World Hunger Year believes in long-term solutions to hunger, which often means educating the public about the root causes of hunger domestically and abroad and making connections for community-based organizations with policy makers, funders and the media. It's like that old adage, "Give a man a fish and feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime." However, we also recognize that it's hard to learn how to fish while you're starving. Thus, WHY's contribution to the emergency feeding sector of the anti-hunger community: The National Hunger Clearinghouse's Hunger Hotline.

The Hunger Hotline, reachable at 1-800-GLEAN-IT (1-800-453-2648), fields calls from across the nation, referring hungry people to resources in their neighborhoods like local food pantries or giving callers vital contact information for government agencies like their county welfare offices.

For instance, a man in Arizona called recently, who had ended his military service after being stationed in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He was suffering from both physical injuries and the emotional challenge of trying to reintegrate himself into civilian life. He had no family members and no savings. As he was going through paperwork and waiting for his benefits to begin, he found himself skipping meals and going hungry. The Hunger Hotline connected him with both local emergency food providers and veterans support organizations.

In another case, the hotline received a call from a Spanish-speaking woman from California who was concerned because she was low-income and out of work and had just found out that she was pregnant. The hotline connected her with the WIC (Woman, Infants, Children) government program as well as a job training agency that was eager to work with her and was able to provide a Spanish translator.

These are the kinds of calls the Hunger Hotline receives every day. This is how WHY stays in touch with people in need. You can help, too.

New York Newsday reports today that welfare initiatives, created to help the toughest cases get work before their five-year federal limit on cash assistance expired, are now being pared back or discarded altogether after repeated raids by state lawmakers desperate for cash.

After looking through state financial records, the newspaper makes the case that the programs could be saved or should be running at full strength because of federal monies like New York's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant from Washington, which has not dipped below $2.4 billion a year since Congress changed the welfare law in 1996. But as New York's budget problems have expanded, so has state officials' cleverness in finding ways to redirect that money, which federal law limits to efforts that help poor families.

The paper cites Gov. George Pataki's and the state legislature's funneling in the past two years of $696 million in welfare money -- nearly four times the amount spent on training programs -- into Tuition Assistance Program grants, which are available to college students from families earning as much as $80,000 a year, as an egregious example of the way money slated for the underprivileged has gone to support others.

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The '50s. Bobby socks. James Dean. I Love Lucy. The post-war boom? Not for everyone. In the late 1950s, the overall poverty rate for individuals in the United States was 22 percent, representing 39.5 million poor persons.1 This is a very high number for what many consider one of the golden ages of the American lifestyle (alongside The Roaring '20s and The Reagan Years). However, like many cultural memories, that of the gilded '50s has grown mythical over the years. This cultural amnesia begs the question: Does poverty have an impact on the way Americans view their cultural history?

The immediate answer would seem to be no. Other than The Great Depression and the high inflation that dogged Jimmy Carter's presidency, most Americans don't use the national poverty level as a criteria for constructing social memory (unless they were poor themselves). For instance, America appeared to be riding high on the hog during the 1980s. It was the decade of the Yuppie generation which wholeheartedly believed in the axiom "Greed is good." In 1982, it was the beginning of the bull market. However, that same year, the poverty level hit a 15-year high at 14 percent. That record number was surpassed the following year, arriving at 15.2 percent. 2

Perhaps part of the reluctance on the part of Americans to accept poverty as a factor in how they view social history is due to a widespread belief that the poor are responsible for their own circumstances. If you are out of a job, you must be lazy. Not true. There is the often ignored reality of the working poor. These are Americans who work but can't make ends meet. They tend to have jobs that pay far less than non-poor workers for comparable work effort. These jobs are also less stable, have less predictable hours, provide fewer benefits, and convey lower status as occupations. This is true even though the primary earner in a working poor family usually works full-time, year-round. 3

Americans are still filtering through the '90s, a decade ushered in by the presidency of George H.W. Bush and dominated by Bill Clinton's two terms. From an economic viewpoint, Bush's presidency has been blamed for ruining the legacy of Reagan's economic policies (or falling victim to them) and for shepherding one of the largest recessions of the last 20 years. Clinton, who oversaw a steady decline in the poverty rate from 15.1 percent in 1993 to 11.3 in 2000, also signed into existence The Welfare Reform Act of 1996. This legislation has been said to have hurt more poor families than it helped.

And how will these present years be viewed through the gauze of history? George W. Bush seems to be following in his father's political footsteps. In 2002, the poverty level increased to 12.1 percent. 2 But the statistic looming large over the administration is the jobless rate, which has crept up over 6 percent, well above the 4.5 percent during the Clinton years. The 2.7 million jobs lost under Bush is the largest since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression. Throw in the $480 billion federal deficit -- the largest in the nation's history. 4 Despite all this, however, will Americans more fondly remember The Lord of the Rings trilogy or their Harry Potter books or their iPods than how many people were living below the poverty line?

The way for America to move forward in the elimination of poverty is to remember history accurately, to identify past mistakes and be careful not to repeat them.

The critical food situation in Zimbabwe has led to the deaths of many people who would have survived if they had been able to access a healthy diet, said Matabeleland AIDS Council director Andrew Moyo.

He went on to tell UN Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) that the demise of the Zimbabwe National Network for People Living with AIDS (ZNNP) two years ago had added to problems for HIV-positive people trying to cope with the food crisis. Moyo's organization works with 90 HIV/AIDS support groups throughout Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city.

Zimbabwe's health care services have been strained to breaking point by the lack of manpower, drug shortages, and infrastructure and equipment falling into disrepair, all as a result of the current economic crisis.

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November 1st marked the official start of the 7th annual conference of the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC), a dynamic convergence of hundreds of individuals, from farmers to urban community activists, concerned with the food that is making its way onto our plates and into our bodies. Community food security, as defined by the CFSC, is "all persons obtaining at all times a culturally acceptable nutritionally adequate diet through local non-emergency sources." How to achieve this effectively through coordinated participation across diverse sectors of society is the focus of this year's conference in Boston.

Just as the challenge of achieving food security is tremendous -- conference participants are finding -- so too is the potential that exists and the headway that has already been made. This could not have been illustrated more powerfully than it was though a series of pre-conference tours which took place this past weekend, setting the scene for the main portion of the CFSC conference. The following is an account of the first pre-conference tour, which took place on Saturday, November 1st.

Finding Food Security in Western Massachusetts

This trip out to Western Massachusetts highlighted innovative measures towards food security in an area endowed with abundant natural resources and breathtaking beauty. Yet, this area is suffering the loss of industries and the dwindling of small-scale family farms that have traditionally formed the backbone of its economy. Anne Cheatham of CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture) -- an organization dedicated to promoting and sustaining agriculture in Western Massachusetts -- orchestrated and led this trip.

The first stop on our tour was Nuestras Raices (Spanish for "our roots") in the city of Holyoke, MA. Paper mills once provided the majority of jobs in this city made up of mostly Latino immigrants, and their closure has caused the local economy to suffer, fueling gang violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and other challenges faced by the Holyoke community. Nuestras Raices is a grassroots organization that tackles these challenges by promoting economic, human, and community development in Holyoke focused around urban agriculture. They have eight full-fledged community gardens with involvement of over 100 families and two additional gardens dedicated to their youth gardening and leadership program. Through this program, older residents, many of whom are from rural Puerto Rico, pass on knowledge to the youth, giving them gardening skills and connecting them with their roots. The youth then go on garden as well as manage a farmers market that enables urban gardeners to market their produce within their communities at an affordable price.

After meeting with a number of youth and adults involved with Nuestras Raices, we headed into the country where we spent the remainder of our day. Our first stop in the country was the Food Bank Farm in Hadley, MA, run by the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts. The food bank, working through its distributing agencies, collects and distributes a tremendous amount of food (nearly 7 million pounds a year), and serves 13% of the region's population.

UNICEF expected hundreds of thousands of children to return to classes during Liberia's Back-to-School campaign -- thousands of them for the first time in their lives. This post-war initiative, launched yesterday, is similar to other education drives orchestrated by UNICEF in other countries, including Afghanistan in 2002.

Continued political insecurity -- despite the exile of former President Charles Taylor -- and crippled infrastructure has compelled UNICEF to employ some unusual methods to distribute school materials, including teachers wheel-barrowing school supplies, and a fleet of outboard canoes to reach river villages.

The Liberian effort includes the training of almost 20,000 teachers, and the rehabilitation of 3,700 schools, providing a major boost to the economy. To encourage parents to send children to school in the first wave, school fees have been waived, and children are no longer required to wear school uniforms, UNICEF said.

UNICEF has also fortified its campaign with "School in a Box" kits. The School in a Box is a mobile classroom for 80 pupils that can be used in any setting. It consists of a metal box and teacher's bag, a teacher's guide and teaching materials. The kit also includes writing materials including chalk, pencils, sharpeners and exercise books for children.

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"Back-to-School in Liberia addresses key issues in war-torn West Africa," said [UNICEF Executive Director Carol] Bellamy. "Children who grow up knowing nothing but war and are recycled across borders to fight, must be offered education and a future at home. Education establishes a path beyond poverty. And a child looking to the future is less likely to pick up a gun."

Results Educational Fund helps the world's poorest people support themselves by providing small loans for self-employment projects. The group claims to be on track to meet its nine-year goal of helping 100 million poverty-stricken families by 2005, according to The New York Times.

By the end of 2002, more than 2,500 institutions had reached 41.6 million poor families worldwide with microcredit loans, according to REF. These loans financed a wide range of businesses like a Pakistani baker, a rickshaw agency in Bangladesh and a lawn-care business in South Florida.

REF says microcredit loans, often less than $150, allow some of the world's poorest people to start and expand tiny businesses in order to pull themselves and their families out of poverty. In 1997, the non-profit organization convened the first global Microcredit Summit, launching a campaign whose goal is to reach 100 million of the world's poorest families, especially the women of those families, with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by the year 2005. On November 10, 2002, more than 2,000 participants from over 100 countries gathered at the Microcredit Summit +5 in New York City.

Over the last five years REF's Microcredit Summit Campaign has been guided by its four core themes: reaching the poorest;reaching and empowering women; building financially self-sufficient institutions; and ensuring a positive measurable impact on the lives of the clients and their families.

More and more American families are hungry or unsure whether they can afford to buy food, the Agriculture Department said in a report released on Friday. The report was based on a Census Bureau survey of 50,000 households, and it was the third year in a row the department found an increase in the number of people who were hungry or uncertain whether they could afford their next meal.

Nearly 3.8 million families were hungry last year to the point that someone in the household skipped meals because the family could not afford them. That is 8.6 percent more families than in 2001, when 3.5 million were hungry, and a 13 percent increase from 2000, reported the AP.

More often than not, poor families find themselves bending their food budgets to the breaking point in order to pay rent or buy prescription medicines.

The rise in poverty can also be linked to the rise in obesity. In the United States, 65 percent of adults and 13 percent of children are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Barbara Laraia, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said hunger and obesity could coexist because many hungry families buy high-calorie foods that are low in nutrients, the AP reported.