World Food Crisis

TV chef, nutritionist, mother, and child sponsor, Allyson Gofton is currently visiting World Vision projects in Uganda and Tanzania. The aim of her trip is to get an insight into how World Vision is creating lasting change in communities effected by the Food Crisis. More …

As New Zealand struggles with its own food prices, millions of families overseas on $2 per day are being cast further into poverty with devastating effects on child malnutrition.

“Nutrition is a subject very close to my heart,” says Allyson. “My work in New Zealand focuses on feeding Kiwis with an enormous array of food varieties, nutrient-rich ingredients, colours, flavours and aromas. It’s pretty easy for most of us to eat well but when I see what children are eating, or not eating, in poor countries, I feel compelled to put a spotlight on the issue and do what I can to help.”

Allyson’s family sponsors two World Vision children, one in Bangladesh and one in Tanzania. “Families in these countries earn $2 per day and spend up to 75 percent of that on food. We complain about spending 60 per cent of our income on our mortgages but they spend way more than that just on food. I find that confounding and outrageous!”

World Vision has set up a Global Food Crisis Fund to provide ongoing assistance to countries affected by the Global Food Crisis. Your contribution to the Global Food Crisis Fund will support such activity as:

• Distributing relief aid like food, water and medicines
• Nutritional feeding for malnourished pregnant women, babies and their mothers
• Maternal and child health programs
• Projects to help families rehabilitate their lives, businesses and farms
• Providing seeds adapted to local soil and climate conditions, as well as tools and agricultural training
• Training in sustainable farming, re-vegetation and the planting of fruit and forest trees
• Disaster mitigation programs
• Joint-projects working with local charities, business and governments to rehabilitate communities and bring about policy changes that help those affected by the Global Food Crisis.

World Vision is the distributor of World Food Programme food. We currently provide nearly 450,000 metric tonnes of food in 30 countries every year, which means that we have the existing infrastructure to ensure food, when sourced, can be made available to those in need.

World Vision is therefore responding by providing emergency food aid, medicine and household supplies to meet immediate needs and is incorporating long-term resilience and sustainability projects so communities at risk will not succumb to this crisis now and in the future.