Four Famines

Food Ration Cuts Are Becoming the Norm as Aid Agencies Struggle to Keep Up

Facing a massive funding shortfall, the World Food Program in January cut rations for Congolese refugees in Rwanda by 25%. Protests against those cuts turned deadly on February 27th when Rwandan police fired into a crowd, killing 11 refugees. This incident...

Map of the Day: The Places Where the UN Warns of Major risks to Food Security in the Next Three Months

Today’s map comes from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. It is part of the FAO’s early warning system that seeks to forecast where food insecurity will be most acute in the coming months. This map forecasts expected emergencies in...

Map of the Day: A New Food Emergency

Today’s map comes from a UN-entity known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification program. This is a group of food security and agricultural experts from the World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization International identifies areas around...

VIDEO: A BBC Journalist Snuck Into Yemen To Report on the Worst Humanitarian Crisis

Journalists routinely hitch rides on UN planes. If there is space on airlifts transporting humanitarian goods and personnel, the UN generally welcomes journalists to ride along and report on some forgotten humanitarian crisis. Such was the case last week when...

PODCAST: An Unprecedented Coalition of NGOs Has Formed to Fight a Global Food Emergency

On July 17 a very rare thing happened in the world of humanitarian relief. Eight organizations that typically compete for donor dollars joined forces to launch a joint appeal to raise funds and awareness around a global food crisis....

Map of the Day: In Yemen, a Looming Famine and Current Cholera Outbreak form a Deadly Nexus.

Today’s map comes from the European Commission. It shows an alarming cholera outbreak is spreading in Yemen in exactly the same places that are suffering most from food insecurity. To date, there have been over 11,000 cases of cholera detected...

Map of the Day: Displaced by Drought in Somalia

Somalia is in the midst of its most catastrophic drought since 1950. Some 3.2 million people face emergency levels of food insecurity. And that is causing massive population displacement. Today’s map comes from the European Union’s Emergency Response Coordination center....

The World Food Program Needs $961 Million to Avert 20 Million Deaths From Famine

The statistics are only getting worse. Nearly 20 million people across four countries are currently at risk of famine. This includes 1.6 million children who are already considered “severely malnourished.” If food does not arrive soon, the numbers of deaths...

A UN Peacekeeping Unit in South Sudan patrols an area where conflict destroyed thousands of acres of cropland

A Famine is Never Just a Famine — It’s Political Violence By Starvation.

We are entering an age of famine. But the extreme food crises facing South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and Northern Nigeria are not solely a consequence of natural disaster or climate change. Rather, people are starving to death because other people...

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