Childhood Hunger

Latest News for June 2008

June 30 Hoarding Nations Drive Food Costs Ever Higher

Food exports worldwide have dropped dramatically in recent months.

June 30, 2008
Keith Bradsher
& Andrew Martin
The New York Times

BANGKOK, Thailand — At least 29 countries have sharply curbed food exports in recent months, to ensure that their own people have enough to eat, at affordable prices.

When it comes to rice, India, Vietnam, China and 11 other countries have limited or banned exports. Fifteen countries, including Pakistan and Bolivia, have capped or halted wheat exports. More than a dozen have limited corn exports. Kazakhstan has restricted exports of sunflower seeds.

Rice is prepared for export in Bangkok. The restrictions are making it harder for impoverished importing countries to afford the food they need. The export limits are forcing some of the most vulnerable people, those who rely on relief agencies, to go hungry.

“It’s obvious that these export restrictions fuel the fire of price increases,” said Pascal Lamy, the director general of the World Trade Organization.

And by increasing perceptions of shortages, the restrictions have led to hoarding around the world, by farmers, traders and consumers.

“People are in a panic, so they are buying more and more — at least, those who have money are buying,” said Conching Vasquez, a 56-year-old rice vendor who sat one recent morning among piles of rice at her large stall in Los Baños, in the Philippines, the world’s largest rice importer. Her customers buy 8,000 pounds of rice a day, up from 5,500 pounds a year ago.

The new restrictions are just an acute symptom of a chronic condition. Since 1980, even as trade in services and in manufactured goods has tripled, adjusting for inflation, trade in food has barely increased. Instead, for decades, food has been a convoluted tangle of restrictive rules, in the form of tariffs, quotas and subsidies.

Now, with Australia’s farm sector crippled by drought and Argentina suffering a series of strikes and other disruptions, the world is increasingly dependent on a handful of countries like Thailand, Brazil, Canada and the United States that are still exporting large quantities of food.

On a recent morning here in Bangkok, sweaty and heavily tattooed dock workers took turns grabbing 120-pound sacks of rice from a conveyor belt and carrying them on their heads to cranes that whisked the sacks deep into the hold of a freighter bound for the Philippines. Most of the one million tons of rice that leaves the dock here each year follows the same spine-crushing routine.

“I’ve been here 28 years,” said the assistant port manager, Suchart Wuthiwaropas. “This is the busiest ever.”

Powerful lobbies in affluent countries across the northern hemisphere, from Japan to Western Europe to the United States, have long protected farmers in ways factory workers in Detroit could only dream of.

The Japanese protect their rice industry by making it nearly impossible for imported rice to compete. The European Union severely limits beef and poultry imports, and Poland goes further, barring soybean imports as well.

Negotiators have been working for years to free trade in farm goods, but today’s crisis actually makes that more difficult for them. Food protests in places like Haiti and Indonesia that rely heavily on imported food have convinced many nations that it is more important than ever that they grow, and keep, the food their citizens need.

“Every country must first ensure its own food security,” said Kamal Nath, the minister of commerce and industry in India, which has barred exports of vegetable oils and all but the most expensive grades of rice.

But as the United States trade representative, Susan C. Schwab, noted in a telephone interview, “One country’s act to promote food security is another country’s food insecurity.”

International relief groups are trying to help people who can no longer afford food at today’s higher prices, but it is not easy. “We’re having trouble buying the stocks we need for emergency operations,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program in Rome.

Restrictions have delayed efforts to ramp up feeding programs in Somalia and Afghanistan. The food program had long purchased grain from Pakistani traders or national stocks. When Pakistan imposed a ban on most wheat exports this spring, the food program was forced to find a new supplier, creating months-long delays.

“We had to slow down the scale-up of our operation as a result of having to redesign our supply lines,” said Ramiro Lopes da Silva, director of transport and procurement. “That means on the ground there were beneficiaries that went without rations or went without full rations for a portion of time. In the case of Afghanistan, some didn’t get into the program.”

The current dispute over food exports highlights choices that nations have confronted for centuries.

What You Can Do

June 26 More Utahns live in poverty—yet data shows participation in school breakfast programs remain low

More Utahns live in poverty—yet data shows participation in school breakfast programs remains low.

June 26, 2008
by Julia Lyon
The Salt Lake Tribune

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Utah’s poverty rate is inching up, though it remains significantly below the national average, according to data released by the Utah Community Action Partnership Association on Wednesday.

According to the group’s annual poverty report, 10.6 percent of Utahns now live below the poverty level, which is an income of $21,200 for a family of four. The percentage is based on 2006 census survey data, the most recent available.

By contrast, 13.3 percent of Americans were living in poverty during the same year.

The nonprofit’s annual poverty report rounds up data about the state’s low income population, along with its recommendations on how to combat poverty in Utah.

Despite the rising poverty rate, Utah in 2005-2006 had one of the lowest participation rates in the federal school breakfast program, which is geared toward low-income families. That worries anti-hunger advocates who are not convinced all children are eating at home.

“Our suspicion is they are not,” said Gina Cornia, the executive director of Utahns Against Hunger. “They’re going to school hungry.”

Between April 2007 and April 2008, the number of Utahns receiving food stamps went up by just over 9 percent or 11,650 people.

An analysis of housing costs found that 38 percent of renters can’t afford a two-bedroom unit without dipping into income needed for food and other expenses, according to 2007 data. A Utahn earning minimum wage, now at $5.85 an hour, is estimated to need more than two jobs to afford a two-bedroom apartment.

“The ultimate solution is we need to have good jobs,” said Heather Tritten, the UCAPA executive director.

Officials pointed to a free tax preparation effort as a means of enriching average Utahns. In 2008, volunteers helped nearly 4,000 residents receive the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, which UCAPA would like to also have available at the state level.

With the help of the volunteers, this year $5.3 million came back to Utahns, an 11 percent increase from the year before.

“Our whole idea behind that is they would use that money to build assets,” she said. “Often times that’s the difference between people who survive a crisis and people who fall into poverty.”

What You Can Do

June 25 Wisconsin flooding may mean pricier organic foods

Wisconsin flooding may mean pricier organic foods.

June 25, 2008
by M. L. Johnson
Washington Times

MADISON, Wisconsin — Richard de Wilde was still reeling from the more than $600,000 in damage that last summer’s flooding did to his organic vegetable farm when new storms swept through this month, dumping rocks, gravel and silt on some acres, washing away fences and contaminating fields with runoff.

De Wilde, 59, said he’s never experienced anything like the two floods in the past 10 months. After the latest round cost him an estimated $250,000, he’s rethinking how he plants his 120 acres in the southwestern corner of the state, home to a vast number of Wisconsin’s organic farms.

De Wilde, like many organic farmers in the area west of Madison and east of the swollen Mississippi River, grows a wide range of vegetables, including lettuce, salad greens, tomatoes, beets and spinach.

“I decided not to farm a few acres of land that I’ve farmed for I guess 25 years,” he said. “They are the most prone to rocks washed onto it or flooded by the river. I just can’t bear to see it happen again.”

Only California has more organic farms than Wisconsin, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. De Wilde’s Harmony Valley Farm is one of the largest organic farms in the state.

The floods that damaged his and other farms in southern Wisconsin earlier this month are likely to result in fewer fruits and vegetables at regionalfarmers markets this summer and will boost already high prices for organic eggs and meat at national grocery stores in the fall.

A cool spring meant many farmers were about two weeks behind in planting. The storms struck just as their first vegetables emerged from the ground.

“Twelve inches of water falling on, say, this field of beets that were just starting to peak through the soil, it just washed them away,” de Wilde said. “They couldn’t withstand that kind of deluge.”

Organic corn fed to livestock that provide organic eggs, chicken, beef and pork was barely 4 inches high, half of what it should have been, said Eric Newman, vice president of sales for La Farge, Wis.-based Organic Valley, the nation’s largest cooperative of organic farmers.

Now, it’s too late in the season to replant, which means feed is likely to be in shorter supply and more expensive in the fall, when farmers in cold states such as Wisconsin stop grazing their animals. Newman predicted the cooperative will have to raise egg and dairy prices accordingly.

“Unless we pay them more, they can’t afford to purchase that feed,” he said.

The one area where consumers aren’t likely to see a shortage or higher prices is in organic produce sold by large grocers, such as Whole Foods. California supplies over half of the nation’s organic fruits and vegetables and should be able to make up for losses in Wisconsin and other flooded states, Newman said.

That could hurt farms like Driftless Organics in Soldiers Grove, Wis. After flooding last August, farm owners Josh and Noah Engel and manager Mike Lind planted early vegetables such as peas and beans in a field that had dried out well. That land got flooded this month.

Now, they’re scrambling to get spinach and other fast-growing plants into the ground. About half of their business is wholesale, but Lind said they can’t look to grocers to pay more to cover the cost of replanting.

“I think the local food scene is in such its infancy right now, that any outlet that does carry our produce has so many connections with California growers that they could easily make up for what we produce,” he said.

Instead, farms like Driftless Organics and de Wilde’s farm are banking on their community-supported agriculture programs, in which people pay for a share of their harvest up front. CSA members get more produce in good years and less in times of drought or flood.

Many CSA members support farms in other ways as well. For example, de Wilde’s members donated $52,000 to help him rebuild after August’s flood. In comparison, his federal insurance paid $23,000.

Unlike farmers who grow corn, wheat and other commodities, most vegetable farmers don’t have any crop insurance because the programs set up for them are difficult to enroll in and pay relatively little, said Laura Paine, an organic agriculture specialist for the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.

Still, she said farmers like de Wilde are relatively lucky because they can replant and salvage part of the growing season.

That’s not the case for muck farmers, who plant in nutrient-rich soil in low areas drained by ditches. Some muck farms in southern Wisconsin’s Columbia, Adams and Jefferson still have many acres under water, Paine said.

They also tend to plant one or two vegetables, often carrots and onions, in the spring for sale to organic food processors in the fall. “Those folks have basically lost their crops for the year,” Paine said.

What You Can Do

June 20 Strong effort to feed the hungry earns high praise

The Portsmouth Taste of the Nation event is a big success.

June 20, 2008
Seacoastonline.com

PORTSMOUTH, New Hampshire — The numbers don’t lie: 800 and $100,000. The 800 people who attended the 14th annual Taste of the Nation event at Strawberry Banke Museum on Wednesday helped raise a record-breaking $100,000 to fight childhood hunger, a persistent social blight growing at rates not seen in decades.

taste of the nation

Those numbers reflected a vibrant community commitment. The money raised goes to Share Our Strength, the national program with the goal of eradicating the plight of children who endure too many days without sufficient and proper nutrition. Fund-raisers such as Taste of the Nation bridge the gaps between existing effective food programs and the families who need them.

Taste of the Nation has been called a prom for adults, but it’s a responsible prom with a theme of sustainability — where 100 percent of the trash was recycled or composted and attendees were encouraged to walk, bike or carpool to the event.

“Taste brings together people from all parts of the community to put on an event that doesn’t just celebrate culinary talent,” said Megan Shapiro-Ross with Share Our Strength. “It celebrates the community’s spirit.”

It’s a spirit more necessary than ever in a time of a shrinking economy and declining public sector services. In this environment, charity has emerged as a necessary ingredient. The organizers said every dollar raised will go to fight hunger and some 80 percent of it will stay local. According to Share Our Strength, one in six households in the country — or some 35 million Americans and more than 12 million children — deal with what is politely called “food insecurity.”

And you may not have to look far to find people who are short of food. The New Hampshire Food Bank, which distributes food to hundreds of organizations throughout the state, estimates that some 95,000 Granite State residents need its services daily.

Craig Fogg of the Seacoast Family Food Pantry, whose organization was one of those targeted by the fund-raising effort, said the 800 people who showed up almost matched the number of those in Portsmouth alone who struggle to put food on the table.

“The support we get here is just fantastic,” Fogg told the Herald. “We’re really seeing a steady increase in the need, so we appreciate this.”

We applaud not only the people who attended, donated, and took part in efforts such as the $34,000 raised in a silent auction. But the involvement of local chefs and restaurant owners — who provided a wide range of food and drink — showed a charitable commitment above and beyond the call of duty.

“We support the cause, and we will continue to do it until the problem (of child hunger) is solved,” said Joanne Paul of The Library Restaurant, which has donated its services for eight straight years.

We salute all those who took part as a donating vendor, those who attended and made a range of donations and those who volunteered. You not only served a worthy cause but showed that community spirit can be fostered in many ways — including in fine evening wear while eating short ribs and sipping a fine beverage.

What You Can Do

June 16 Economy Raises the Heat in the Kitchen

Restaurateurs face higher costs and fewer diners.

June 16, 2008
Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post

Restaurant owners around the region and country are trying to contend with a double economic whammy that has hit the industry, shaking up menus and causing chefs to consider, among other things, the merits of foie gras.

Food costs are high. Try making a profit on a gourmet pizza when flour prices are up 87 percent. Diners are ordering less or staying home altogether, as their wallets feel lighter from trips to the gas station and from not seeing the for-sale signs on their block turn to sold.

Last week Carmine Marzano, the owner of District restaurant Luigino, changed out of a white chef’s coat and into a suit and went to court for his first bankruptcy hearing. Not only are food costs squeezing his business, but he is also still recovering from when the 2001 terrorist attacks obliterated tourist traffic — an important aspect of his business because he’s just down the street from the convention center. He was forced into debt that has now caught up with him.

“If these conditions don’t change, I don’t see any light,” said Marzano, whose restaurant filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. “We’ve got to find a way to get through this.”

In this region, restaurant owners are taking creative, sometimes painful, steps to keep customers. In some restaurants, filet mignon is off the menu. It’s just simply too expensive an option for owners and diners. Hostesses get sent home early. Managers seat guests and answer the phones. Marzano let his manager go and is doing some of those tasks himself.

At Equinox, a D.C. fine-dining restaurant where business is down around 5 percent, one strategy is to get as much out of a chicken as possible. That means that in addition to using the breast meat for a light chicken salad, the legs feed staff and the bones help create chicken stock.

“You just have to know how to use the whole bird,” said Equinox co-owner Ellen Kassoff-Gray, who said she has accepted that she will be battling crummy economics for months to come. “We told our staff, ‘Save money. We’re going to have some lean times ahead.’ “

And that means no foie gras on the menu, either.

What You Can Do

June 13 Too many Hoosier kids struggling for a lifeline

Rising child poverty presents challenges parallel to devastation by nature.

June 13, 2008
Indy Star

Childhood poverty in Indiana increased at five times the national average between 2000 and 2006, … elevating the rate to the overall national level—18 percent—for the first time ever.

HOOSIER, Indiana — Sometimes, catastrophe strikes with sudden, spectacular force, seizing everyone’s attention and igniting action at every level of society.

Sometimes, it creeps into the community’s fabric inch by inch and day by day, acutely felt by those it directly affects but overlooked by the rest of us until the hour grows late — perhaps too late.

On Wednesday, as eight Indiana counties were declared federal disaster areas and Hoosiers continued to fight back against the weather siege of the past two weeks, the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s authoritative annual Kids Count report hit the news.

The document makes for a grim damage assessment and an ominous social and economic forecast.

Childhood poverty in Indiana increased at five times the national average between 2000 and 2006, according to the report, elevating the rate to the overall national level — 18 percent — for the first time ever.

When one in five children in a state can be classified as poor, a cycle of cause and effect is in motion that seems harder to stop than torrential rain.

Low education, inadequate health care and teenage pregnancy, prime obstacles to getting ahead in life, worsen. Government assistance, which requires tax dollars, suffers from a weakened economic base that is impacted, in turn, by an underqualified work force. Businesses, legitimately hurting and at the same time taking advantage of a desperate immigrant labor pool, push down wages. Churches and charities find themselves spread thinner and thinner.

It is everyone’s problem and everyone’s obligation, in short, much in the way that a natural disaster puts the onus on officialdom, private philanthropy, neighbors and each individual to weigh the damage, critique the preparedness and the response, forget finger-pointing and get to work.

Less obviously than in the case of the flooding mobilization, lots of hard work has been done to alleviate the perfect storm of poverty meeting poverty. The state is providing health insurance to more low-income people and dispensing more food stamps, though it has cut the family assistance rolls and is being sued by needy people over Medicaid changes. In Indianapolis in particular, the corporate and philanthropic sectors have ratcheted up their partnerships with the public schools. The schools themselves — private, traditional public and charter — have taken bold strides to cut into the dropout rate.

Many more sandbags need to be hauled. More boats need to be deployed. But with the falling flood waters, as with the rising tide of poverty, the ultimate rescuers are individuals and families themselves. No child must be left to sink, but all must be taught to swim.

What You Can Do

June 8 Warren teens fight hunger with bake sale

Three teens participate in the Great American Bake Sale.

June 8, 2008
Tim Yovich
Vindy.com

Warren, Ohio — Three Warren teenage friends are not just thinking about the sadness of needs of hungry children in America, they are doing something about it.

“I thought it was an ideal way to help feed the hungry,” said Emily McGlawn, 15, of Warren, a junior at Warren G. Harding High School.

Emily; Jennifer Reese, 16, of Bazetta Township, a Warren Christian School senior; and Decreeta Gary, 15, of Warren, a Harding junior, have recruited 55 amateur and professional bakers to volunteer to make cookies, pies, cakes, breads, cinnamon rolls and cupcakes.

They will be sold from 7 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Friday at the Wal-Mart store off Elm Road in Bazetta and on West Federal Street in downtown Youngstown.

The two venues were selected, Emily said, because they both generate a high volume of foot traffic.

They and their team comprised of three other members are looking to raise $1,000 to help feed children as part of the Great American Bake Sale.

“I’m hoping for more than that,” Emily said.

Not only have the teens amassed 55 bakers, but have gained the support of businesses such as Turning Technologies in Youngstown, Rosetta Stone, a Youngstown restaurant, Starbucks in Niles, Beat Coffee House in Youngstown and Duncan Donuts in Girard.

Most of the sponsors have donated money, Emily explained.

Actually, it was Emily’s mother, Rayenell McGlawn, who planted the idea of a bake sale to help the hungry after reading a magazine article about Share Our Strength, a nationwide organization, and mentioned it to her daughter.

Emily said she has been involved in bake sales and had some knowledge about them. She then contacted Decreeta and Jennifer and they agreed to get involved.

They got most of the volunteer bakers through announcements in churches and schools.

Most of them are members of the First Presbyterian Church of Hubbard, where Emily’s father, Bert McGlawn, is the interim pastor.

Emily even recruited her Foster Drive neighbor, Cecilia Janus, and Janus’ son, Jeffrey, both professional bakers.

“It feels really good to help other children,” Decreeta said, noting she will be baking cakes because others tell her they are exceptionally moist.

“I feel really good about helping other children,” Decreeta said.

Commented Jennifer, “I think it’s really a good cause. We tend to lose focus about the hungry in this country. We should help our own economy.”

The bake sale is not the only good needs the three teens have been involved in.

Emily, Jennifer and Decreeta have volunteered at the Relay for Life events.

Emily will be going on a church mission to South Dakota to tutor the Lakota Indian tribe’s children.

Jennifer also volunteers at the Warren Family Mission.

“It’s kind of sad to see fewer toys for more children” during Christmas, Jennifer said.

And Emily volunteers at the Rescue Mission in Youngstown and helps at the First Presbyterian Church of Warren where her father formerly served as pastor. She helps with the monthly food give-away to help families.

What You Can Do

June 5 As Food Prices Rise, There's No Dancing in the Aisles

Rising food prices makes real people have to make real choices.

June 5, 2008
All Things Considered

DC Metropolitan Area (NPR) - Anita Rhodes, a high school dropout who had a baby on her hip before she turned 20, is a hard worker who is clever with her limited finances.

In Rhodes’ hometown of Oakland, Md., the Mennonites sell damaged goods at basement prices. Until four months ago, Rhodes had never been inside her local Mennonite grocery.

“The things there are all way, way past their due date, but I tried it,” Rhodes says.

A single mom with three kids who makes $374 every two weeks, Rhodes realized that her grocery bill was stretching her earnings too far.

About four months ago, she decided she had no other option and went to the Mennonite store. She came home with a bag of groceries, including a couple boxes of cereal. But her experiment didn’t turn out well.

“The first box I opened had bugs in it,” Rhodes says.

The box of cereal had cost around one dollar. Rhodes returned the box to the store to get her money back. Some people might not have bothered to retrieve a sum so small, but Rhodes’ life doesn’t permit that kind of luxury. And the recent spike in food prices has made what is normally a hard situation even more difficult.

But that hardly captures it. Rhodes goes down her grocery list, ticking off the things she can’t afford: no paper towels, no bottled water, no chips, no cookies, no candy and no toiletries of any kind. She says her teenagers use toothpaste on their pimples. Wherever there is room to cut, Rhodes’ says, she cuts.

“We used to eat 12-grain bread, but now we’re back to white,” she says with a laugh.

Still, there is a drawer of unpaid bills, and every visit to the store brings fresh reason for anxiety.

Walking the aisle of her regular supermarket, Rhodes notes the weekly rise in the price of milk.

“Two weeks ago it was $2.39 a gallon — and I think it was more Monday,” she says.

On May 30, it was $3.49. It’s gone up again.

Rhodes says she doesn’t have a plan for what she’ll do if prices continue to rise. But so far, she says, her children have been understanding about their lifestyle cutbacks.

“They try to make me feel good, like everything’s OK,” she says. “But I was a kid once and I know there are things that they want.”

Rhodes has no doubt that no matter how high food prices get, she will be able to provide for her family. She points out that she was raised in rural Maryland. She is, she says, a country girl.

“I can shoot a deer,” she says. “I can shoot a turkey. So I will feed my kids one way or another.”

The Retired Library Administrator

Three hours away, in northern Virginia, Amanda Rudd stands in front of a refrigerated cheese bin at Costco. Rudd is a retired library administrator wearing small round diamonds in her ears. She lives comfortably in a one-bedroom apartment close to the Potomac River.

Rudd says she started to become aware of the prices around February after sitting down and looking over a pile of store receipts.

“I just said to myself one day at home by myself, I’m really going to have to watch what I buy because my retirement hasn’t changed at all,” she says.

Rudd is middle class, so her cutbacks are not as dramatic as Rhodes. But she says she thinks about her finances every time she opens the refrigerator.

“I used to toss food without [thinking], but now I don’t want to toss anything and some things I virtually don’t buy,” she says.

Rudd no longer carries home blueberries or strawberries. She is careful about the meat she buys. But perhaps one of the biggest changes in her life since February is how she does her shopping. It’s no longer a matter of just hopping in the car and driving to the grocery whenever she needs food.

Instead, she sits down with a stack of local papers every Sunday and clips coupons from different stores — something Rudd hasn’t done since her early married life. Then, with the precision of a NASA engineering crew, she plots out how best to organize her shopping. She goes to Costco because she has an appointment down the road. She will buy bananas and that is all. Then she will make another stop at a Giant grocer several blocks away for another single item.

Basically, Rudd will spend two hours this Monday morning inching her way through the northern Virginia suburbs, stopping every couple blocks to fill her cupboards in the least expensive way.

These are the changes she has made so far. But she worries she will have to go back to work if prices continue to rise.

And the increases are affecting more than middle- and lower-income people. In small ways, it has touched even those who are well off.

The Upper-Middle Class Shopper

Diane Krause walks the back section of the Shoppers Food Warehouse in her Virginia neighborhood, giving a tour of the prepared foods section.

“Let’s see, we have breaded wings, breaded chicken, breaded potatoes,” Krause says. “Breaded anything you can think of.”

The selection of food is very different from the prepared foods offered at her old grocery store.

Until January, Krause was an organics devotee who shopped at Whole Foods Market. Then she had what she refers to as her Whole Foods “moment.”

“I went to Whole Foods because I needed a cake and groceries, and it was my daughter’s 23rd birthday,” she says.

Krause quickly filled her cart with the usual items. The colorful fruit, fresh greens — and picture perfect meats that she’d been taking home without thinking since the Whole Foods Market opened in her community several years ago.

Then she got to check out and did something she hadn’t done for a while.

“I started looking at the prices and what I was buying, and I realized I had $140 worth of food in the cart and I didn’t have three meals,” Krause says. “I realized I couldn’t afford to shop there.”

No one was more shocked by this realization than Krause. She didn’t consider herself the kind of person who had to watch prices. After all, she lives in an affluent neighborhood and has a house on the Shenandoah River, which she bought for cash. She and her husband also own another building. They are, she felt, upper-middle class.

Still, Krause crunched some numbers when she got home and discovered she spent more than $300 a week feeding her family. Although the amount of money she and her husband made hadn’t changed since the year before, they were beginning to stretch their budget. So she decided to make some sacrifices, starting with one of the things she loved most: organic food.

“I won’t buy it right now; it’s too expensive,” she says.

That’s how Krause ended up at Shoppers Food Warehouse. And she isn’t alone in her social circle — she says several of her friends are doing the same thing. She relates a conversation that she had the previous weekend when she and a girl friend were getting ready for a trip.

“We were packing out to go away for the weekend and my one friend had her Whole Foods bags full of clothes, and I said, ‘Wow, it’s good to know that you get another use out of the bags.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, this is the last set.’ I said, ’ What do you mean?’ and she said, ‘I can’t shop there anymore.’”

Krause said she didn’t push further. She says she knew exactly what her friend meant.

What You Can Do

June 1 High food prices, drought threaten Ethiopia again

The 1984 Ethiopian famine was the impetus that brought Share Our Strength into being. Yet now, 24 years later, Ethiopia faces yet another famine. And with food prices rising, this one could be even worse.

June 1, 2008
Barry Malone
Reuters

KOREM, Ethiopia (Reuters) - Clutching an intricate bronze cross he used to dig graves during Ethiopia’s 1984-1985 famine, priest Alemayu Gede prays drought and high food prices will not make him use it as a shovel again.

At the height of the famine that caused more than 1 million deaths and spawned the Band Aid project bringing dozens of top musicians together to raise money, Alemayu helped dig 200 graves a day with the symbol of his faith which he carries everywhere.

“Some used hands, some used sticks and I used this cross,” said Alemayu, now in his late 80s. “There were 350 of us, digging day and night. This place was the valley of death.”

Alemayu is standing at a grave for 300,000 people just outside the northern town of Korem that attracted world attention in 1985 when hundreds of thousands of people streamed down from the surrounding hills looking for food. ad_icon

As survivors gathered in the town this week to unveil a memorial sculpture and lay a ceremonial cornerstone for a hospital paid for by Band Aid, the threat of deadly hunger loomed again in the Horn of Africa country.

About 70 km (44 miles) away in Nehoni, farmer Kassu Belai said seven of his cattle had died as watering holes dried up in the searing heat, forcing pastoralists to crowd their cows, goats and camels around the fast-disappearing liquid.

No rain is coming.

“Our animals are dying,” he said. “And for us that means we must be ready to die.”

Local doctors have already reported more than 400 children suffering from malnutrition, and the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF estimates that 126,000 children are severely malnourished. Only 33,000 are receiving treatment because of what aid workers say is a lack of money.

“We are having a drought in many parts of Ethiopia,” UNICEF’s Ethiopia country director Bjorn Lungvist told Reuters. “And we have rising food prices compounding the problem. This global situation has affected the U.N. World Food Programme’s ability to help.”

The WFP has estimated that it can afford 60 percent less food than it had budgeted for, because of the rise in world food prices that world leaders will tackle at a U.N.-led summit in Rome next week.

OTHER DISASTERS

Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa’s second most populous nation behind Nigeria, itself needs $197 million to meet the food shortfall, the United Nations agencies estimate.

Another problem, aid workers say, is the fact that donor money is being diverted to disasters in China and Myanmar.

In southern Ethiopia, starving children are arriving daily at hospitals, health centers and churches, their emaciated bodies and desperate faces horribly reminiscent of 1985.

UNICEF says 6 million Ethiopian children under 5 may be at risk of malnutrition. The WFP estimates 3.4 million of Ethiopia’s more than 80 million people will need food relief from July to September, in addition to 8 million regularly receiving assistance.

Ethiopia had been held up as an example after cutting its infant mortality rates to 123 deaths per 1,000 births from 166 per 1,000 during its last bad drought five years ago. ad_icon

The record food prices have all but wiped out those gains, aid workers say.

That may spell disaster for another generation of Ethiopians born into the world’s worst hunger. Tesfaye Hagdu, 24, was a baby during the last famine and is now the father of three sons.

“I don’t know why I am here. God maybe. But I worry about our children. People say there is no food in some places now. We need the world to help again,” he said.

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