The golden arches were first sighted in Porirua in 1976. Just 20 years later, there were 100 McDonald's restaurants in the country. Nowadays, fast food restaurants are an omnipresent feature of the landscape of urban New Zealand.

Kiwis flocked to the cities in the latter half of the 20th century, and as we moved, so too did the source of our lunch and dinner.

New Zealand has the third-highest adult obesity rate in the OECD, and rates continue to increase - yet in many of New Zealand's most socially disadvantaged suburbs, fast food and other unhealthy options are often the only pick on the menu.

Children living in deprived neighbourhoods are almost three times as likely to be obese compared to those living in more affluent areas, according to the New Zealand Health Survey.

The Government has taken a broad approach, focusing on messages of nutrition and increased physical activity.

But researchers from Auckland University of Technology say the answer lies in building food havens - places with food that is culturally accessible, affordable and desirable, found on a family, community or local business level.

"... Healthy eating campaigns that ignore the cultural meaning of food may miss their target audience, and there should be more focus on promoting healthy food that people in communities over-represented in obesity feel connected to."

The need for food havens first occurred to public health researcher Dr Radilaite Cammock when she was trying to find groceries for her kids in her South Auckland neighbourhood.

"The idea came to mind when trying to find a healthy market to give my kids' food," she said. "I couldn't find anywhere good close to where I live."

Cammock says change needs to come from empowering communities rather than expecting the big corporations to do a sudden U-turn on providing healthy food.

"If you look to the big food organisations to change, you miss some great stuff that can change in the community," she said. "We've spoken to young entrepreneurs who are trying to sell healthy food with a cultural connection."

In South Auckland, enterprises like Papatoetoe Food Hub and Otara Kai Village have been providing healthy and affordable kai with a focus on culture and community.

Developed by the Southern Initiative, Papatoetoe Food Hub wants to build supply and demand for good food in South Auckland.

Since July 2019, they've repurposed around 300kg of unused produce a week - some from Papatuanuku Marae and Pukekohe farmers - but mainly from the New World across the road.

Bin says they may be the only business in New Zealand based on rescuing food.

"It's a whole cycle. Our food waste goes into compost, which we then use in planter boxes where we grow our own food. We've been composting about 100kg a week."

They hope to be part of shifting South Auckland's dependency on fast food. Continue reading

• Image: Newsroom

The panel says the waste is morally, economically and environmentally unacceptable.

Giving the panel his endorsement, Pope Francis tweeted: "We must put an end to the culture of waste, we who pray to the Lord to give us our daily bread. Food waste contributes to hunger and to climate change."

The expert panel defines food waste as that which is discarded by the consumer, restaurants or supermarkets and in rich countries, households and restaurants prepare large portions, resulting in "plate waste", leftovers that often go uneaten.

British advocacy group WRAP says about one-third of all food produced in the world is lost or wasted.

It estimates that by reducing consumer food waste could save between US$120 and 300 billion per year by 2030.

WRAP's chief executive Marcus Gover told the conference that about 10 million tonnes of food is lost or wasted in the UK each year.

He says this amount of food is enough to fill St Peter's Square to the top of the basilica 10 times over.

He illustrated a study showing that, of 100 potatoes ordered by a London restaurant, only 25 were actually eaten.

WRAP maintains that strategies to achieve economic and environmental gains by reducing food waste will also improve economic performance and tackle climate change by reducing the amount of food that is wasted in agriculture, transport, storage and consumption.

The appeal to address food waste came at the end of a two-day conference at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences attended by more than 50 scientists, academics, economists, corporate leaders and United Nations officials from 24 countries.

"We call on our leaders, and on all of us, for deepened commitment to action toward halving food loss and waste by 2030 — an achievable goal based on existing knowledge and technology," a statement said.

Sources

• WRAP
• Reuters

But chances are that the details of their lives — from their phones and their politics to their dinner plates and how they raise their kids — are still ruled by some sort of a religious impulse, says author David Zahl.

Zahl is the founder of the popular nondenominational Christian Mockingbird Ministries project, which formed 12 years ago to reach out to young adults who felt they had been "burned" by the church.

His most recent book, "Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do About It," suggests that American culture is not actually becoming more secular at all.

It's simply becoming more religious about more things, with people increasingly attaching their natural yearning to feel like enough to more and more things.

"If you want to understand what makes someone tick, or why they're behaving the way they are, trace the righteousness in play, and things will likely become clear," he writes.

Zahl, who also works for the Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, spoke to Religion News Service about the secular religiosities he sees ruling people's lives and anxieties. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Can you define "seculosity" and how you see it play out in the world around you?

It's a mashup of secular and religiosity.

It really refers to what I call religious devotion or religious feeling or even the impulse when it's directed at earthly rather than heavenly objects.

But also I wanted didn't want to ascribe belief in something divine or supernatural. So that's why I chose the word seculosity.

Especially as a young parent, I would see codes of behavior, people clinging to something that's righteous.

There's an orthodox way and almost like a heretical way of raising children.

People were constantly at war with each other.

You would see a parent at a playground correcting a perfect stranger.

And it felt to me like what you would see sometimes in a church event.

So I saw all the young parents around me always get so anxious, like they were being graded all the time.

Are there other areas you see it playing out?

Certainly you see it in things like exercise.

I remember being invited to a SoulCycle class, which is the classic example.

We're all facing one direction and we're standing and we're kneeling and there's someone at the front who just starts spouting out witty sayings.

But they weren't just about exercise, they were about betterment and perfection.

The community and the ritual that developed around exercise to me felt a lot like the small groups that I had been a part of in churches in the past.

Take something like food.

Look at the emphasis on the purity of where ingredients are sourced, what's being put into you, the way that we used to call it fasting and now we just call it a cleanse.

The moral language, the anxiety around food, the fear of getting caught eating fast food — again, the judgments we wield against each other based on diet. It felt like a lot of anxiety.

A lot of sense of righteousness was at stake in where people were eating and what they were eating and there was a lot of hiding.

And any time there's hiding there is usually some form of judgment or condemnation that people are afraid of.

I can go on and on. T.S. Eliot once said half the harm that is done in this world is by people who are absorbed in the "endless struggle to think well of themselves."

A lot of times we turn to these seculosities to make us feel better about ourselves but they end up making us feel worse.

Do you see the proliferation of social media and technology as exacerbating seculosity? Perhaps in the ways people present certain kinds of images of themselves online?

Absolutely.

But I don't think this tendency is something that's invented by social media or technology.

Church people have always felt that there was sort of Sunday face that you would put on where everyone was sort of shiny and happy sitting in church wearing nice clothes and got the sense that everything was going well.

Then there was the rest of the week where you were just who you were.

That phenomenon of like a "Sunday face" versus the "rest of the week face" — that's social media to me.

It's the gap between who you should be and who you actually are, which creates a lot of dissonance and a lot of, again, anxiety but also loneliness.

And the comparisons that people make each other jump through, it's pretty merciless.

In the church, there was a backdrop of sin and the idea that people are not perfect.

Without that you just have pressure to curate and put up a happy face or sophisticated face or effortlessly sophisticated face at all times.

That's really daunting.

There's some real spiritual and emotional fallout in that.

Do you think people of faith are less prone to seculosity?

In a lot of ways — I call it Jesusland, the kind of bastardized form of Protestant Christianity that dominated a lot of the West, or at least America — it resembles seculosity much more than medieval Christianity or Reformation Christianity or first-century Christianity.

It's a lot about church as the place to assert or earn righteousness, rather than a place to receive it.

Speaking myself as someone who is involved in a couple of churches, I found myself very, very, very much prone to seculosity and everything I describe in the book.

So I don't know.

Seculosity is not so much about worship so much as self-justification, like where people are finding their sense that they're justified, they're enough, they're OK.

That's part of what religion is about, a sort of guilt management system where you end up offloading your guilt or your shame, receiving some sort of better sense of yourself.

People are very much doing the same thing.

When the seculosities exhaust you, when they beat you into the total nervous wreck, that's usually when you find real faith, something that's not based in your performance.

What message do you hope religious and nonreligious people will walk away with?

One of the things I wanted to do in the book was not give people another set of things to feel like they're failing at.

I really wanted to point to whatever it is, wherever it is, a person finds some form of grace — that can be in the form of forgiveness, mercy, love in the midst of deserving something else.

That is what I hope and pray people will cling to and value a little bit more deeply.

Because you're not going to get it from your bank account or social media.

We're not going to get the gift of humanizing and absolving like that.

But I think we all tend to have something that functions in that way in our life, and I hope we can figure out a way to stay closer to it.

Can houses of worship aid in that journey?

I do have some prescriptions for what I think it would take for religion in this country to function again in that way, as a religion of grace rather than one that drives exhaustion and hypocrisy and perfectionism.

We have to evaluate our relationship to our performance, to find some sense of dignity in our being rather than our doing.

It's a little cliché, perhaps, but I think one thing that would help is talking a bit more about death.

So much of that anxiety that I'm describing is stuff that you don't think about on your deathbed.

Ultimately, death is the great equalizer. And I think that it actually, instead of being morose, it shows us that our performance really isn't the most important thing going on in life.

Our relationships are more important.

You realize that everyone already feels like a failure.

We all have some sort of treadmill that we're running on.

People are suffering under enormous burdens of who they should be. And what would it look like for our houses of faith to be places you go when you mess up rather than places you flee from when you have?

Religion at its best has been a place where we can go to with our guilt and our shame.

When you cut religion out of your life, a lot of times it looks like you're cutting out the oppressive part, the mandates.

But when you do that you're also cutting off the forgiveness.

Clergy used to be your local forgiveness person.

Wouldn't it be beautiful if our houses of worship were places we could go to unload, to atone, to be refreshed, to receive hope beyond your performance that day?

• Aysha Khan is a Boston-based journalist reporting on American Muslims and millennial faith for RNSFirst published in RNS. Republished with permission.
• Image: RNS

The charity event was hosted by the Centre for Marriage and Family (CMF) on 10 November in Tawa, near Wellington.

The American Filipino-born priest who travels the world sharing the importance of family dinners, delighted attendees with a live cooking demonstration while at the same time sharing biblical truths such as a knife being the double-edged sword of the Bible.

Renowned New Zealand chef Martin Bosley also spoke at the event about his culinary journey and his charity work with prisoners, called Prison Gate to Plate.

People were able to taste the gourmet pasta meal prepared by prisoners from the Rimutaka prison.

Director of CMF Patrica Sison said "Both Fr Leo and Martin Bosley are involved in the important work of helping prisoners out of a life recidivism."

In the afternoon session, Leo, who is also a third-degree black belt instructor, treated the audience to a live martial arts demonstration as he explained aspects of spiritual warfare.

Sison said Leo is a multi-talented man with a deep prayer life and it shows in the ways he is able to relate faith with food and other aspects of life and, at the same time, communicate deep spiritual truths; much in the same way Jesus would have done through his parables.

Leo is the founder of Plating Grace, a movement to bring families back to the dinner table.

He believes the simple act of creating and sharing a meal can strengthen all kinds of relationships.

"We believe in the power of food to do good - for all people, no matter their background - as food is the common denominator that can bridge people and culture" he says.

He says it's important to sit down at the table and have dinner with your kids, "it's good for them and will make them better people."

Leo is also an award-winning author and radio and tv show host. He has a weekly tv show called Savouring Our Faith on the Catholic Channel EWTN.

He lives in a consecrated community called Voluntas Dei (The Will of God).

Source

Supplied: Patrica Sison, Director Centre for Marriage and Family

Typhoid and skin diseases are rife, malnutrition is on the rise, while, in remote areas, schools and medical centres have been shut down because there is no clean water.

Drought and frosts have wiped out subsistence crops in PNG's highlands, where villagers are facing months without food if they do not receive help.

Mt Hagen's Archbishop Douglas Young described the situation as dire with thousands of highland people in distress as their food gardens were destroyed, and now floods were having an impact.

"First it was frost and drought, now heavy rain and flooding," he said.

"It's one extreme to another.

"Across the archdiocese, most of my people are short of sweet potato so they are short of their staple.

"In the high risk, high altitude areas it will be months before the next crop comes on line."

About one million people live in PNG's highlands.

Many people live in isolated villages with no means of transport in or out. This is also the case in border areas like the vast Western Province.

"The real issue is whether people have roads. It is the remote areas that don't participate in the cash economy they are most affected," Archbishop Young said.

"If they are able to market other crops, they are able to get money and buy the food they need."

Archbishop Young said getting emergency food to remote villages was slow, and government distribution attempts were "not very successful".

"The Government is stuck with bureaucrats," he said.

"We were able to use our parish structure - people on the ground everywhere, volunteers and service providers.

"But sometimes the logistics overwhelm everybody. The cost of transport is twice as much as the food itself."

Sources

• Catholic Leader
• Image: ABC

The destruction has caused an outcry from anti-poverty campaigners who say the food should have been given to the poor

A petition against the action on change.org has already attracted more than 300,000 signatures.

Moscow banned many Western food imports last year in retaliation for sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union and others during the confrontation over Ukraine.

The change.org petition states: "Sanctions have led to a major growth in food prices on Russian shelves. Russian pensioners, veterans, large families, the disabled and other needy social groups were forced to greatly restrict their diets, right up to starvation."

"If you can just eat these products, why destroy it?"

Russia's food safety watchdog said officials seized 436 tonnes of various food products on August 6 and destroyed more than 320 tonnes.

A huge pile of Western-produced cheese was destroyed in front of television camera.

One priest from the Russian Orthodox Church, which enjoys close ties with the Kremlin, expressed his anger.

"My grandmother always told me that throwing away food is a sin," the cleric, Alexey Uminsky, said.

He was quoted by the website 'Orthodoxy and the World' as saying: "This idea is insane, stupid and vile."

"Such an idea can only appear with a man who has been in no need for anything in recent decades and is ready to do something like that for populism and quasi-patriotism," he added.

Mr Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week the situation should be not blown out of proportion.

"The primary goal is to stop the contraband . . . Second, to protect economic interests of the country hurt by the contraband. Third, and in fact the most important thing, is safeguarding the health of citizens," he told reporters.

While Peskov said the Kremlin was keeping an eye on the change.org petition, he said banned food was arriving without necessary certificates and could therefore pose health risks.

Sources

• Daily Mail
• Vatican Radio
• Image: Sydney Morning Herald

His comments came on Friday at a UN conference on nutrition hosted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The Pontiff condemned speculation in food commodities and greed, saying they undermined the global fight against poverty and hunger.

"It is also painful to see that the struggle against hunger and malnutrition is hindered by market priorities, the primacy of profit, which have reduced foodstuffs to a commodity like any other, subject to speculation, also of a financial nature", Pope Francis told delegates from over 170 countries.

The Holy Father told delegates that a fairer distribution of food "cannot remain in the limbo of theory".

Calling on rich nations to share their wealth and denounce waste, excessive consumption and unequal food distribution, the Holy Father highlighted the "paradox of plenty"; where enough food is produced globally for everyone, but not enough for all to eat.

"The hungry remain at the street corner and ask to be recognised as citizens, to receive a healthy diet. We ask for dignity, not for charity".

The UN estimates that a third of all the food that is produced is lost to waste and spoilage.

Sources

• La Stampa
• Associated Press
• Reuters
• Image: Yahoo

• I'm not in the Te Tai Tokerau electorate.
• I'm not Maori.
• I have no particular affinity towards Hone Harawira nor necessarily agree with most of what he says.

Hone Harawira however was a strong voice for the disadvantaged, particularly the poor.

His "Feed the Kids" campaign was a tangible example of his concern. Even during the election he protested very strongly to his own party, Internet Mana, at their plans to promote cannabis law reform at the expense of feeding kids.

"Why am I seeing all this shit about weed and so ……. little about feed," Hone Harawira wrote, rather ironically, in a leaked email. (But I digress.)

The Internet-Mana party quickly scrapped the cannabis policy.

Such is his passion, that in my view, the absence of Hone Harawira's voice will make the Parliament less representative and potentially the country less aware of some pressing social concerns.

The likelihood of Hone Harawira being part of any shade of government coalition was always going to be slim.

However it was from opposition that Hone Harawira's "Feed the Kids Bill" received the support of 70% of New Zealanders and got the Prime Minister to do something about supporting food in schools.

There is no excuse for even 2,000 New Zealand children to be living in poverty. That there are more than 200,000 New Zealand children living in severe poverty is a disgrace.

Let's face it, the Internet-Mana party is probably more a "flashmob" than a long-term political party, it may last for an even shorter time than the most optimistic pundits allowed.

I think it's sad, Hone Harawira, a champion voice for the disadvantaged will no longer be heard in our Parliament, however that's the system.

Hone Harawira's voice was credible when he spoke up for the poor, however he came unstuck; trading his credibility for the promise of money.

We are only as good as the friends we choose, or as The Beatles put it 50 years ago, "Money can't buy me love".

Fighting Child Poverty

In early August, more than 1,000 people packed St Paul's Anglican Cathedral in Wellington for a Catholic and Anglican initiative to hear politicians address child poverty.

The meeting expressed concern about low incomes, gambling, alcohol, inadequate housing and debt. Archbishop Dew called on all politicians to make child poverty their top priority.

Archbishop Dew also said that child poverty is not just something for politicians to fix but something for the whole community to do something about.

True enough.

There are many ways to fight child poverty and they don't always just involve the Government opening the tax payers' wallet. But without the constant reminders from the likes of Hone Harawira, who will focus us to do something about it?

As they say, you can tell a lot about a society from the way it treats its most vulnerable.

- John Murphy is a Marist priest working in digital media at the Marist Internet Ministry, New Zealand.

"Since eating this pearl millet, the children are rarely ill," raves Mankar, a slim man with a gray beard, worn clothing and gold-rimmed glasses.

Mankar and his family are participating in a large-scale nutrition experiment.

He is one of about 30,000 small farmers growing the variety, which has unusually high levels of iron and zinc — Indian researchers bred the plant to contain large amounts of these elements in a process they call "biofortification."

The grain is very nutritional," says the Indian farmer, as his granddaughter Kavya jumps up and down in his lap. It's also delicious, he adds. "Even the cattle like the pearl millet."

Mankar's field on the outskirts of the village of Vadgaon Kashimbe is barely 100 meters (328 feet) wide and 40 meters long.

The grain will be ripe in a month, and unless there is a hailstorm — may Ganesha, the elephant god, prevent that from happening — he will harvest about 350 kilograms of pearl millet, says the farmer. It's enough for half a year.

The goal of the project, initiated by the food aid organisation Harvest Plus, is to prevent farmers like Mankar and their families from going hungry in the future.

In fact, the Dhanshakti pearl millet is part of a new "Green Revolution" with which biologists and nutrition experts hope to liberate the world from hunger and malnutrition. Continue reading.

Source: Spiegel Online

Image: AFP

"Our guests will benefit significantly from the change in law", she told CathNews.

"Our chefs are very creative but will welcome the opportunity to offer a greater variety of food and further improve our guests' nutrition.

"I'd call this redistribution of food a 'win-win", said Nance Thomson.

In June this year the Food Safety Minister Nikki Kay announced that a 'Good Samaritan' clause will be introduced to the Food Bill, allowing restaurants and supermarkets to donate perishable foods without the liability they currently face.

Nikki Kaye says the amendment, currently before the Select Committee, will reduce the liability of donors and better protect businesses that "give good food in good faith".

A report published Wednesday by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation found that each year about a third of the food produced for human consumption worldwide is wasted.

The approximately 1.3 billion metric tons emits the equivalent of about 3.3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases which is about twice the amount of carbon emitted from the U.S.'s transportation sector and close to twice the yearly emissions of India.

That wasted food also wastes water and the report states that about 250 cubic kilometres of ground and surface water is used each year to produce food that is ultimately wasted.

The Sister of Compassion have been running the Soup Kitchen in Wellington for more than a century. They offer daily a 'no questions asked' free breakfast and a $2 'family style' dinner.

This week the Soup Kitchen is looking for donations of milk, potatoes, canned tomatoes and eggs.

Sources

• RNZ
• Soup Kitchen
• UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (pdf)
• Image: Soup Kitchen

"A way has to be found to enable everyone to benefit from the fruits of the earth ... to satisfy the demands of justice, fairness, and respect for every human being," he said.

The Pope urged FAO members to push for substantial changes, "inspired by something more than mere good will or — worse — promises which all too often have not been kept".

He said food shortages are aggravated not only by the current worldwide economic downturn, but also by the number of military conflicts in needy nations.

He also said the FAO should be mindful of climate change and of biological diversity as it makes plans for addressing the problem of secure food supplies.

The Pope noted that there are many possible initiatives and solutions and that they don't only have to do with increasing production seeing that current levels of production are sufficient,

Pope Francis decried the reliance on "vague abstractions in the face of issues like the use of force, war, malnutrition, marginalisation, the violation of basic liberties, and financial speculation".

Food, he said, cannot be treated as just one more sort of merchandise. Political leaders must recognise the urgent moral necessity for ensuring adequate food supplies for everyone.

Pope Francis said that the shortages occurring in the world today are "a consequence of a crisis of convictions and values, including those which are the basis of international life".

He asked the FAO, its member states and the entire international community to open their hearts.

"There is a need to move beyond indifference and a tendency to look the other way, and urgently to attend to immediate needs … leaving behind the temptations of power, wealth, or self-interest and instead serving the human family, especially the needy and those suffering from hunger and malnutrition," he said.

Sources:

Vatican Information Service

Vatican Radio

Image: USA Today

"Participants are learning methods of preserving food while still retaining all its nutrient levels in its preserved state," said Indonesian Ambassador Chandra Salim. "Food that can be preserved for one to two days like pawpaw can be turned into a jam puree so that it can last for months and several other means of food preservation which the participants are learning.

The course is jointly organised by the Koronivia Research Station and the Indonesian Embassy.

Salim said the course objective was to teach participants Indonesian food preservation techniques and how food could be used as a form of healing therapy.

Source

• The Fiji Times
• Image: Whole Living Web

As many as 2,000 children are experiencing stunted growth and nearly 1,000 are acutely malnourished, said Andrew Scadding, director of the Thai Children's Trust, during an interview with Hanna Hindstrom from the Democratic Voice of Burma.

The UK-based NGO has provided food aid through local schools since 2010, but their money is running out. Global aid budgets are down and donors are redirecting much of their remaining funds into Burma's emerging market. Continue reading

He stated that food should not be equated with other merchandise and therefore should not be subject to speculation.

What is required is investment in agriculture and, ultimately, the need to rediscover "the feeling of compassion and humanity towards others, accompanied the duty of solidarity and the realization of justice".

The message marking the thirtieth World Food Day was sent to the Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Jacques Diouf.

Commenting on this year's theme "Food Prices: from crisis to stability," the Pope writes that "the meaning of this day should be a commitment to changing behaviors and decisions to make sure that every person today, and not tomorrow, has access to the food they need, and that the agricultural sector has a sufficient level of investment and resources to bring stability to production and as a result to the market. "

Pope Benedict remarked that behaviour and consumption would need to be moderated for the good of future generations so that there can be "concrete commitments for the development of entire peoples and nations."

He noted that countries who received help had a responsibility to invest "in rural infrastructures, irrigation systems, transport, organization of markets, and in the development and dissemination of agricultural technology that can make the best use of the human, natural and socio-economic resources that are more readily available at the local level"

The Pope added, "All of this can only be realized if the international institutions ensure impartiality and efficiency of their service, but in full compliance with the deepest convictions of the human spirit and aspirations of each person.

Source: Vatican Radio

Image: Radio Canada International

Sub-saharan Africa leaps out as the place where the most people fear for their next meal, while the rich world has more to fear from obesity.

But there's plenty of salutary reminders and fascinating detail, like India's food problems and the vulnerability of Spain.

And it demonstrates the sickening, symbiotic relationship between lack of food and conflict: where one leads, the other follows.

We must start with the worst, in the horn of Africa.

In Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, human failings mean a severe drought has tipped millions into famine. It's a textbook case of why things go wrong.

• War begets poverty, leaving food unaffordable.
• Devastated infrastructure destroys both food production and the ability to truck in emergency food.
• The collapse of society means the effects of extreme weather such as drought cannot be dealt with. And
• the fear of violence turns people into refugees, leaving their livelihoods and social networks behind.

The recent spike in food prices, linked by some to the uprisings across north Africa and the Middle East, had also hit hard in Somalia. Maize prices in Mogadishu were 100% higher in June 2011 than in June 2010, and the price of sorghum in Somalia rose by 180% compared with 2010 prices.

Continue reading how Food is the ultimate security

He said persistent world hunger was a "tragedy" driven by selfish and profit-driven economic models, whose first victims are millions of children deprived of life or good health.

"How can we be silent about the fact that even food has become the object of speculation or is tied to the course of a financial market that, lacking definite rules and poor in moral principles, appears anchored to the sole objective of profit?" he said.

"Poverty, underdevelopment and, therefore, hunger are often the result of selfish behaviors that, born in the human heart, manifest themselves in social life, economic exchange, in market conditions and in the lack of access to food," the Pope said.

Source

• Catholic News Service
• Image: The New Security Beat

Rising food prices are tightening the squeeze, even on those who can currently afford food, the NGO says.

In an acceleration of a trend which has seen food prices double in the last 20 years, the charity is forecasting food prices will increase by 120-180 per cent in the next 20 years unless there is reform.

"The food system must be overhauled if we are to overcome the increasingly pressing challenges of climate change, spiralling food prices and the scarcity of land, water and energy," said Barbara Stocking, Oxfam's chief executive.

The report, Growing a Better Future, acknowledges that climate change will cause half of that increase. But the poverty and justice agency calls on world leaders to increase transparency in commodities markets, regulate futures markets, increase food reserves, end promotion of biofuels and invest in small farming, particularly helping women farmers.

Among the many factors continuing to drive rising food prices in the coming decades, Oxfam predicts that climate change will have the most serious impact.

And it calls on the international community to launch a global climate fund "so that people can protect themselves from the impact of climate change and are better equipped to grow the food they need."

The report says a "broken" food system causes "hunger, along with obesity, obscene waste, and appalling environmental degradation", and "power above all determines who eats and who does not", and says the present system was "constructed by and on behalf of a tiny minority - its primary purpose to deliver profit for them".

"We are sleepwalking towards an avoidable age of crisis," said Barbara Stocking, Oxfam's chief executive.

"One in seven people in the planet goes hungry every day despite the fact that the world is capable of feeding everyone," she said.

Sources

• ucanews.com

The organisation pointed the finger of blame at inefficiencies through the food supply chain.

Industrialised and developing countries consistently waste or lose around 660m tonnes each year, with rich countries wasting 222m tonnes. Waste by rich countries roughly equates to the entire food production of sub-Saharan Africa.

While in rich countries the wasted food is driven by consumers, the main issue for developing countries is food loss due to weak infrastructure: poor storage, processing and packaging.

Amid rising global food prices, the study says that reducing food losses in developing countries could have an immediate and significant impact on livelihoods in some of the world's poorest countries.

The report argues that reducing reliance on large supermarkets could help cut food waste. It also encourages retailers and charities to work together to distribute unsold but perfectly edible food that would otherwise go to waste.

Attention to food storage, packaging and refrigerated delivery systems were key items for poor or developing countries to focus on.

Sources

• The Guardian
• Image: Green Script

Since 2009 UNICEF has worked with six Pacific Island countries to establish early warning monitoring to track the impact of economic crises on the most vulnerable and to provide real-time pulse data". It found that the most recent round of surveys in 18 urban settlements and rural communities revealed

• a worrying picture of high food prices across the region.
• A majority of families interviewed reported increased economic stress in meeting food expenditures because of rising food prices.
• The impact is being felt in family's diets as they switch to locally-produced foods or cheaper substitutes.

In response the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and Pacific island governments met in Nadi last week to discuss measures to address the emerging food price crisis. There was consensus that measures would need to be based on individual country situations and the priorities and capacities of different stakeholders,

Unicef representative in the Pacific Dr Isiye Ndombi said "The problem is particularly acute for families in urban settlements who do not have the option of supplementing their diets with gardening and fishing," The effects of cutting back on food or switching to less nutritious food can have a serious effect on pregnant women and young children, depriving them of essential nutrients during a critical period." He said sentinel monitoring also reveals that adolescents were facing some of the harshest impacts of the price rises.

The report in the Fiji Sun suggests that now is the time:

• To tighten belts.
• To practice economies of scale.
• To make use of backyard gardens
• To walk instead of taking a cab
• To take the bus instead of using your own vehicle.
• To watch your spending
• To live within your means.

Sources

The Almighty's divine feathers are unlikely to be ruffled by act of this school boyish humour on the part of some of the inhabitants on a small planet in a distant galaxy "but it is hard not to feel some sympathy for Christians, who are implicitly characterised as humourless if they object to the articles of their faith being ridiculed, or at least exploited, for commercial gain" said the New Zealand Herald.

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Auckland, Patrick Dunn, told the New Zealand Herald: "I suppose in some ways they are acknowledging that Jesus was around for a limited time, but a number of people might decide to boycott Hell Pizza for a while and I will be one of them."

Source

The New Zealand Herald

Photo Credit

Maximus.pl