wfn.org | World Food Day: Much done, more to do

["Lesley Crosson" <lcrosson@churchworldservice.org>]

>Church World Service
>475 Riverside Drive
>New York, New York 10115

>For Immediate Release

>World Food Day: Much done, more to do

NEW YORK CITY, October 16, 2009--The 1.02 billion undernourished people in  the world live in different places and have different faces.  One  characteristic they share, though, is their extreme vulnerability in the  face of high food prices, a struggling global economy, the challenge of  adjusting to climate change and public policies that harm rather than help  them.

World Food Day (Oct. 16) is an annual call is to individuals, agencies and  governments to help provide the tools, training, programs and advocacy  necessary to help poor, hungry people improve their lives.

The Rev. John L. McCullough, Executive Director and CEO of Church World  Service, says, "Fighting hunger and poverty has been the work of this  agency for more than six decades.  We view access to nutritionally  sufficient food as a human right and we work to assure that as many people  as possible indeed do have that access."

Church World Service works throughout the world to empower poor people to  confront and conquer both the conditions and the forces that have kept so  many generations of people--particularly in developing countries--mired in  poverty or permanently teetering on the edge.

Through a combination of training and support for sustainable agriculture  programs in parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean,  Central Europe and the Middle East, emergency relief and advocacy, CWS is  working to empower people to use the few resources at their disposal to  improve food security for themselves and their families.

"We have to focus even more on empowerment of individuals and families,"  says Rev. McCullough.  "I don't think that you can solve the problem of  hunger through a series of governmental services or relief services.  We  also need to empower people with education and training and tools so that  they can control their own destinies."

In Kaikungu, Kenya, villagers seem to have embraced that idea.

The words "Give us food, we are hungry," was the villagers' initial plea  to staff of the Anglican Church of Kenya, Church World Service's partner  in the region. People had been surviving on food distributed by government  and relief agencies in the wake of nearly three seasons of crops destroyed  by drought.

Village elders said more than 80 percent of the 5,000 villagers faced  starvation.  Now, after training in effective farming techniques and  construction of sand dams to capture water to use in irrigation, the  people of Kaikungu--still poor, but now convinced that they are not  entirely captive to the whims of nature--have changed their request to,  "We need food, but we want to use the resources you [CWS and partner] will  give us to change our lives so that the drought does not affect us so much  next year."

Across the developing world, suffering and struggling for survival is a  fact of life for poor people.  Each day almost 16,000 children die from  hunger-related causes.  That's one child dead every five seconds.  And  even those children who survive can be permanently affected by childhood  malnutrition.

In Indonesia, for example, CWS is working with rural farmers to reverse  the ravages of two decades of failed crops through nutrition programs and  training. In regions where infants and toddlers have critically high  malnutrition rates, there is a danger of lifelong stunting of their  physical and mental development.  CWS is working with partners to provide  nutritional supplements and to improve the nutritional quality of food  available to children and their mothers. The program also helps people  identify locally grown vegetables that previously had not been eaten, but  that can be used as food.

McCullough emphasizes that the educational component is a key part of  combating the problem of food insecurity.  "What people also need is good  information, so that they can make good choices about what food is  available to them."

The Gran Chaco region of Latin America stretches across 400,000 square  miles of central South America, including parts of Argentina, Bolivia, and  Paraguay. Church World Service is working with indigenous people of the  region to help them learn techniques to defend their rights to ancestral  lands.

Discrimination against native peoples has left them vulnerable to greed  and exploitation by national and transnational companies anxious to  control the region's abundant natural resources. With training through  CWS-supported programs, indigenous communities are claiming--and winning--t itles to ancestral lands on which they can hunt, fish and raise cattle for  both food and income.
McCullough says, "Advocacy is a very important part of our work at Church  World Service, domestically and internationally, because it's the way that  we, or anyone, make our voices heard in places where decisions about how  resources will be deployed are made and that means not just in the halls  of government, but also calling industry to corporate responsibility."

The American face of hunger and poverty  In the United States, Church World Service annually sponsors CROP Hunger  Walks involving some 2,000 communities to help fund programs around the  world--and to help stock the food pantries and soup kitchens that feed  some of the more than 37 million Americans living in poverty in the U.S.   CWS also advocate for public policy reforms to help struggling small  farmers in the U.S. and abroad and to improve access to nutritional food  for poor people.

"Here in the U.S. there are government supplements to help people buy  food, but we also have to look at limitations on that assistance and how  those limitations affect the choices people can make about what foods to  buy with very limited money that can only go so far," McCullough points  out.

The more than a million people malnourished people that inhabit the Earth  are the embodiment of the huge gulf between where we are and where we need  to be in terms of responding to dramatically increased hunger in our  neighborhoods and our world, but McCullough remains optimistic.

"The problem of hunger is still with us, but tremendous collective efforts  are being made and we need to honor the efforts put forward even as we  continue finding new ways to insure a more just distribution of resources  so that everyone has a fair opportunity to improve their economic  situation."

Resources

Just Eating? Practicing Our Faith at the Table
Facts Have Faces: Hunger in a World of Plenty

How to help  To support Church World Service CROP Hunger Walks and other CWS work to  end hunger please donate online at http://www.churchworldservice.org/donate , by phone (800.297.1516), or by mailing a contribution today to Church  World Service, P.O. Box 968, Elkhart, IN 46515.

Media Contact: Lesley Crosson, 212-870-2676, lcrosson@churchworldservice.org Jan Dragin, 781-925-1526, jdragin@gis.ne