Food & Health

Many of the news stories about African Union (AU) member states focus on the outbreak of infectious diseases, which are a direct result of the legacy of colonialism and neo-colonialism, where the healthcare institutions were deliberately left underdeveloped.

The National Department of Health has become one of the distressed departments in both the Zuma and Ramophosa’s cabinets. Way too many complaints, allegations and challenges have been levelled against the Department. These complaints come from both the community and the employees alike.

Last week, Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of the World Health Organization, nominated Robert Mugabe, the 93-year-old president of Zimbabwe as that organization’s Goodwill Ambassador for Noncommunciable Diseases, a position currently held by former N.Y.

The network has adopted the following Charter:

Food sovereignty is the human right of peoples as individuals and communities to define their own food systems. It means, working with nature and protecting resources to produce sufficient, healthy and culturally appropriate food by:

Unprecedented and rising levels of industrial animal farming are undermining the highest attainable standard of health that is WHO’s mandate.

We often hear the platitude “water is precious” while we carry around bottles of water we can drink anytime. We bathe with it several times a day, wash our cars with it, flood our lawns and gardens with gallons of it, and waste it in every conceivable way.

Babsy Mpheshwa returned to St Patrick’s Hospital, Bizana, last week to check on conditions after his sons and nephew had been forced to seek emergency medical assistance in Durban – some 200km away from the nearest local hospital – when they were involved in a seriou

The year is 2014, and in quite a cinema-isque fashion, 50-year-old Margaret finishes her 21km half-marathon in determined eager stomps, running right into the arms of her husband, the President of the Republic of Kenya.

The necessity of food to human life requires that everyone gets concerned about food debates. Unfortunately, the agenda being pushed is one that profits corporates at the expense of smallholder farmers.

Assume that three in five African youth are meaningfully engaged in agriculture. Assume they are investing across the value chain – in production, processing, manufacturing, distribution and, of course, are also the major consumers.