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Salt, health's silent enemy

Sumito Estévez's picture

También disponible en español

Também disponível em português

kitchen

This year, World Health Day focuses on hypertension. Specialists report a clear link between excessive salt consumption and high blood pressure. In this blog, Venezuelan chef Sumito Estévez explains how the use of salt in our cooking has changed. He also shares some ideas for reducing salt consumption and reminds us that governments are also responsible for taking measures to decrease consumption.

Coq Au Vin (Chicken in red wine) is a delicious traditional French dish. Those who have had the privilege of preparing this slow-cooked recipe know that once the sauce has thickened, practically no extra salt is needed.

The Costs of Being Landlocked: A Road Trip in Africa

Ali Zafar's picture

The Ouagadougou-Accra-Tema corridor, a road stretching from Ouagadougou in West Africa’s Burkina Faso through Ghana’s bustling capital city Accra and onto the country’s port city Tema, is one of Africa’s most well-known corridors. In October, we joined Albert, a 50-year-old driver from Burkina Faso, on a 750 kilometer journey to highlight the high economic costs faced by landlocked countries and the cumbersome border crossings that impede trade.

The journey, which should have taken seven hours by car, took us 17 hours, 1 border crossing and 20 checkpoints. 

How We Saved Agriculture, Fed the World and Ended Rural Poverty: Looking Back from 2050

Duncan Green's picture

As Oxfam’s two week online debate on the future of agriculture gets under way, John Ambler of Oxfam America imagines how it could all turn out right in the end.

It is now 2050.  Globally, we are 9 billion strong.  Only 20% of us are directly involved in agriculture, and poor country economies have diversified.  Yet we all have enough food.  Technological innovation has played its part, but increased production has been largely driven by institutional reform.  For example, industrialized countries have eliminated the subsidies that once undercut poor country agricultural production and exports.  Land reform has spread in Latin America.  Water reform has proceeded in Asia.  Irrigation, which once constituted 70% of freshwater use, now consumes less than 50%.  New agronomic practices are taking hold worldwide. The world is eating more healthily and locally.  The sustainability of our agricultural systems is taken as non-negotiable by the world’s politicians.

The key?  Institutional reform.  And the key to institutional reform has been placing citizens and primary producers in more central oversight and ownership positions, with governments stepping back and taking more responsibility for managing at watershed and ecosystem levels.

Social Media at the World Bank: Tell Us What Will It Take to End Poverty

Jim Rosenberg's picture

Read this post in Español, Français, عربي, 中文

What will it take …to improve your life? …for your children to be better off?  …for mothers to be healthy? …for all to get a good education? …to end poverty? More than 1.3 billion people around the globe live on less than $1.25 a day. Fighting poverty in times of crisis may be challenging, but we can’t take our eyes off the most vulnerable.

In this video, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim asks, “What Will It Take?” Post your questions on Twitter using #whatwillittake, and share your solutions with the hashtag #ittakes.

Optimiste pour la Guinee

Phil Hay's picture

At a fishing enclave called Baie des Anges on Guinea Conakry's Atlantic coast, the country's development challenges are laid bare. In this make-shift settlement shrouded with blue tarpaulins and weighted down with stones and old tires, families battle the constant threat of flooding while they struggle to make a living from fish they smoke on cinder-block stoves. For the poor people of Guinea, better times can't come fast enough.

The statistics are tough to read. Here in Guinea, it rains for six months a year and yet drinking water is hard to find. The country has some of the world’s largest deposits of bauxite and iron ore, and still one in two people lives in grinding poverty. And it’s getting worse. The poverty rate has jumped from 53% of the population in 2007 to more than 55% in 2012. Blessed with some of Africa’s most significant agricultural and hydro-electric potential, few homes outside downtown Conakry have power at night unless they run generators; and food is often in short supply.

World Bank Vice President for Africa Makhtar Diop with women leaders in Guinea, ConakryI joined the World Bank’s Vice President for Africa, Makhtar Diop, on a recent trip to Guinea where he held development talks with the President, Professor Alpha Condé, the Prime Minister, Mohamed Said Fofana, Cabinet Ministers, and local business leaders. In his discussions Diop was optimistic about the country’s development future and its potential to tackle its energy shortages, boost its agriculture production, and use its rich mining resources to transform the economy and development prospects of some of Africa's poorest people.

You Asked: What's Going on With Food Prices?

Karin Rives's picture

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Photo: © Michael Morris / World Bank

When the World Bank’s Food Price Watch reported last week that severe drought pushed prices of staples such as maize and soybean to an all-time high this summer, people everywhere took notice. What will it mean for the poor in regions most affected by rising prices? What will it mean for us? 

Economist José Cuesta, who authors the Bank’s quarterly Food Price Watch, asked readers of our last blog entry to submit their own questions about food prices. Here are his answers to a few of them.

Longreads: Future Foods, Car Index, Mexico's Middle Class, Gen U and Africa's Era of Unemployment

Donna Barne's picture

Find a good longread on development? Tweet it to @worldbank with the hashtag #longreads.

 

Amid Olympics chatter, concern continues to grow over extreme weather and rising food prices, with many tweeting this week about IRIN’s “Food: Price Shock Hotspots.” BBC News Magazine  looks at possible future climate-friendly food stuffs —including insects, lab-grown meat, and algae—in “Future Foods: What Will We Be Eating in 20 Year’s Time?” Demand for protein is expected to expand along with the global middle class—which may be as large as 600 million people in G20 developing countries, according to a Carnegie Endowment paper, "In Search of the Global Middle Class." Authors Uri Dadush and Shimelse Ali argue their "Car Index" of the number of cars in circulation provides "a relatively good measure of the number of middle-class households." A  BRIC economy is the subject of the Washington Post’s "Returning Migrants Boost Mexico’s Middle Class" -- a look at how immigrants’ savings are being used back home. In Africa, progress could be hampered by jobless growth and growing numbers of jobless young people, according to "Generation U – Africa’s Era of Unemployment."

Socio economic consequences of food price spikes

Will Martin's picture

High food prices, especially when they have increased suddenly and unexpectedly, have been found to hurt many poor people around the world. The Global Monitoring Report 2012: Food Prices, Nutrition, and the Millennium Development Goals (GMR) finds that the food price shock that peaked in early 2011 pushed nearly 50 million people into poverty. On one level, this is not surprising—the poorest people, after all, spend nearly all of their income on food. But on further reflection, this result is not so obvious— three quarters of the world’s poor are rural and the majority of them depend on farming for their livelihoods. The problem is that—unlike farmers in rich countries—many poor farmers in developing countries don’t produce enough food to meet their families’ needs. These net buyers of food are hurt by higher food prices even though they are farmers.

Food and nutrition: How do we balance the equation?

Leslie Elder's picture

Although the world produces a surplus of food, we have yet to achieve the right balance between the production of food and achievement of good nutrition. A new World Bank-hosted knowledge platform will generate better understanding of the links between agriculture, food security and nutrition, to help countries reach the Millennium Development Goal on hunger (MDG 1). Read more on the SecureNutrition blog.

Putting food first …

Jos Verbeek's picture

Our world is only three years away from the 2015 deadline for reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Two global targets have been reached well ahead of schedule – according to preliminary estimates for extreme poverty the proportion of people living on less than a $1.25 a day has fallen below half its 1990 value. The same is true for the target to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water. 

A few more MDGs are in sight of the finish line. These are primary school completion rate and gender equality in primary and secondary education. 

However, some others will need a real push, particularly child and maternal mortality and access to improved sanitation facilities. Hence, it is too early to claim that the mission has been accomplished, especially when we look at individual countries and achievements per region. Disparities among regions and countries remain large and much remains to be done to make progress towards the MDGs a reality for all. 

Coping with high food prices in Pakistan

In the last three or four years, there has been a sharp rise in food prices in Gujrat, Pakistan, where I live--especially for commonly needed products such as wheat, sugar, vegetables, fruits, and grains.

My neighbors and friends say their incomes can’t keep up with food and oil prices, so they are reducing their daily food intake.  Before this food price spike, they ate three times a day, now it’s twice.

After the holidays, a time to reflect on the state of food in Africa

Ian Gillson's picture

As we gather in kitchens and dining rooms during this season of eating and charity, let us pause for a moment to review the state of food trade in Africa: how does cross-border commerce in key crops fare on a continent with pockets of harsh weather and unpredictable politics? How is the traffic in grains and tubers?

It’s clear that prices are high, following the February 2011 peak worldwide. The price of maize in Nairobi has tripled this year alone, while the price of a 50 kg bag of rice in Dakar has risen from $36 to $43.50. These spikes can be blamed partly on increased demand for food crops – including for biofuel production in Europe and the United States. They are also due to supply-side factors, such as higher energy prices which impact transportation and fertilizer costs, and weak harvests in large exporting countries.

But on a global scale there is no food shortage. In 2010, the world produced 2.2 billion tons of cereals, up from 820 million tons 50 years ago (a 268 percent increase). Over the same period, the world’s population has grown from three billion to seven billion people: an increase of 233 percent. In Africa, food staple production is abundant in some areas even though the continent is a net importer of food. Mali grows enough excess sorghum to supply its neighbors, and Uganda, the bread basket of East Africa, makes regular shipments of maize to Kenya, Southern Sudan and Rwanda. The problem is that the surplus food does not always get to those in need. Often shipments of perishable goods are stopped at the border and excessive inspections frequently cause delays.

Food Prices and the 7 Billionth Baby

Otaviano Canuto's picture

Photo: World BankTurmoil is not solely circumscribed to Wall Street and stock markets around the world. Volatility is also affecting global food prices, and with them, millions of people in developing countries. So, just as the world marks the birth of the 7 billionth baby this week, his or her family might be struggling to put food on the table.

Haiti: sowing the seeds for better nutrition

Marie Chantal Messier's picture

Haiti: merging nutrition and agriculture innovations to progress from crisis to stability

“Haiti” and “food” and “nutrition” are words not usually seen together as part of an optimistic statement, rather the opposite. But as we commemorate World Food Day I believe there is a lot that Haiti can bring to the table to find a sustainable solution to its stubborn malnutrition problem.

This may sound like the world’s best kept secret, but it is partly the result of people, including ourselves sometimes, focusing on Haiti’s ailments rather than its progress. 

Latin America's poor not protected enough against rising food prices

Margaret Grosh's picture

Latin America's poor not protected enough against rising food prices

As the threat of a new global crisis eats away the world’s expectations of a prompt economic recovery, our eyes are again focused on rising food prices and their potential impact on Latin America and the Caribbean’s own recovery.

Now, you may argue that the region is well equipped to weather another meltdown, and that the region’s poor are shielded from the impacts of such developments. After all, Latin America has been praised worldwide for its safety nets, right?


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