The Global Forum on the Right to Food offers an opportunity for representatives of FAO member countries, practitioners and stakeholders to:-
- Share experiences on initial implementation of the right to food;
- Collect lessons learned;
- Discuss ways to promote further the implementation of the Right to Food Guidelines.

The Forum has been designed in a way as to promote an open debate on practical issues of implementation of the Right to Food.

'Economists explain the food crisis as a perfect storm: rising demand for resource-intensive foods like meat, protracted drought, and more land being used to grow fuel instead of food.

More critical thinkers point out that long before biofuels became a household word, international trade rules had bankrupted millions of small farmers in the global south. Because of huge government subsidies to factory farms in the US and Europe, food imported from these countries became cheaper than food prod more...

'Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat. A camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Khartoum. Similar camps have been set up in the Darfur region, where United Nations and Western aid feeds more than three million people. Farmers plowed a more...

'Nearly half of the seafood we eat today is farmed. And while aquaculture is often equated with pollution, habitat degradation, and health risks, this explosive growth in fish farming may in fact be the most hopeful trend in the world's increasingly troubled food system, according to a new report by Worldwatch Institute.'

The vultures of corporate America are closing in on the carcass of cheap food. With corn selling at $5.86 a bushel (up from just $2.00 in 2005, and $4.28 just six months ago), the food price crisis has been somewhat of a windfall for farmers. But the briefly glimmering hope for rural communities is about to go out.

Last week Monsanto announced it would increase the price of its corn seed by $100 a bag, or about 35%. $100 a bag! So if you are a farmer with 1,000 acres in corn, Monsanto will b more...

The correct theorizing of the questions of food security and poverty has become
particularly important at the present time, which is one of rapid changes in the
economic environment in which small producers including farmers and workers are
living. In a poor developing country, the incidence of poverty is very closely linked to
the availability of food, in which the staple food grains still remain predominant,
accounting for three-fifths of the daily energy intake of the population. The
me more...

Today, but few can recall memories of the Bengal famine of 1943 and 1944. Most disturbingly, after almost two decades of 'reform' and a full decade or more of a nonstop media festival of growth rates and India Shining songs and chants, a massive acute food crisis is again a possibility. For the rulers of India such concerns, while now unavoidable, remain highly abstract. The memories of Bengal famine are again of special importance. Ashok Mitra, in his memoir Apila-Chapila (Ananda Publishers more...

This food policy review presents a rationale for Food For Education (FFE) programs and undertakes a critical review of the causal evidence on the impact of FFE programs on education participation and attainment, learning, cognitive development, and nutrition. Results from the most careful studies show that in-school meals programs improve primary school attendance of enrolled students where initial attendance was low.
This is a publication of IFPRI. (pdf:85)

“The largely benign development environment that has prevailed since the early years of this decade, and that has contributed to the successes to date, is now threatened,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declares in the foreword to the report. “The economic slowdown will diminish the incomes of the poor; the food crisis will raise the number of hungry people in the world and push millions more into poverty; climate change will have a disproportionate impact on the poor,” the Secretary-Gene more...

The World Food Programme (WFP) has said that high food prices are creating the biggest challenge that WFP has faced in its 45-year history, a silent tsunami threatening to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger. “This is the new face of hunger – the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are,” said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran, ”What we are seeing now is affecting more people on every continent, destroy more...