Last week, on May 5th, there was yet another eruption of violence over rising food prices, this time in Mogadishu, Somalia. Somali police fired into tens of thousands of rioting Somalis, killing at least two.
The rioting broke out as protesters marched against the refusal of traders to accept older 1,000 shilling banknotes, blaming them and a […]

Cyclone Nargis devastated the Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta on May 3, leaving about 62,000 people dead or missing. The U.N., however, has suggested the death toll is likely to be more than 100,000.
The United Nations has reported that only a small portion of international aid so desperately needed for Myanmar’s cyclone victims is making it into the country. There is also […]

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has now joined the growing number of world leaders in warning of the immediate need of addressing the escalating global food prices. On Sunday, the UN top official stated that food production must be increased to help ease the skyrocketing prices.
The Secretary-General also pledged to establish a task force to deal […]

Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank stated  a week ago that global food prices have risen 80% in the past three years. He then warned that at least 33 countries face serious social unrest  as a direct result of these rising food prices.
As I discussed briefly in yesterday’s post, skyrocketing food prices have already […]

This morning I talked with a colleague in Sierra Leone. Francis Webber is the Director of the Sierra Leone Alliance Against Hunger. I want to share his comments.

Life is becoming very hard for the average Sierra Leonean as the price of food commodities are on the rise. Sierra Leone poverty is wide spread over 70% […]

Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, has now joined the growing chorus of world leaders in urging for immediate action to deal with escalating food prices. This storm of rising prices is causing increased hunger around the world, and has incided protests, riots and deadly violence in a growing number of countries. (My post, Agflation: a […]

A new term has been coined to describe the rapidly spiraling escalation in food costs around the world. “Agflation” is now used to discuss the worldwide surge in food commodity prices.
 
This storm surge of rising prices is impacting nearly every agricultural commodity. The price of wheat has more than tripled on the international market since […]

Soaring food prices have brought three days of chaos to Haiti in the latest wave of growing outrage over the inability of the poor to afford even basic foods. Political unrest and violence in Haiti is nothing new, but the past three days of protests and looting is a direct response to the spike in […]

If any man is hungry, this is both a religious and a political concern, and out of a religious concern for one created in God’s image, political means must be divised for ensuring that everyone gets enough bread—which is a suitable enough definition of the act of politics.

                                                            Robert McAfee Brown                                                The Spirit of Protestanism, […]

There is no question that the United Nations Millennium Development Goals provide the world with the most significant opportunity in the history of humankind. The MDGs, established in 2000 by the largest gathering of world leaders ever assembled. These leaders representing 191 countries met in New York City and agreed to a time-frame for ending the world’s top global […]