchen assistant before Covid, has become a de facto leader in her community. "I keep knocking on doors, looking for support." She used to make hearty stews with meat and vegetables, served with rice. But in the past few months, donations have reduced to a trickle and all types of food are more difficult to source. "We are desperate, I've had to reduce the portions," Ms Flores says. She struggles to get basics like rice. What began in April as protests by farmers and transport workers against the rise in the cost of fuel and fertilisers has led to a series of strikes further disrupting the food supply. Recently, because of rising costs, Ms Flores had to stop serving meat. She had used blood, liver, bones and gizzard because they were affordable, then giblets got too expensive, and she replaced them with fried eggs. When the price of oil shot up she gave families eggs to cook at home. Now, there are no eggs either. So today she's serving pasta with a sauce made from onions and herbs. Ms Flores' doesn't blame the farmers for the strikes though, or shortages. "We can grow food here in Peru but the government is not helping," she says. A chicken boycott in Jordan On 22 May an anonymous account tweeting in Arabic called on people to tag pictures of chicken products with the hashtag #Boycott_Greedy_Chicken_Companies. A few days later in Jordan, Salam Nasralla was on her way home from the supermarket when she saw the campaign go viral. "We heard about it from everywhere, all of our friends and family were talking about it. It was all over social media and TV," says Ms Nasralla. She'd just noticed the price hike on her own shopping bill. As a mother of two who regularly cooks for her parents, sisters, nieces and nephews, she buys a lot of chicken. She felt compelled to take part. For 10 days she avoided chicken, but it was hard. Because other meat and fish are expensive, Salam and her family eat chicken almost every day. They ate hummus, falafel or fried aubergine instead of meat. Twelve days after the campaign started, the price of chicken had fallen by a third, almost $1 (0.7 Dinar) per kilo. Rami Barhoush, who manages chicken farms and slaughterhouses, supports the idea of boycotts but thinks this one was misconceived. His farms have been struggling with rising costs since the beginning of the year, especially for fuel and chicken feed. Global factors have combined to push up fuel and grain prices - due to factors such as China building up its pig herd after swine flu, drought in South America and war in Ukraine. In Jordan, the government proposed a price cap on chicken but on few other products. Chicken farmers agreed to a cap until the end of Ramadan. But in early May, they were forced to raise prices, causing a spike. Then the social media uproar began. "Chicken represented displeasure with all of the rising prices of everything else," he says. Ms Nasralla was glad to see the protest had an effect but worries it didn't get to the heart of the issue. "Unfortunately it's the small farmers and chicken sellers that are hurting the most and not the big traders who put high prices on everything the farmer needs." With inputs from BBC

Ratopati English श्रावण २०७९

Ukraine war: World Bank warns of 'human catastrophe' food crisis

MAY 19: The world faces a "human catastrophe" from a food crisis arising from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, World Bank president David Malpass has said. He told the BBC that record rises in food prices would push hundreds of millions people into poverty and lower nutrition, if the crisis continues. The World Bank calculates there could be a "huge" 37% jump in food prices. This would hit the poor hardest, who will "eat less and have less money for anything else such as schooling". In an interview with BBC economics editor Faisal Islam, Mr Malpass, who leads the institution charged with global alleviation of poverty, said the impact on the poor made it "an unfair kind of crisis... that was true also of Covid". "It's a human catastrophe, meaning nutrition goes down. But then it also becomes a political challenge for governments who can't do anything about it, they didn't cause it and they see the prices going up," he said on the sidelines of the IMF-World Bank meetings in Washington. The price rises are broad and deep, he said: "It's affecting food of all different kinds oils, grains, and then it gets into other crops, corn crops, because they go up when wheat goes up". There was enough food in the world to feed everybody, he said, and global stockpiles are large by historical standards, but there will have to be a sharing or sales process to get the food to where it is needed. Mr Malpass also discouraged countries from subsidising production or capping prices. Instead, he said, the focus needed to be on increasing supplies across the world of fertilisers and food, alongside targeted assistance for the very poorest people. The World Bank chief also warned of a knock on "crisis within a crisis" arising from the inability of developing countries to service their large pandemic debts, amid rising food and energy prices. "This is a very real prospect. It's happening for some countries, we don't know how far it'll go. As many as 60% of the poorest countries right now are either in debt distress or at high risk of being in debt distress," he said. "We have to be worried about a debt crisis, the best thing to do is to start early to act early on finding ways to reduce the debt burden for countries that are on have unsustainable debt, the longer you put it off, the worse it is," he added. The acknowledgement by the World Bank president that we have to be worried about a developing country debt crisis, is very significant. The combination of massive pandemic debts with rising interest rates, and rising prices is truly toxic. The talk on the sidelines here at the IMF and World Bank meetings is that the rich countries told emerging economies not to worry about borrowing in order to spend to help suppress the pandemic. Now those countries are wondering if these record debts will be written off. Campaigning groups are preparing mobilisations over a pandemic debt jubilee. But there is silence from the rich country lenders, so far. And there is a very new dynamic these days. The bankers to whom these sums are owed are no longer just in the West. China is now, very broadly, owed as much as the entire collection of Western creditors known as the Paris Club. How will it respond to calls for leniency on the repayment of loans? Mr Malpass says of China: "They have different rules, for example, contracts that have non-disclosure clauses, meaning you can't share the terms with other people that makes it very hard to restructure those debts". China has also secured its lending against ports and natural resources. Sri Lanka is a case in point right now. The unwinding of all of this might not be orderly, and could have significant geopolitical consequences. Earlier this month, the United Nations said that the Ukraine war had led to a "giant leap" in food prices, as they hit a new record high in March. It came as the war cut off supplies from the world's biggest exporter of sunflower oil and the cost of alternatives climbed. Ukraine is also a major producer of cereals such as maize and wheat which have risen sharply in price too. The UN said "war in the Black Sea region spread shocks through markets for staple grains and vegetable oils". The UN Food Prices Index tracks the world's most-traded food commodities - measuring the average prices of cereal, vegetable oil, dairy, meat, and sugar. Food prices are at their highest since records began 60 years ago, according to the index, after they jumped nearly 13% in March, following February's record high. Food commodity prices were already at 10-year highs before the war in Ukraine, according to the index, because of global harvest issues.

Ratopati English बैशाख २०७९

UN: Ukraine war’s food crisis worst since WWII

The UN food chief warned Tuesday the war in Ukraine has created “a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe” and will have a global impact.

Nepalnews फाल्गुन २०७८

Russia's deputy chairman of the Security Council warns of major food crisis

MOSCOW, Nov 1: Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev warns of a looming global food crisis, saying that no one can give accurate forecasts for overcoming the recession in the world economy. "It is obvious that a world food crisis is coming.  Food prices are on the rise everywhere, food inflation is accelerating," Medvedev said in an article published by the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper. He emphasized that the world economy is suffering from a recession, which is much more serious than during the financial crisis of 2008-2009. "A lot will depend on the rate of resumption of foreign trade, especially in terms of export-import of services. Nobody can give accurate forecasts now, " Medvedev said. The Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council explained that non-economic factors, such as vaccination and the emergence of new viruses, are currently affecting the world economic situation.

Ratopati English आश्विन २०७८

Food bank at Barekot to address food crisis

JAJARKOT, August 17: Efforts are underway to set up a food bank at Barekot of the district so that it could address the food crisis. The food bank is being established with the assistance of World Food Programme (WFP), Barekot Rural Municipality and other donors. The food grains collected and stored with help of various bodies would be utilized to feed the people who are adversely affected by natural disasters and food shortage. Even a building for the food bank has been constructed at Lissa of Barekot-2 with the financial assistance of WFP and technical assistance of Panchtara Youth Protection Forum, Jajarkot.  Jajarkot district has been suffering the food crisis due to geographical difficulty, lack of transportation and irrigation, and natural disaster. But the food bank would be a huge relief to the vulnerable people, said Mahendra Shaha, Chairperson of Barekot Rural Municipality.  The WFP constructed a building with two rooms at the cost of Rs 4.1 million under the infrastructure development programme. One room is for running office and another for storing food grains. The food bank would be brought into use shortly with the coordination of the rural municipality. Even a work procedure for the operation and management of food bank has been passed, according to chief administrative officer at rural municipality, Govinda Bahadur Singh. WFP's infrastructure development programme is aimed at providing employment to 1,238 peoples affected by the landslides. It has already released over Rs 31 million in total to the individual bank accounts of members of the families which survived disaster. Similarly, hydropower, irrigation, roadway, schools building, drinking water projects are supported by the WFP programme in the district.

Ratopati English श्रावण २०७८

Muktikot village in Bajura suffers food shortage

MARTADI, June 27: Muktikot village of Swamikartik Khapar Rural Municipality-1 in Bajura has suffered food shortage. The prolonged drought and COVID-19 crisis led to the emergence of food crisis in the village.  Local Bal Bahadur BK said the village is home to around 400 Dalit families and they are struggling to meet their daily food requirements.  They are out of work due to COVID-19 crisis. “We have neither job nor food,” he said. India is the labour destination for a majority of youths in the village. But with the outbreak of second wave of the pandemic, they returned homes and are staying idle. The local production is sufficient to the requirement just for a month. They rely on market for almost throughout the year, according to locals. Muktikot is gripped by the food crisis and malnutrition is the common health issue among children here, according to Swamikartik Rural Municipality information officer Kuber Shahi. Children, pregnant and aged people are the most affected. Malnutrition is one of the reasons for the child mortality rate in the village.  The village has not got any support from the federal and province governments yet. The Poor House Hold Identity Board’s-2072   report states that 75 percent households in Swamikartik fall below the poverty line. Out of 2,185 households, 1,038 are living with absolute poverty, the report shows.

Ratopati English जेष्ठ २०७८

Privacy

Download