Food/Agriculture

We've reached a very strange point in human history when it is assumed that people who don't have access to food will have working cell phones:

In a test project targeting 1,000 Iraqi refugee families, the United Nations agency will send a 22-dollar (15-euro) voucher every two months by SMS to each family, who will be provided with a special SIM card.

The beneficiary can then exchange the electronic voucher for rice, wheat flour, lentils, chickpeas, oil, canned fish, cheese and eggs at selected shops.

Addressing concerns about mobile phone ownership among the refugee population, WFP spokeswoman Emilia Casella said all the 130,000 Iraqi refugees currently receiving food aid from the agency in Syria have mobile phones.

Update: UN Dispatch's Matthew Cordell has more.

The Lebanese sure showed Israel this weekend. For years, the two held the same thing sacred, while only one could hold the title. That title, of course, is who could make the largest batch of hummus.

Israel used to hold the record for making the largest plate of the dip, but no longer after Lebanese chefs served up over two tons of chickpea-y goodness on Saturday. The entire affair is comical in the sense that too often it seems like neither side is actually talking about hummus.

The slogan for the event was, "Come and fight for your bite, you know you're right," illustrating the growing frustration. Several Lebanese businessmen also used the belligerent rhetoric.

"Lebanon is trying to win a battle against Israel," Fady Jreissati, the events promoter said. "Hummus is a Lebanese product and part of our traditions."

This isn't the first time the two counties have clashed over the dish, last year the Association of Lebanese Industrialists sued Israel in an effort to stop them from marketing hummus as Israeli. Saturday, the head of that group said, "If we don't tell Israel that enough is enough, and we don't remind the world that it's not true that hummus is an Israeli traditional dish, they will keep on marketing it as their own."

However the food wars don't end with hummus. Yesterday the Lebanese also made the world's largest batch of tabbouleh, a salad which Lebanon claims the Zionists are trying to take as their own.

RAMZI HAIDAR/AFP/Getty Images

The Christian Science Monitor highlights an April report by the International Food Policy Research Institute entitled "'Land Grabbing' by Foreign Investors in Developing Countries." The report details purchases of farmland in developing countries by China, South Korea, India, and a handful of gulf states.

Saudi Arabia recently purchased 500,000 hectares of land in Tanzania and Indian companies have bought land in Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Senegal and Mozambique.

Another analysis of the "land-grabbing" trend relased in June by the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization and two other agricultural research groups examines more closely the potential positives and negatives of the purchases.

Increased investment may bring macro-level benefits (such as GDP growth and improved government revenues), and may create opportunities for economic development and livelihood improvement in rural areas.

But as governments or markets make land available to prospecting investors, large-scale land acquisitions may result in local people losing access to the resources on which they depend for their food security – particularly as some key recipient countries are themselves faced with food security challenges. 

And, as Devindeer Sharma from India's Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security told the Telegraph on June 28, there is a high chance of a local backlash and investors will have to avoid a neo-colonial image:

"There are 80 Indian companies trying to get land in Ethiopia, and it's all to be imported back to India. The government of India has been encouraging them," he said, and warned of danger if famine returned to Africa.

"If food is being shipped out and poor people are dying, what will happen? There would be riots," he said.

Thoughts? Is the investment good or bad for the recipient countries? 

RANCOIS XAVIER MARIT/AFP/Getty Images

The European Union has lifted its ban on oddly-shaped fruits and vegetables enacted 20 years ago. The move has overcome an obsession with perfection in efforts to lower the price of fresh produce and reduce agricultural waste. Bendy cucumbers and forked carrots are now welcome on supermarket shelves across the region, which is good news for British chains like Sainsbury's that launched a campaign against the strict EU regulations last November. Also surely rejoicing is the Prince of Wales whose home-grown carrots were deemed too "wibbly-wobbly" to sell.

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Eating seal is illegal in Europe. But a New York Times piece today says that's far from the case in Montreal:

Across town, at Les Îles en Ville, Andrée Garcia, an owner and chef, has elevated seal from an occasional specialty to a regular feature. The most frequent preparation there, Ms. Garcia said, is a filet-mignon-style cut of seal that is pan-seared, then roasted briefly in the oven and finished with a cranberry sauce.

Looks like the blubbery animal is becoming quite the anti-Europe symbol these days. A lot of French nationals are coming from far and wide to feast on charismatic megafauna, too. And nobody has yet managed to top the eating of a raw seal heart as a political statement.

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

"A third of women in urban Kampala and a quarter of the women in more rural central and southwestern Uganda are overweight or obese, according to 2007 government statistics. It is a major paradox since 50 percent of children in southwestern Uganda are malnourished," Derrick Z. Jackson writes in a Boston Globe op-ed.

This does not come as a surprise to me. Go to the prominent markets in cities, or take a drive through the richer neighborhoods in Nigeria, Cameroon, or even Liberia for that matter, and obesity is visible -- if not as prevelant as in the United States, for example. There are no real reliable statistics on obesity in Africa yet (check out how nearly the whole continent lacks data here) but there is a general consensus that the epidemic is growing -- at least among the wealthier. 

In my experience, "fatness" is not bemoaned much in the African countries I've visited... In fact, it's applauded. I'll never forget a church service I observed in which a preacher asked attendees to greet their neighbor joyously: "Today is your day of fatness!"

Fatness, in this context, means more than just physique. It's associated with wealth of all sorts. In a continent struck by poverty, being big in all things -- wallet, house, and belt size -- is a sign of success. I was often told to gain weight, and complimented on days when I apparently looked "bigger." It's an understandable mentality when poverty is all around; when one escapes such a fate, seeking all things non-poor is a prized goal. What is harder to justify is the way that the "big man" concept fits into corruption as well. Opportunities to get rich are often taken; and big men become exactly that in all senses of the word. 

Obviously, this is a small subset, and certainly there are other reasons for obesity on the rise. (It doesn't help that African food is often rich -- for example in Sierra Leone: rice, palm oil, cassava, palm oil, meat, and more palm-oil fried plantains -- so workers moving from the fields to desk jobs are likely to take in more calories than a sedentary lifestyle allows). 

But if I'm right, or if being big remains a big goal, then Africa's slow rise out of poverty could bring with it a rise of obesity. But perhaps being big won't be so special anymore -- and another fashion will fill its place. 

AFP/Getty Images 

The United Nations' tally for people around the world suffering from hunger will hit a new milestone this year: one billion, or fully one-sixth of the world's population.

The new data comes from the Food and Agriculture Organization, whose director-general believes hunger represents a grave threat to "world peace and security," the BBC reports:

The UN said almost all of the world's undernourished live in developing countries, with the most, some 642 million people, living in the Asia-Pacific region.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the next worst-hit region, the figure stands at 265 million.

Just 15 million people are left hungry in the developed world"

A combination of the global recession and rising food prices are largely to blame for the increase in world hunger, the UN says.

AFP/Getty Images