Today is World Food Day—a day established by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 1979 to raise awareness about the issue of hunger and food insecurity worldwide. Below are some relevant news clips, including an op-ed from Secretary of State Clinton.

To learn more, check out our Food Security in Focus hot topic. And remember, not just today, but every day, there are over one billion people around the world suffering from hunger and food insecurity.

The Guardian—Seeding a safer world (op-ed by Hillary Clinton)
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton writes about hunger and food security in the developing world in today’s Guardian. She writes, “The Obama administration sees chronic hunger as a key priority of our foreign policy. Chronic hunger threatens individuals, governments, societies, and borders. We know that development works best when it is seen as investment, not aid. Revitalizing global agriculture will not be easy. But it can be done. It is worth doing. And if we succeed, our future will be more prosperous and more peaceful than our past.”

Financial Times—Gates’ charity to focus on food security
In a speech yesterday, Bill Gates put the focus of his multi-billion-dollar foundation firmly on food security, saying that making poor farmers more productive will have a “massive impact” on hunger. “Helping the poorest smallholder farmers grow more crops and get them to market is the world’s single most powerful lever for reducing hunger,” Gates said as he announced $120 million in one-off grants for research and development. While the foundation has already provided $1.4 billion to food security projects, the new grants and Mr. Gates’s speech point to a bigger prominence for agriculture, the Financial Times writes.

Washington Post—Gates’s Fields of Dreams (op-ed by Michael Gerson)
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson writes about the Gates Foundation’s focus on agricultural investment. Gerson writes, “Approximately three-quarters of Africans are employed in agriculture, but about 30 percent of people on the continent suffer from hunger and malnutrition. Over the next few decades, African farmers will need to feed a growing population without expanding into ecologically important lands, while adapting to climate disruptions that make drought, pests and floods more common. They will need Gates’s help, and more.”

L.A. Times—Hunger breeds violence (op-ed by Sandy Berger)
Former U.S. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger connects the fight against hunger to the fight against terrorism and extremism in an op-ed in today’s L.A. Times. He writes, “Every six seconds a child dies of hunger. Those who don’t die face a childhood of worry and desperation. Many of them end up foraging in the streets or garbage heaps, where they are prime targets for recruitment by extremist groups or other criminal organizations. That is simply not acceptable when most live in a world of plenty.”

Wall Street Journal—Starving for Freedom (op-ed by Julian Morris)
An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal offers a slightly different perspective on food security, arguing that much of the blame for famine and hunger is due to trade restrictions, not climate change or a lack of Western aid. Julian Morris writes, “Instead of carping about climate change and more aid, the World Bank, Western governments and all those charities in Africa should learn the lessons from one of this year’s economics Nobel laureates. (Their) work emphasizes the need for markets and institutions to be built from the bottom up, without interference from higher levels of government.”

Other news:

Financial Times—Affluent Africa
The Financial Times looks at the growing class of powerful African businessmen and women that has emerged in the past decade thanks to increased money being invested domestically on the continent. The Times writes that mobile phone entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim personifies this trend; his company and others proved it was possible to build a business on a regional scale that could be profitable providing services and connecting the lives of the rich and poor, a new step in the emergence of African entrepreneurs on to the world stage.

Reuters—Poor states seek cotton safety net due to slump
The world’s poorest countries on Friday urged other World Trade Organization members to set up a safety net for cotton producers in poor nations, to help address losses arising from the world economic slump. Trade Ministers from some 30 members of the Least Developed Countries also asked for quick action on removing trade-distorting subsidies and duty- and quota-free market access to cotton and cotton by-products from poor countries.