World Hunger Solutions

“Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy.”
--Frances Moore Lappe

We hope you’ll use these selected resources to join with others to create solutions to hunger and poverty.

• Click here to read “World Hunger: Its Roots and Remedies,” Frances Moore Lappé’s contribution to A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite (Oxford University Press). This chapter is a concise, plain-English overview of the world’s ongoing food/hunger crises. Please feel free to download and share.

• Helpful World Hunger Solutions Links
Despite our producing more than enough food to feed the world, hunger is still widespread. But from Bangladesh to Brazil, from India to Indiana solutions to the root causes of persistent hunger are emerging from bottom-up citizen movements. These diverse efforts reject “the market made me do it” cop-out for tolerating hunger amid plenty and build on three core values: inclusive participation, accountability to those affected, and basic fairness. These movements show the way to a values-driven economics that insures all get to eat and that more of us have a seat at the decision-making table, helping make the life-and-death decisions about how we produce our food, what we produce, and who has access to it.

Here are people ending hunger. We can join them.

Landless Workers’ Movement

Green Belt Movement / Wangari Maathai

People’s Campaign of Decentralized Planning - Kerala

Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee

Navdanya

• International Campaigns to bring democractic values to economic life

Food First

Fair Trade / TransfairUSA

United Students Against Sweatshops

Corporate Accountability International

FIAN International - Defending the Right to Food

Focus on the Global South

Oakland Institute

ActionAid (UK)

Grassroots International

Heifer International

• Recent Reports concerning hunger and poverty

Human Development Report 2005, United Nations Development Program

World Development Report, World Bank 2005

• Resources about the Campaign to End Hunger in Brazil

Explaining the National Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) Campaign: PowerPoint Presentation about Zero Hunger by Adriana Aranha
Since 2003, Adriana Aranha has been a special consultant for the Brazilian Ministry of Social Development and the Fight Against Hunger, working for the head of the Ministry, Patrus Ananias, on the Fome Zero Program. Prior to working at the federal level, Adriana was the Director of Program for the Defense and Promotion of Nutritional Consumption at the Secretariat of Municipal Supply Policy (SMAB) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Belo Horizonte: Regional Food Security Supporting Rural Sustainability, Jahi Chappell
Jahi is a Ph.D student at the University of Michigan in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. For his dissertation, he is researching how social policy and ecological management can be integrated to produce gains in both human rights and conservation. Over the past several years, Jahi has spent about 15 months in and around Belo Horizonte measuring biodiversity on the farms of producers that work with SMAB.

Capacity-Building for Food and Nutritional Security, Stephen Bentley (Executive Summary of Masters Thesis)
Stephen is a recent graduate of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. Steven spent the summer of 2005 in Brazil in Belo Horizonte and São Paulo, along with other cities, studying food and nutritional security governance at the municipal, regional, and state levels for his thesis.