hunger
aid means: a) robber, b) couch, c) help, d) ship
2 x 2 equals: a) 3, b) 0, c) 4, d) 2
If you can answer these questions, you can help feed the world’s poorest right now. No, really.
Today marks the start of the first-ever World Freerice Week, a campaign to help end global hunger through Freerice, an online game managed by the World Food Programme. For each correct answer on trivia questions like the ones above, you get 10 grains of real-life rice that end up on the plates of hungry people.
This year’s theme, “6 Degrees of Separation,” aims to exponentially increase the amount of donated rice. Play the game in teams of six and compete against Freerice players all across the world. Players have already helped donate 94 million grains of rice since the game first started — so just imagine how much more we could help give if we got more people to play?
Register or join a group now, and play Freerice like a madman until Friday, February 11. Let us know how you do, and good luck!
Everyone, say hi to our new intern Paulena Papagiannis. She just graduated from Oberlin and will be on our new media team for the spring. This is her first post, so be nice!
In a recent Facebook post, we shared a staggering statistic: Consumers in rich countries dispose of 220 million metric tons of food waste every year, equal to the entire food output of sub-Saharan Africa.
Like the farm ministers and policy makers who gathered last week to discuss this atrocity, our readers were infuriated, calling the waste “shameful” and “despicable” (and those were the nicest words).
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Adria Saracino of Distilled, a creative digital agency, shares an interactive infographic on global food consumption and income using data from a surprising source: Food Service Warehouse.
Developing countries consume much less than Western nations, particularly in times of crisis, like with what we’re seeing in Somalia. However, despite a lower caloric intake, these poorer countries’ citizens spend more than 50 percent of their income on food.
Food Service Warehouse (FSW) created the interactive infographic to the left (click to launch) to explore the caloric intake of the 20 richest and poorest countries. They were expecting to see a lower average calorie consumption between the two sets of countries, but were surprised to find that the poorer countries spent more than half of their income on food.
Since FSW works with a lot of different organizations in the food industry, they have access to large sets of data. They utilize this data to explore its customers and industry, and in the process, often make startling discoveries. This food consumption infographic was developed after analyzing data for a competitive eating infographic. While conducting research on calorie consumption in the US, FSW noticed there was a huge difference in calorie intake among US citizens. These differences — attributed to factors like height, gender, activity level and geography — result in an average daily consumption of 3770 calories per person.
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This week, Americans from all across the country are making the pilgrimage home to spend time with friends and family over a delicious meal. Amid a heaping pile of mashed potatoes and seconds of whipped cream with a side of pumpkin pie, this quintessential harvest holiday also affords us the chance to step back and give thanks for a year that is fast coming to an end and all of the wonderful people, events and more that have populated it over the past months.
Date-filled sambusas. Photo credit: Sarah Commerford.
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When ONE started to look at the data behind the massive famine gripping the Horn of Africa, we knew that a column of numbers could not tell this story alone. For this reason, we published a new interactive online feature to map the famine crisis in the region. Developed in partnership with online visual experts at Development Seed, our new map follows in line with their recent maps on food prices and the famine’s spread, but takes it a bit further.
Visit our map “Where is the Hunger? Mapping the Famine in the Horn of Africa”
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For the first time in our lifetime, a wide range of African artists and global celebrities with a passion for Africa, have united in a call for action to break the recurring incidence of famine and extreme hunger in the Horn of Africa.
In an open letter addressed to African and world leaders, 58 artists are appealing for the implementation of a three-part plan to beat the famine in the Horn of Africa and invest in long-term solutions to avoid future food crises.This prominent group of African voices together command an audience of more than 7 million people on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
This letter is published just before two crucial meetings: the G20 finance ministers meeting in Washington DC this Friday, and a Ministerial Mini-Summit on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York this Saturday. ONE is campaigning to ensure that top of the agenda at both of these meetings are two key issues: ending the current famine and avoiding future famines .
ONE’s members support these efforts, too. Nearly 220,000 supporters have signed a petition calling on leaders to urgently provide the full funding that the UN has identified as needed for the Horn of Africa crisis, and to keep their promises to deliver the long-term solutions which could prevent crises like this from happening again.
This is just the beginning of relentless campaigning on hunger and famine, and shining a spotlight on the opportunities of agriculture development in Africa, which ONE will be pushing throughout the next few months. Specifically, over the coming days and weeks, ONE will be advocating for three key promises from African and world leaders:
- Fill the remaining financing gap for emergency assistance to help people in the Horn of Africa
- Invest in longer-term agriculture and food security to stop the cycle of extreme hunger
- Encourage a prominent and formal role for civil society in the peace-seeking process to stop the cycle of instability in the region
This will be tough given the state of finances of many economies. But what could be more important than preventing future famines and ending hunger and its causes?
That’s why we at ONE are working with advocacy partners on a charter to end extreme hunger. This charter, along with the African artist letter, and ONE’s petition, will be presented to the gathering of leaders coordinated by the UN on Saturday.
80% of Africans depend on subsistence agriculture to ensure their families have something to eat. Investing in agricultural productivity in Africa gives Africans a real chance to lift themselves out of poverty. This is a cause worth fighting for!
Pearl Alice Marsh from ONE’s policy team explains what it takes to get food aid safely to those who need it most.
The crisis in the Horn of Africa presents a major logistical challenge for the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) and other international humanitarian organizations responding to the crisis. But moving emergency food to destinations in Somalia is particularly challenging. It requires procuring and moving large amounts of food from all corners of the globe through treacherous waters and vulnerable ports, roads and bridges, to incredibly hard-to-reach places in one of the most dangerous locations on earth.
Boxes of food aid from USAID. Photo credit: Josh Lozman/ONE
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