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Each year the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) celebrates World Food Day on Oct 16, the day on which this UN organization was founded in 1945. The theme for 2005, “Agriculture and Intercultural Dialogue,” recalls the contribution of different cultures to world agriculture, and argues that sincere intercultural dialogue is a precondition for progress against hunger and environmental degradation.
Some 850 million people around the world remain hungry. At the World Food Summit held in Rome in 1996 and again at the World Food Summit: five years later in 2002, leaders vowed to reduce that number by half by 2015. Moreover, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals commit world leaders to reducing by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger, while ensuring environmental sustainability. (see the 2004 document)
HUNGER
FACTS
• More than one-half of the world's people live below the internationally
defined poverty line of less than U.S. $2 a day.
• Nearly one-third of rural residents worldwide lack access to safe drinking
water.
• Poor families spend over 70% of their income on food. An average American
family spends over 10%.
• 842 million people do not have enough to eat--more than the populations of
the U.S., Canada, Europe & Japan combined.
click here to read more Hunger Facts
AIDS UPDATE: see 2004 update
Progress in reducing hunger has virtually halted (Oct 2002 report)
POOR DRUG RESEARCH
The
reputation of major drug companies, already suffering from the dispute over
making AIDS slowing drugs accessible to poor countries, has received another
blow following the results of a study by World Health Organization members
and published this last summer. According to the findings (reported by the
Financial Times), “Drug development has been so skewed towards the needs of
rich countries, that only one per cent of new treatments over the last 25
years were for diseases found mainly in the developing world.”
It is a complicated issue as drug companies are businesses, and want to see
their research investments pay off. Because population areas suffering with
tropical diseases, are not a lucrative market, it will require more public
sector incentives and initiatives to foster needed drug development
projects.
In response to criticism, Swiss pharmaceutical, Novartis, has decided to
open a research institute for infectious diseases in Singapore, and the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged in January to donate 200 million
dollars to encourage medical research into Third World diseases. That pledge
followed a November 2002 commitment of 100 million dollars to support an
initiative to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS in India. Read more at:
www.gatesfoundation.org/globalhealth/
ARCHIVE:
From WCN issue #23
SHEBA’S
SONG
by Joe Harbison
A book about child sponsorship, Here is the story of on Indian girl and her American sponsor that will inspire you: An Indian woman looks back on her childhood, and the influence that an American family had on her through their support, and the correspondence they kept up for years during her childhood growing up in poverty.
To read more about the book, click here. To buy this book, click here
- Movie review of Oscar-nominated About Schmidt, which also features child sponsorship as part of the story.
Walking
With the Poor
by Bryant Myers
Principles and Practice of Transformational Development.
Drawing on theological and biblical resources, secular development theory
and work done by Christians among the poor, Myers develops a theoretical
framework for transformational development and provides cutting-edge tools
for those working alongside the poor.
To buy this title, click here
last update: 2005 September