by Glenn Brigaldino

Created on: July 06, 2008   Last Updated: August 19, 2010

As the mainstream media fails to provide coherent and regular reporting on important world events that are not easily "marketable", lives go on in many places we rarely hear about. The struggles and concerns that shape the lives of so many people, are all too often ignored by the few large news agencies that provide 50 to 95 % of what we get to hear and see in the media.

One continent that is by-passed in all too many ways is Africa, in spite of many hypes and "high-level" events. The gladiators of globalization, the so-called G7 (or G8 if one can really count all members of this self righteous club) are too pre-occupied with themselves and with their agendas , driving the course of globalization in favourable directions for themselves and their sponsors. Largely lip-service remains for the actual impoverished populations in vast stretches of Africa. With new millions being spent daily on improving safety, security and defense, waging wars in remote desert lands, few of us seem to wonder whose millions are being spent on whose safety and why. Couldn't reducing hunger and food crisis around the world be contemplated as a global human security effort? That there is a blatant need for such an effort is clear to anyone who chooses to look beyond the neon lights in the shopping malls.

This year a globally hitting food crisis arose,bringing the contradictions of uneven cross-global as well as inner-country affluence and poverty also the local super-market outlets. In the media and amongst politicians, there is a tendency to explain away the reasons behind recurring food crisis or to be inclined to accept them as regrettable natural disasters. If one agrees that that knowledge of nature's calamities in drought-prone regions is not strikingly unexpected news, then the question arises why aren't affected countries and their international partners better prepared to act when disaster hits? For one thing, droughts and food insecurities are rarely sudden events, they gradually develop and early warning signs do exist. Why aren't these recognized in time and pre-emptive actions taken before malnutrition and hunger among large populations set in?

Once questions like these are asked, a bewildering range of answers and suggestions arise from scores of publications, abundance of conference reports and series of policy debates and academic discourse. Few experts can stay on top of this information tide and anybody involved in food policy and food security matters would be very

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