Food & Health

It’s 30 years since Michael Buerke’s harrowing report of a ‘biblical famine’ reached BBC TV screens. Following a year of cynical government inaction and silence, Bob Geldof launched a frenzied celebrity campaign to get aid to the famine-hit regions.

Modern African history teaches, often tragically, the need to distinguish between what might be called natural phenomena from those that are essentially socio-economic-political. The droughts that ravaged many parts of the continent in the early 1970s were an example of the former.

The member countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America –Peoples’ Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP in its Spanish acronym), meeting in Havana on October 20th, 2014, on the occasion of the Extraordinary Summit to deal with the Ebola epidemic;

Just as a glass prism differentiates sunlight into its component colours, corresponding to the different wavelengths, the Ebola crisis ravaging three West African countries has produced three distinct responses, corresponding to the three principal classes of capitalist society.

Renowned Pan-Africanist, scholar and teacher, Ali Al’Amin Mazrui, 81, died peacefully on October 12, 2014 of natural causes at his home in Vestal, New York.

MEDIA RELEASE

10 October 2014

Few emergencies in modern history have accumulated an endless list of frightening superlatives in such a short period of time.

The deadly Ebola virus is currently spreading across West Africa, with cases registered in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The virus is transmitted through direct contact with the blood, body fluids or tissue of infected animals or people.

Ebola is caused by a virus, not by malnutrition or poor sanitation. A virus transmitted by blood, saliva and excrement.

In its State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014 report (SOFI 2014), which has just been released, the 'world' according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) excludes North America, Europe (not just western Europe but the entire 28-country Eurozone), and countries that a