The USDA has released its data for hunger in the United States, and the numbers aren't good.

In 2007, 36 million people were classified 'food insecure'. In 2008, the figure was 49 million - an increase of 13 million.

Children were badly affected, though older children took the hit if they had younger siblings. Those in the front lines were, of course, women. The graph shows the differences in US hunger between 2007 and 2008: single mothers and women living alone were worst hit. ... read more »

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Posted on 16 November, 2009 - 21:52

Variants of this quote has been cropping up a great deal recently:

It is not acceptable for women to constitute
70 per cent of the world’s 1.3 billion absolute poor. Nor is it acceptable for
women to work two-thirds of the world's working hours, but earn only one-tenth
of the world's income and own less than one-tenth of the world's property.

I've been going a little nuts trying to find the source because, well, I wasn't able to get the quote right.

In the excellent Penguin Atlas of Women in the World, in the 'Feminisms' entry, I found a lead. It was said by Noeleen Heyzer, Director of UNIFEM, at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. You can find the full text here. ... read more »

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Posted on 4 November, 2009 - 20:46

It's as if the already miraculous reporters at Inter Press Service had read last night's posting, and sent this article from the heavens. While land-grabs continue in Africa, women wonder whether they'll be able to take what's theirs. Hat-tip to Dan M.

Women Want Land to Call Their Own

Davison Makanga/IPS

CAPE TOWN, Aug 10 (IPS) - In 1956, twenty thousand women marched to parliament to protest discriminatory pass laws. The march, commemorated as Women’s Day in South Africa on Aug. 9 each year, has become iconic of women’s quest for equality. ... read more »

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Posted on 10 August, 2009 - 15:11

Dan Moshenberg, who has done a previous guest post on the anniversary of Katrina, is a regular sender of Things That Appear on this Blog. He writes far too rarely at Women In and Beyond the Global, and it was his idea to write the letter to the New York Times that has been a minor hit, republished as far away as Kenya.

Recently, Dan's been tying some threads together, first here and, below, his latest thoughts on what it means, and how unusual it is, when "women bear the brunt", whether of hunger or of insecurity. ... read more »

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Posted on 4 November, 2008 - 05:57

First of two round-ups on gender and the food crisis. The first from the excellent Foreign Policy In Focus (to whom I still owe a piece on the Doha WTO round which, while apparing irrelevant, is as urgent as ever). ... read more »

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Posted on 4 November, 2008 - 05:36

The New York Times ran a special food-themed issue of its Sunday magazine a week back. It was kicked off by a fine piece by Mark Bittman, who observed quite rightly that the conversation being had in the magazine’s pages reflects America’s new, and healthy, interest in what they’re eating.

Indeed, just a few years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine this sort of interest, and even harder to imagine that the New York Times would countenance the sorts of politics espoused in Michael Pollan’s Farmer in Chief essay, or David Reiff’s subtle dissection of the Gates Foundation’s African Adventures.

I like David’s piece a great deal, not just because I appear in it as a reasonable person, but because he captures exactly what’s wrong about the Northern do-gooder in Africa. For the record, a mistake crept in to the piece – I’ve never actually met Raj Shah – but the piece certainly captures how I feel about the Alliance for a New Green Revolution in Africa.

And yet, despite all that, the issue had one or two gaping holes. Labour didn’t really get a look in and, most important, the entire issue was almost wholly silent on the issue of gender. ... read more »

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Posted on 23 October, 2008 - 06:35

Hail a new entry on the blogroll - the Food Riot Project. It's a review of historical materials about women living in New York's Lower East Side at the time of the 1917 food riots, and it's lovely in so many ways. Least of all, it was sparked by an appearance of your author on NPR here in the US, but more importantly, the site's a wonderful archive to dip into. Ultimately, it'll all feed into a play that'll be put on by The Anthropologists in Spring next year. Watch this space fo ... read more »

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Posted on 14 October, 2008 - 07:41

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere - three quarters of the population lives on less than two dollars a day.

Haitians have company - more than anyone thought. The news from the World Bank is that, cough, poverty might be more pervasive than they thought. Looking back at their figures, they've revised up their estimates of the number of people living in poverty from 985 million to 1.4 billion, a more than 40% increase.

The Bank's spin is that poverty is still lower now than it was in 1981, when there were 1.9 billion people living in poverty. But most of the world's reduction in poverty comes from China. Excluding China, world poverty fell from 40% to 30% over the past 25 years.
Read the full BBC report.

Worse, these figures don't include the recent increases in food prices. Poor people around the world, particularly in cities where you need money to buy food, are finding meals increasingly hard to come by. Ethiopia, as this report shows, is facing food price inflation of over 40%. Things are so hard that, in some cases, families are forced to choose which of their children they will save from hunger.

Some have taken to the streets rather than face this choice. In Haiti, as Reuters reports below, food riots have broken out again. Sadly, they're not likely to be the only ones we see as winter approaches. And, if you read French, you can see here how women are in the front lines not only of growing their own food, but in organising for it too... ... read more »

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Posted on 27 August, 2008 - 17:23

A few days back, I posted a piece from Pambazuka News on the effects of the food crisis on women. Below is the fact-filled source for much of that article, by Women Thrive Worldwide and is well worth a read. ... read more »

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Posted on 31 July, 2008 - 13:23

This report is lifted from the pages of the excellent Pambazuka News, where it first appeared. It's a much better and more thoughtful article than the one that appeared in the Washington Post. I'm not linking to it directly, but to the CommonDreams page, which has some excellent back-and-forth in the comments section, nailing quite precisely the patronising and infantilising attitudes that characterise a great deal of reporting on the food crisis. More below the fold ... read more »

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Posted on 29 July, 2008 - 05:58