The World Food Programme says food cuts in Darfur are a forced necessity.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) on Tuesday said it was cutting back its humanitarian air services in Sudan due to a -million funding shortfall.
The world food crisis is a tragedy frequently and passionately foretold. For years food experts warned that chronic under-investment in agriculture in developing countries, by governments and donors alike, would one day spell disaster.
A United Nations global food crisis summit risked embarrassing failure to reach any formal agreement on combating hunger threatening a billion people worldwide.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon warned on Wednesday that failure was not an option in addressing the global food price crisis, and said an extra -billion to -billion per year would be needed to help avoid disaster.
Burma’s junta on Saturday came under renewed international pressure from rights groups and the United States defence chief, who said its slow response to the cyclone disaster had cost "tens of thousands of lives". US Defence Secretary Robert Gates criticised the delay in allowing in foreign aid, saying US ships could have swiftly brought relief.
It has been described as a global crisis pushing 100-million people into hunger, threatening to stoke social and political turmoil and set the fight against world poverty back by seven years. Now, the food price crisis will be tackled by world leaders, who meet in Rome next week to seek ways of reducing the suffering for the world’s poorest people.
Burma’s junta extended the house arrest of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday, a move likely to dismay Western nations who promised millions of dollars in aid after Cyclone Nargis. Officials drove to the Nobel laureate’s lakeside Rangoon home to read out a six-month extension order in person.
Foreign aid workers saddled up for the cyclone-ravaged Irrawaddy Delta on Monday to see whether army-ruled Burma will honour a promise made by its top general to give them freedom of movement. ”We’re going to head out today and test the boundaries,” said an official from a major Western relief agency.
World food prices are likely to stay high and volatile for the foreseeable future despite some record crops this year, according to a report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation on Thursday. Food import bills around the world are expected to total more than a trillion US dollars in 2008.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon flew to Burma on Thursday to press the ruling generals to allow a full-blown international aid effort for 2,4-million people left destitute by Cyclone Nargis. The government’s official toll is 77 738 people killed and 55 917 missing, and it also estimates the damage to the economy at -billion.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon headed to south-east Asia on Wednesday on a mission to secure more help for cyclone victims in Burma, whose military rulers have finally granted an aid agency the use of helicopters to deliver supplies. The UN says up to 2,4-million people are struggling to survive.
This year’s poor rains have nearly killed Bizunesh. The rangy three-year-old weighs less than 4kg. Her long limbs, weak and folded like a praying mantis, cannot carry even her slight weight. She cannot speak. She doesn’t want to eat. Health officials say she is permanently stunted.
Global price rises and floods last year have caused severe food shortages in north-east Uganda, where nearly 30 people have died and some have been reduced to eating rats. The deaths occurred in the remote Karamoja region, an impoverished area that is notorious for fighting over livestock and scant resources.
A severe drought in Ethiopia threatens up to six million children, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) warned on Tuesday. "Up to six million children under five years of age are living in impoverished, drought-prone districts and require continuation of urgent preventative health and nutrition interventions," Unicef said in a statement.
Aid was trickling in on Sunday to an estimated 2,5-million people left destitute by Cyclone Nargis in Burma’s Irrawaddy delta as more foreign envoys tried to get the junta to admit large-scale international relief. The junta’s official toll from the disaster stands at 77 738 dead and 55 917 missing.
China struggled to bury its dead and help tens of thousands of injured and homeless on Friday when a powerful aftershock brought new havoc four days after an earthquake thought to have killed more than 50 000 people. Anger has focused on the state of school buildings, many of which crumpled in Monday’s 7,9-magnitude quake.
A furious rescue worker accused Burma’s military junta on Monday of crimes against humanity for refusing to fast-track visas for aid officials desperate to enter the country to help the 1,5-million survivors of Cyclone Nargis. ”They say they will call, but it’s always wait, wait, wait,” Pierre Fouillant of the Comite de Secours Internationaux, a French disaster rescue agency.
The first United States military aid flight landed in Burma on Monday, but relief supplies continued to just dribble into the reclusive state nine days after a cyclone. A C-130 military transport plane left Thailand’s Vietnam war-era U-Tapao airbase carrying 12 700kg of water, mosquito nets and blankets.
A lack of funds has forced the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to cut by more than half the number of districts in drought-hit Ethiopia it serves, the food agency said on Monday and appealed for ,4-million in aid. WFP said shortages would prevent it from providing food supplements to malnourished mothers and children.
Desperate survivors of Cyclone Nargis poured out of Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta on Sunday in search of food, water and medicine as aid groups said thousands more people will die if emergency supplies do not get through soon. Buddhist temples and high schools in towns on the outskirts of Nargis’s trail of destruction are now makeshift refugee centres.
The United Nations World Food Programme on Friday said two relief flights will be sent to Burma on Saturday, just hours after suspending flights due to ”unacceptable restrictions” by the government. Burma has maintained strict limits on foreign involvement in the relief effort, despite calls for it to allow unfettered access to experts.
The United Nations food agency suspended aid flights to cyclone-struck Burma on Friday after the military government seized two deliveries at Rangoon airport, apparently determined to distribute supplies on its own. Governments around the world have been pressing Burma’s ruling generals to open the country’s borders to desperately needed assistance.
It is tempting to romanticise the lifestyle of nomads in Kenya’s north-east — a land peppered with vast termite mounds which burst from rust-coloured soil like fingers pointing to the cloudless sky. For centuries, Muslim pastoralist tribes have roamed the semi-arid wastelands, in perpetual pursuit of pasture and water.
Clashes between Ethiopian troops and Islamist insurgents have killed more than a dozen people in southern and central regions of Somalia, residents said. Islamist fighters, opposed to Ethiopian soldiers in Somalia to support its interim government, ambushed a convoy of Ethiopian forces in the central Hiraan region on Wednesday.
A few aid shipments had arrived in Burma’s main city by Thursday, but the planeloads of supplies and heavy equipment needed to help millions of cyclone victims remain largely stranded outside the country. In a dramatic development, the ruling junta agreed to accept United States emergency aid after last weekend’s cyclone.
Burma’s military junta believes at least 10 000 people died in a cyclone that ripped through the Irrawaddy Delta, triggering a massive international aid response for the pariah nation. ”The basic message was that they believe the provisional death toll was about 10 000, with 3 000 missing,” a Rangoon-based diplomat said in Bangkok.
The African Development Bank (AfDB), the only multilateral development body specifically devoted to Africa, will add -billion to its portfolio of agricultural loans to help address the food crisis in African countries, the bank said on Saturday.
The United Nations’s new top adviser on food blamed two decades of wrong-headed policies by world powers for the food crisis sweeping the globe in a stinging interview published on his first day in office. Frenchman Olivier de Schutter told <i>Le Monde</i> newspaper the world needed to prepare for the end of "cheap food".
North Korea again runs the risk of outright famine, ten years after up to one million of its people died of starvation, a leading United States research institute said on Wednesday. ”The country is in its most precarious situation since the end of the famine a decade ago,” said Peterson Institute senior fellow Marcus Noland.
United Nations agencies and the World Bank pledged on Tuesday to set up a task force to tackle an unprecedented rise in global food prices that is threatening to spread social unrest. The international bodies called on countries not to restrict exports of food to secure supplies at home.
United Nations agencies and the World Bank pledged urgent action on Tuesday to tackle an unprecedented rise in global food prices that is hurting developing countries. The international bodies called on countries not to restrict exports of food to secure supplies at home, warning that could only make the problem worse.