Tag Archives: Hunger

Child hunger and death rising in Zimbabwe due to drought, charity says

By Katy Migiro

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Child hunger and deaths are rising in Zimbabwe due to the worst drought in two decades, with thousands facing starvation by the end of the year without additional aid, an international charity said on Thursday.

Southern Africa has been hard hit over the past year by drought exacerbated by El Niño, a warming of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which has wilted crops, slowed economic growth and driven food prices higher.

“This is an emergency,” Save the Children UK’s interim chief executive Tanya Steele said in a statement, after visiting Binga, on Zimbabwe’s western border with Zambia.

“Some children are already dying of complications from malnutrition.”

Mothers are foraging for wild berries and roots to feed their children, while going without food themselves for up to five days, the charity said.

The number of under-fives who have died of hunger-related causes in Binga town has reached 200 over the last 18 months — triple the usual rate, it said.

More than 60 million people, two thirds of them in east and southern Africa, are facing food shortages because of droughts linked to El Nino, according to the United Nations.

The U.N. World Food Programme estimates around 4 million people — one in three Zimbabweans — are struggling to meet their basic food needs.

The peak of the emergency is likely to be between October and March, the U.N. children’s fund (UNICEF) said.

Hundreds of young children across the country are being admitted to hospital for malnutrition each month, it said, while child neglect, abuse and child labor are on the rise.

HIV/AIDS is often one of the underlying causes of malnutrition in Zimbabwe, where 15 percent of adults are living with the disease, U.N. figures show.

The number of children suffering malnutrition is expected to rise sharply in the coming months, Save the Children said.

“Most of the severely malnourished children who receive no help are likely to die,” it said.

“Around half of these with moderate acute malnutrition could also perish without some form of intervention.”

El Nino ended in May but meteorologists predict a La Nina event, which usually brings floods to southern Africa, is likely to develop in the second half of this year,

Erratic, late rains in Zimbabwe led to a poor harvest in April, with some families suffering their second or third consecutive year of poor production, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET).

(Reporting by Katy Migiro; Editing by Katie Nguyen.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories.)

Hundreds arrested in Venezuela after latest bout of unrest

A man shouts during a protest over food shortage and against Venezuela's government in Caracas

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan security forces have arrested at least 400 people after the latest bout of looting and food riots in the crisis-hit OPEC member country, local officials said on Wednesday.

Violence engulfed the eastern Caribbean coastal town of Cumana on Tuesday as looters swarmed over dozens of shops and security forces struggled to maintain control.

There were unconfirmed reports on social media of several deaths in Cumana, the capital of Sucre state, and an opposition legislator from the zone said one man was shot dead.

But regional governor Luis Acuna from the ruling Socialist Party said the reported deaths were unrelated to the looting.

“There were only 400 people arrested and the deaths were not linked to the looting,” he told a local TV station, calling the looters vandals encouraged by right-wing politicians.

“I have no doubt they paid them, this was planned,” Acuna said.

Nelson Moreno, governor of Anzoategui state, which neighbors Sucre, said eight people were also arrested on Tuesday in “irregular” situations, a term that usually refers to looting.

With desperate crowds of people chanting “We want food!,” protests and melees at shops have spread across Venezuela in recent weeks, fueled by severe shortages.

Three people were shot dead in separate incidents last week, with a policeman and a soldier arrested in two cases.

According to a local monitoring group, the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, more than 10 incidents of looting are occurring daily across the nation of 30 million people that is suffering a brutal recession and the world’s highest rate of inflation.

Venezuela’s political opposition says President Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez are to blame for failed socialist economic policies. The opposition is pursuing a recall referendum this year in an effort to remove him from office.

But Maduro, 53, says his foes are waging an “economic war” against him and seeking to foment a coup. Government officials say there is not enough time this year to organize a referendum.

Should there be such a vote in 2017 and Maduro loses, his vice president would take over – rather than a new presidential election being held – meaning the ruling “Chavismo” movement would still be in power.

(Reporting by Diego Ore, writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Sarah Dagher; editing by G Crosse)

As populations swell, the greater demand for food could spark unrest

A passerby walks outside a restaurant, the day Hong Kong government releases its latest consumer price

By Lin Taylor

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Swelling populations and demand for food combined with ever scarcer water and land resources could lead to a doubling of food prices and trigger civil unrest in some developing countries, a new report says.

Demand for food with a higher environmental impact, such as meat, has surged as emerging countries like China and India grow in size and in wealth, said Martin Halle, policy analyst at Global Footprint Network (GFN).

“A few things are very clear: the demand for food is going up tremendously because of population growth,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“[Food production] is becoming more unstable because climate change is affecting production, in the context of growing land and water scarcity. There’s very little leeway between supply and demand.”

In the past, countries were able to meet those demands by growing more food on more land. But this has come at a cost, Halle said, since the planet is now running out of water and arable land.

The last time the world saw a severe food crisis was in 2007 and 2008, the report said, when extreme weather events hit major grain producing regions the year earlier, causing spikes in the demand and cost of food.

The higher prices led to social and political unrest in North Africa, the Middle East and South East and South Asia.

The report published this week by GFN and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)said most of the same countries, namely Morocco, Bangladesh, Tunisia and Indonesia, are again at risk if food prices were to increase in the next few years.

CLIMATE CHANGE VOLATILITY

Climate change and extreme weather patterns will further increase volatility in food production, Halle added, meaning food prices will become more unstable in the coming years.

“The real game-changer comes when you factor in the environmental constraints – climate change, land scarcity and water scarcity, and all of these are linked,” said Halle.

Drought is becoming more frequent and severe in places like southern Africa, and that – combined with the recent El Nino phenomenon – is taking a heavy toll on rural lives and economies.

For example, maize prices in South Africa, the continent’s top producer of the staple crop, reached near record highs late 2015, in the face of rolling heat waves and poor rains over key growing areas.

Using models from data across 110 countries, the study found that if the cost of food doubled, household spending would increase by more than 10 percent in 37 countries.

Five African countries – Benin, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ghana – would be the worst affected in terms of highest percentage loss to GDP.

The major emerging economies of China and India are forecast to lose $161 billion and $49 billion in gross domestic product (GDP) respectively with a doubling of food commodity prices.

“What this provides is a litmus test,” said Ivo Mulder, economics advisor at UNEP. “We are overusing what is available for us and we don’t really know what the magnitude of the risk is.”

While higher income countries, like the United States, could benefit from food price hikes, Mulder said, their high demand for meat-based products is contributing to the problem.

“It’s important to be honest about the types of risks that countries face,” he said. “Because even if developed countries are less exposed than developing countries, it doesn’t mean there is no risk at all.”

(Reporting by Lin Taylor @linnytayls, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters that covers humanitarian news, conflicts, land rights, modern slavery and human trafficking, women’s rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)

Urgent measures needed on living conditions in Greek migrant camps

People queue for free food at a makeshift camp for migrants and refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni

STRASBOURG (Reuters) – Urgent measures are need to address overcrowding and poor living conditions in refugee and migrant camps in Greece, Europe’s top rights watchdog warned on Wednesday.

The Council of Europe, which brings together 47 countries, said some facilities were “sub-standard” and able to provide no more than the most basic needs such as food, hygiene products and blankets.

The report echoes warnings by other rights groups and aid agencies who say Greece has been unable to care properly for the more than 800,000 people reaching its shores in the last year, fleeing wars or poverty in the Middle East and Africa.

The Council described dire living conditions in several sites visited on a March 7-11 trip, just before the European Union and Turkey reached a deal that reduced arrivals but increased the number of people held in detention awaiting asylum decisions or deportation.

It said in its report that people who reached Greece were locked away in violation of international human rights standards and lacked legal access.

At Greece’s Nea Kavala temporary transit camp, people were left burning trash to keep warm and sleeping in mud-soaked tents, according to the report.

The Council called for the closure of a makeshift camp in Idomeni, where some 10,000 people have been stranded en route to northern Europe due to the closure of Macedonia’s border.

Germany has taken in most of the 1.3 million refugees and migrants who reached Europe across the Mediterranean in the past year, triggering bitter disputes among the 28 EU member states on how to handle the influx.

Europe’s deal with Turkey last month gave its leaders some breathing space but has come under pressure since Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, one of the sponsors of the accord, stepped down.

The morality and legality of the deal has been challenged by human rights groups, however, and a provision to grant Turkish citizens visa-free travel to Europe in exchange for Ankara’s help remains politically contentious.

In a separate report, a trio of European Parliamentarians on Tuesday described the poor conditions faced by people who have been returned to Turkey under the deal.

“We have seen how the migration policies imposed by the European Union have terrible consequences on the lives of thousands of people,” said Cornelia Ernst, a German member of the European Parliament and a co-author of that report.

“Turkey has been hired as a deportation agency, putting into practice the migration policies designed in Brussels.”

The left-wing deputies said on their May 2-4 visit to Turkey they had met people who complained of not being able to claim asylum in Europe, which would run counter to international humanitarian law.

They also described poor detention conditions, confiscation of private property and widespread difficulties in getting access to legal help or information, among other issues.

(Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska; Editing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Hugh Lawson)

Stealing food not a crime if you really need it in Italy

ROME (Reuters) – Stealing a little food should not be considered a crime if you really need it, Italy’s highest court has ruled.

Ukrainian national Roman Ostriakov was living rough in the northern Italian city of Genoa in 2011 when he was caught trying to steal some cheese and sausage worth 4.07 euros ($4.71) from a supermarket.

He was found guilty of theft and sentenced to six months in jail and a handed a 100-euro fine.

The state prosecutor appealed the sentence on a technicality, arguing that he should not have been found guilty of theft, but rather attempted theft, because he had been caught before he had left the supermarket premises.

But Italy’s Supreme Court annulled the verdict.

“The condition of the accused and the circumstances in which he obtained the merchandise show that he had taken the little amount of food he needed to overcome his immediate and essential requirement for nourishment,” it said in a written ruling.

(Reporting by Crispian Balmer)

Hyenas attack hungry women as Somaliland’s drought deepens

Women pray as they wait for assistance at Hariirad town of Awdal region, Somaliland.

By Emma Batha

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Somaliland risks descending into famine amid a severe drought that has killed thousands of livestock, an international aid agency warned on Friday, adding there were reports of some women being set upon by hyenas after collapsing from hunger.

“Many people are saying it’s the worst drought in memory,” said Mary Griffin, spokeswoman for Islamic Relief, who visited the region this month.

She said malnourished mothers were unable to breastfeed their babies, and herders were feeding cardboard boxes to their surviving animals because there was no grass left for grazing.

Adan Shariff Gabow, Islamic Relief’s manager for Puntland, neighboring Somaliland, said there were cases in Somaliland of women attacked by starving hyenas.

“They fell down, malnourished, and we understand they were then set on by the animals,” he said.

The United Nations says 1.7 million people – many of them nomadic – need aid in Somaliland and Puntland, Somalia’s two semi-autonomous regions in the north.

Griffin said there was a “terrible sense of deja vu” in the Horn of Africa where a 2011 drought in southern Somalia killed more than a quarter of a million people.

Aid agencies were criticized then for responding too late to warning signs.

Hany El-Banna, chairman of the Muslim Charities Forum, who also visited the region, called on the world not to repeat the same mistakes.

“We cannot wait like we did in 2011 when we acted too late,” he said. “We need to deal with this today – if we don’t this drought will turn into a famine.”

CLIMATE CHANGE

The drought has been caused by successive poor rainy seasons made worse by El Nino conditions in the Horn of Africa.

Thousands of goats and cows have perished and even camels – which are more drought-resistant – are dying.

Britain’s shadow development secretary Diane Abbott, who accompanied aid agencies on the trip, plans to raise the issue in parliament next week.

“I spoke to families who had 500 or more animals three months ago, and now are left with 20 or fewer,” she said.

“For people who rely on their animals for meat, milk and trade, it’s the equivalent of losing your entire life savings.”

The United Nations says malnutrition-related deaths have been reported in Awdal region, bordering Ethiopia, where sprawling makeshift camps have sprung up as people wait for aid to arrive.

Griffin who visited a camp at Qol Ujeed, in Awdal, said 1,200 people were living there without a single toilet. Many of their dead animals are buried around the camp.

Nimo Mohamed Abdi, a mother of three, described how she had lost all her livestock – more than 180 animals including camels – in three months.

“We were living by the coast then and the animals died so quickly, one after another, that we could do nothing with their corpses but throw them into the sea,” Griffin quoted her as saying.

The United Nations has launched a $105 million appeal.

Abbott said conditions that pastoral communities would expect to see every seven to 10 years were becoming an annual occurrence.

“With the increasing effects of climate change we need to look at how to build more resilience; more boreholes, dams, ways to collect and store rainwater.”

(Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, which covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org to see more stories.)

Humanitarian Aid sets off to besieged Syria after blocked for months

A bird flies near a torn Syrian national flag in the city of Qamishli

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Dozens of trucks carrying humanitarian aid set off on Thursday for the town of Rastan in Syria’s Homs province for a delivery to a besieged area where supplies have not been able to enter for months, the Red Crescent said.

Rastan was one of the first areas to be bombed by Russian warplanes when Moscow intervened in the five-year Syrian war in September. New government air strikes have targeted the area in recent days as a partial truce in western Syria has unraveled.

A spokesman for the Red Cross, which was to deliver the aid alongside the Red Crescent, said Thursday’s convoy included 65 trucks carrying food and medical aid. He said it was one of the largest joint humanitarian aid deliveries in Syria.

United Nations and Red Cross aid deliveries have reached a number of besieged areas in Syria this year, including during a U.S.-Russian-brokered cessation of hostilities agreement that took effect in February.

The truce is now in tatters after fighting intensified, and peace talks in Geneva appeared to collapse this week.

Fresh fighting has displaced tens of thousands more people in recent days near the northern city of Aleppo, the United Nations says. Many locations besieged by government forces and their allies, Islamic State fighters and other insurgents remain hard to reach, aid agencies say.

(Reporting by John Davison, editing by Larry King)

Japan quake survivors face low food supply, closed factories

By Minami Funakoshi and Kaori Kaneko

TOKYO (Reuters) – The Japanese share market fell more than 3 percent on Monday after a series of earthquakes measuring up to 7.3 magnitude struck a southern manufacturing hub, killing at least 42 people and forcing major companies to close factories.

About 30,000 rescue workers were scouring the rubble for survivors and handing out food to those unable to return to their homes following the quakes which struck Kyushu island from Thursday. The biggest hit near Kumamoto city early on Saturday.

“There are still missing people. We want to make further efforts to rescue and save people and prioritize human lives,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told parliament, adding he aimed to declare the region a disaster zone to free up reconstruction funds.

The Nikkei stock index ended 3.4 percent lower, hit by a stronger yen and as investors weighed the impact of the disaster on manufacturers’ supply chains and insurers.

Factories for major manufacturers including Toyota, Sony and Honda were closed, disrupting supply chains around the country.

Japan’s atomic regulator declared three nuclear plants in the region safe, giving a degree of comfort to a country deeply scarred by the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 that was sparked by an earthquake and tsunami.

All commercial flights to the damaged Kumamoto airport were canceled and the bullet train service to the region was suspended.

Food was in short supply as roads remained cut off by landslides. Evacuees made an SOS signal out of chairs at a school playground, hoping to catch the attention of supply helicopters, Japanese media reported.

“Yesterday, I ate just one piece of tofu and a rice ball,” said the mayor of one of the areas affected. “What we’re most worried about now is food.”

Of more than 500 quakes hitting Kyushu since Thursday, more than 70 have been at least a four on Japan’s intensity scale, strong enough to shake buildings.

DESPERATE SEARCH

The Kumamoto region is an important manufacturing hub and home to Japan’s only operating nuclear station.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the government would “take all the necessary measures” to support companies affected by the disaster and the economy more broadly, including tapping into reserve funds of 350 billion yen ($3.24 billion).

Abe said a sales tax increase next year would go ahead barring a financial crisis or major natural disaster, without elaborating on whether the quakes qualified as such a disaster.

On the stock market, Sony Corp and Toyota Motor led the sharp falls among manufacturers, dropping 6.8 percent and 4.8 percent respectively. Nissan Motor and Honda Motor both lost about 3 percent. Insurers and utilities were also sold, with nuclear plant operator Kyushu Electric Power slumping nearly 8 percent.

Toyota said it would suspend production at plants across Japan after the quakes disrupted its supply chain.

Electronics giant Sony said its Kumamoto image sensors plant would remain suspended. One of the company’s major customers for the sensors is Apple. Honda said production at its motorcycle plant in southern Japan would remain suspended through Friday.

Numerous aftershocks have rattled the region with one of 5.8 magnitude on Monday evening. There were no immediate reports of new damage or injuries.

Automotive chipmaker Renesas Electronics said earlier the aftershocks were keeping it from installing replacement equipment at a quake-hit plant.

The Kumamoto government said 42 people had been killed and nine were missing.

Thirty three people have been confirmed dead in Saturday’s quake and nine in the smaller tremor just over 24 hours earlier. The government said about 190 of the injured were in serious condition and some 110,000 people had been displaced.

Rescuers digging with their bare hands dragged some elderly survivors, still in pyjamas, out of the rubble and onto makeshift stretchers made of tatami mats.

“We can’t take a bath, we don’t have any clothes to change into – we just have what we ran out in,” a woman at one evacuation center told TBS television.

Public broadcaster NHK showed footage of forests and rice fields torn apart by the quake, saying one 50 km (31 miles) strip shifted almost 2 meters (6 feet) sideways.

Quakes are common in Japan, part of the seismically active “Ring of Fire” which sweeps from the South Pacific islands, up through Indonesia, Japan, across to Alaska and down the west coast of North, Central and South America.

At the other end of the ring this weekend, Ecuador’s biggest earthquake in decades killed at least 262 people, caused devastation in coastal towns and left an unknown number trapped in ruins.

A 9 magnitude quake and tsunami in northern Japan in March 2011 caused the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986, shutting down the nuclear industry for safety checks and sending radiation spewing across the countryside.

Nearly 20,000 people were killed in the 2011 tsunami.

(Additional reporting by Linda Sieg, Elaine Lies, William Mallard, Shinichi Soashiro, Chris Gallagher, Kiyoshi Takenaka, Tim Kelly and Thomas Wilson; Writing by Stephen Coates; Editing by Robert Birsel and Ian Geoghegan)

U.N. says food situation in Iraq’s Falluja extremely worrying

A displaced Iraqi child, who fled from Islamic State violence from Saqlawiyah, near Falluja, is seen in the town of Khalidiya, north of Baghdad

GENEVA (Reuters) – The food situation for 60,000 civilians trapped in the besieged Iraqi city of Falluja is extremely worrying and likely to deteriorate unless aid gets into the city, the U.N. World Food Programme said on Monday.

The Iraqi army, police and Iranian-backed Shi’ite Muslim militias – backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition – have maintained a near total siege on the Islamic State-held city, which is located 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, since late last year

“As the siege continued in Falluja for the third consecutive month, no sign of improvement was recorded in March; food prices remain extremely high, and stocks in shops and households are depleting. In March, the price of wheat was six times more expensive than in December,” the report said.

“For the third consecutive month, respondents from Hay Alwahda sub-district reported that shops and markets had exhausted all food supplies including wheat, sugar, rice, vegetable oil and lentils,” the report said.

The report was based on a mobile phone survey conducted in March. But it said reaching respondents had become increasingly difficult and very limited information was available, especially as armed opposition groups had shut down transmitter towers to stop people using mobile phones.

“Aid has not reached Falluja since the government recaptured nearby Ramadi in December 2015, with supply routes cut off by Iraqi forces and the armed groups preventing civilians from leaving,” the report said.

There were reports that people wanting to leave the city and seek safety were unable to do so, it said.

Last week a report from New York-based Human Rights Watch said desperate residents were making soup from grass and using ground date seeds to make flour for bread.

(Reporting by Tom Miles, editing by Richard Balmforth)

Drought Protest Turns Violent

MANILA (Reuters) – Philippine police opened fire as a protest by thousands of rice farmers who lost their crops turned violent on Friday, killing one and wounding about a dozen, a leader of a farming group said.

About 6,000 farmers blocked a portion of the main highway in North Cotabato province on the southern island of Mindanao, demanding government assistance after drought linked by some to El Nino hit hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland.

“Loud bursts of gunfire erupted,” Norma Capuyan, leader of a farmers’ group, told reporters. “There was heavy volume of fire. We ran to a church compound and the police surrounded us.”

A farmer died on the spot and about a dozen others were wounded in the legs and shoulders, Capuyan said, adding the police first tried to disperse them with water cannon but started shooting when they held their ground.

North Cotabato Governor Emmylou Mendoza said about 20 police were wounded when the farmers attacked them with sticks and stones. She said the first shot was fired by the protesters.

The police issued a statement saying it was investigating.

“Any violation of national police rules and regulations shall be meted (out) with the appropriate penalty,” national police spokesman Chief Superintendent Wilben Mayor said in a statement.

The protest began on Wednesday when farmers barricaded the highway in Kidapawan, demanding a dialogue with the governor and the release of 15,000 sacks of rice she had promised to them as relief.

The agriculture ministry said more than 300,000 hectares of farmland had been affected by drought, causing loses of about 5.3 billion pesos ($115.09 million) in rice and corn. It said the effects of El Nino were minimal.

(Reporting by Manuel Mogato and Enrico dela Cruz; Editing by Nick Macfie)