Tag Archives: Hunger

Venezuelan women seek sterilizations as crisis sours child-rearing

Lisibeht Martinez (L), 30, who was sterilized one year ago, sits next to her children while they play in a bathtub in the backyard of their house

By Alexandra Ulmer

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s food shortages, inflation and crumbling medical sector have become such a source of anguish that a growing number of young women are reluctantly opting for sterilizations rather than face the hardship of pregnancy and child-rearing.

Traditional contraceptives like condoms or birth control pills have virtually vanished from store shelves, pushing women toward the hard-to-reverse surgery.

“Having a child now means making him suffer,” said Milagros Martinez, waiting on a park bench on a recent morning ahead of her sterilization at a nearby Caracas municipal health center.

The 28-year-old butcher from the poor outskirts of Caracas decided on the operation after having an unplanned second child because she could not find birth control pills.

Her daily life revolves around finding food: she gets up in the middle of the night to stand in long lines outside supermarkets, sometimes with no choice but to bring along her baby son, who has been sunburnt during hours-long waits.

“I’m a little scared about being sterilized but I prefer that to having more children,” said Martinez, who with dozens of other women took a bus from the slums at 4 a.m. to attend a special “sterilization day” in this wealthy area of Caracas.

While no recent national statistics on sterilizations are available, doctors and health workers say demand for the procedure is growing.

For a Wider Image photo essay, see http://reut.rs/2atW2ZL

The local health program for women in Miranda state, which includes parts of Caracas, offers 40 spots during these “sterilization days” but as recently as last year did not usually fill them.

Now all the slots are scooped up and some 500 women are on the waiting list, according to program director Deliana Torres.

“Before, the conditions for this program were that the women be low-income and have at least four kids. Now we have women with one or two kids who want to be tied up,” she said.

Health workers at a national family planning organization and at three government hospitals in the states of Falcon, Tachira and Merida echoed her view that demand for sterilizations had grown in recent months.

The trend highlights how the oil-rich nation’s brutal recession is forcing people to make difficult choices.

Venezuela is a largely Roman Catholic country where Church doctrine rejects all forms of contraception and abortion is banned unless a woman’s life is at risk. The Archbishop of Merida, Baltazar Porras, told Reuters an increase in sterilizations would be a “barbarity.”

But Venezuela’s crisis has triggered almost daily riots for food and slammed a shrinking middle class as well as the poor who were once a bastion of support for late leftist leader Hugo Chavez’s self-styled “beautiful revolution.”

Pregnant women are particularly affected as they struggle to find adequate food and supplements, give birth in crowded and under-equipped hospitals, and have to spend hours in lines for scarce diapers, baby food and medicines.

The government ministries for health, women and information did not respond to requests for comment.

‘I WANTED FIVE KIDS’

Sterilizations are usually straightforward procedures that involve closing or blocking a woman’s fallopian tubes, known as tubal ligation.

“I heard about these free sterilization days on the radio. Immediately I showered, dressed, and went out (to find out about them),” said Rosmary Teran, 32, who had her second child two months ago and also came to the health center from a poor neighborhood before dawn.

Some health workers fear the economic meltdown is putting pressure on women to make a choice they may come to regret if the crisis eases.

“Sometimes we hear: ‘My husband told me to get sterilized because another child now wouldn’t be practical’,” said social worker Ania Rodriguez at family planning group PLAFAM in central Caracas.

Rodriguez says she meets with up to five women a day seeking sterilizations, up from one or two per week about a year ago. When women seem unsure or pressured into sterilizations, Rodriguez tries to steer them toward contraceptives like intra-uterine devices, which are somewhat more available and affordable than birth control pills or condoms.

When they have them, pharmacies sell a pack of three condoms for around 600 bolivars, only 60 U.S. cents at the black market rate but a big expense for those who earn the minimum wage of some 33,000 bolivars per month. On the Caracas re-sale market, those same condoms fetch around 2,000 bolivars.

Venezuela’s elite can afford those prices but the ailing middle class and poor are increasingly stuck.

“I couldn’t find the (contraceptive) injections, the pill, nothing. It’s very expensive on the black market, and now you can’t even find stuff there anymore,” said Yecsenis Ginez, 31, who has one son and decided to get sterilized.

“I thought I would have up to five kids, I had loads of names in mind. But it would be crazy to fall pregnant now.”

Still, some women have had to wait for months to be sterilized because there are limited spots at state-led hospitals and private clinics can charge about 12 times the monthly minimum wage. And some health centers are unable to provide sterilizations at all due to a lack of equipment or specialists.

DISARRAY

Amid what now feels like a distant oil boom, Chavez built thousands of Cuban-staffed health centers in poor neighborhoods and also launched popular maternity-health programs during his 1999-2013 rule.

But with Venezuela’s state-led economic model decaying and oil prices depressed, hospitals have deteriorated sharply under his successor Nicolas Maduro.

Medicine shortages hover around 85 percent, according to a leading pharmaceutical association. Equipment ranging from surgical gloves to incubators is scarce, and many underpaid doctors have left the public sector or emigrated.

The government still says it has one of the world’s best health systems and accuses detractors of waging a smear campaign. It has stopped releasing timely health data, though.

The World Health Organization says Venezuela’s neo-natal mortality rate was 8.9 per 1,000 live births last year, above the Americas region’s average of 7.7. It says Venezuela’s maternal mortality rate was 95 per 100,000 live births in 2015, one of the worst rates in Latin America and up from 90 in 2000.

The nation of 30 million people has one of Latin America’s highest rates of teenage pregnancies and large numbers of single-parent households, U.N. data shows.

As they waited to be called into the operating room for their sterilizations, women in blue scrubs and hairnets wistfully recalled happier times in once-booming Venezuela.

“Before, when you got pregnant, everyone was happy,” said mother-of-two Yessy Ascanio, 38, as she sat on a bed in a side room. “Now when a woman says ‘I’m pregnant’, everyone scolds you. It makes me sad for young women.”

As some of her peers nervously looked out at patients being wheeled out after their sterilization, Ascanio advised: “If you get scared, just remember those food lines.”

(Additional reporting by Mircely Guanipa in Punto Fijo, Anggy Polanco in San Cristobal, and Sarah Dagher and Daniel Kai in Caracas; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne, Stuart Grudgings and Kieran Murray)

Venezuela denies zoo animals starving, says one happy family

starving lion at Venezuelan zoo

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s government denied on Monday that zoo animals were dying of starvation amid a national food shortage, saying they were being lovingly treated “like family.”

Minister for Ecosocialism and Water Ernesto Paiva toured Caricuao zoo in Caracas, where a union leader last week said 50 animals including Vietnamese pigs, tapirs, rabbits and birds had starved to death in the last six months.

“The animals are very dear, treated as if they were family, in fact they all have names,” said Paiva, adding that they were being seen by nutritionists to ensure they had an adequate diet.

The official said widespread media reports of deplorable conditions for zoo animals in the recession-hit OPEC nation were part of a campaign of “lies” against the socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro.

A union leader for employees of state parks agency Inparques, which oversees zoos, and sources at various facilities have said animals are suffering across the country, with lions being fed mangoes instead of meat and bears receiving less than half of their required intake.

Despite the minister’s assurances that the Caricuao animals were healthy and adequately fed, state prosecutors are investigating the deaths of “various species of wildlife” there.

(Reporting by Daniel Kai; Writing by Girish Gupta; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Sandra Maler)

Venezuelan schoolchildren express hunger in drawings

A drawing made during a lesson at a school shows what a student ate during the course of a day in Caracas, Venezuela July 14, 2016. The student wrote, "Ate corn cake with cheese for breakfast; had spaghetti with egg for lunch and a cookie for dinner." The student said that pizza was their favourite dish.

By Daniel Kai

CARACAS (Reuters) – When children at a Catholic-run school in a poor neighborhood of Venezuela’s Caracas capital began fainting from hunger, teachers asked them to draw or describe their most recent meals and what they expected to eat next.

The responses were shocking.

Some of the 478 kindergarten and primary students had gone without breakfast and were skipping other meals. Others expected to eat only bread, yucca or “arepa,” a form of cornmeal flatbread that is a local staple.

The drawings and texts at the Padre Jose Maria Velaz school in western Caracas are another symptom of the oil-rich South American nation’s deep economic crisis and its effects on nutrition and eating habits.

Due to the faltering socialist economy and the plunge in global oil prices, Venezuela has been in recession since early 2014. It suffers from the world’s highest inflation and is experiencing shortages of basic goods, from milk to medicines.

Huge lines at shops and pharmacies are now the norm, and hungry residents are quickly stripping the nation’s lush mango, coconut and papaya trees.

Depicting their latest meals, some students at Padre Jose Maria Velaz drew just mangoes and plantains. One said he had eaten rice and beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Another said he had no breakfast. “We are waiting for food.

“I have pasta and ham for lunch,” he added. “I’m hungry.”

School director Maria Hidalgo said one in four children there were eating inadequately, and some teachers had also fainted from hunger.

“It’s dramatic, what we are going through,” Hidalgo said. “What kind of Venezuela are we going to have in 10 years?”

Critics say Venezuela’s crisis is the fault of economic policies under President Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez. But the government says it is the victim of an “economic war” led by opposition politicians, businessmen and the United States.

Alexis Marin, who runs the food program for state schools, said children were receiving proper supplies.

“With all the economic war, they couldn’t destroy the school food program,” he told state TV.

The children at Padre Jose Maria Velaz at least had a happy reprieve: Nearby private textile company Telares de Palo Grande and local charity Mi Convive recently organized a party around a healthy meat soup for all to mark the end of the school year.

(Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Child hunger and death rising in Zimbabwe due to drought, charity says

By Katy Migiro

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Child hunger and deaths are rising in Zimbabwe due to the worst drought in two decades, with thousands facing starvation by the end of the year without additional aid, an international charity said on Thursday.

Southern Africa has been hard hit over the past year by drought exacerbated by El Niño, a warming of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which has wilted crops, slowed economic growth and driven food prices higher.

“This is an emergency,” Save the Children UK’s interim chief executive Tanya Steele said in a statement, after visiting Binga, on Zimbabwe’s western border with Zambia.

“Some children are already dying of complications from malnutrition.”

Mothers are foraging for wild berries and roots to feed their children, while going without food themselves for up to five days, the charity said.

The number of under-fives who have died of hunger-related causes in Binga town has reached 200 over the last 18 months — triple the usual rate, it said.

More than 60 million people, two thirds of them in east and southern Africa, are facing food shortages because of droughts linked to El Nino, according to the United Nations.

The U.N. World Food Programme estimates around 4 million people — one in three Zimbabweans — are struggling to meet their basic food needs.

The peak of the emergency is likely to be between October and March, the U.N. children’s fund (UNICEF) said.

Hundreds of young children across the country are being admitted to hospital for malnutrition each month, it said, while child neglect, abuse and child labor are on the rise.

HIV/AIDS is often one of the underlying causes of malnutrition in Zimbabwe, where 15 percent of adults are living with the disease, U.N. figures show.

The number of children suffering malnutrition is expected to rise sharply in the coming months, Save the Children said.

“Most of the severely malnourished children who receive no help are likely to die,” it said.

“Around half of these with moderate acute malnutrition could also perish without some form of intervention.”

El Nino ended in May but meteorologists predict a La Nina event, which usually brings floods to southern Africa, is likely to develop in the second half of this year,

Erratic, late rains in Zimbabwe led to a poor harvest in April, with some families suffering their second or third consecutive year of poor production, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET).

(Reporting by Katy Migiro; Editing by Katie Nguyen.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories.)

Hundreds arrested in Venezuela after latest bout of unrest

A man shouts during a protest over food shortage and against Venezuela's government in Caracas

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan security forces have arrested at least 400 people after the latest bout of looting and food riots in the crisis-hit OPEC member country, local officials said on Wednesday.

Violence engulfed the eastern Caribbean coastal town of Cumana on Tuesday as looters swarmed over dozens of shops and security forces struggled to maintain control.

There were unconfirmed reports on social media of several deaths in Cumana, the capital of Sucre state, and an opposition legislator from the zone said one man was shot dead.

But regional governor Luis Acuna from the ruling Socialist Party said the reported deaths were unrelated to the looting.

“There were only 400 people arrested and the deaths were not linked to the looting,” he told a local TV station, calling the looters vandals encouraged by right-wing politicians.

“I have no doubt they paid them, this was planned,” Acuna said.

Nelson Moreno, governor of Anzoategui state, which neighbors Sucre, said eight people were also arrested on Tuesday in “irregular” situations, a term that usually refers to looting.

With desperate crowds of people chanting “We want food!,” protests and melees at shops have spread across Venezuela in recent weeks, fueled by severe shortages.

Three people were shot dead in separate incidents last week, with a policeman and a soldier arrested in two cases.

According to a local monitoring group, the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, more than 10 incidents of looting are occurring daily across the nation of 30 million people that is suffering a brutal recession and the world’s highest rate of inflation.

Venezuela’s political opposition says President Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez are to blame for failed socialist economic policies. The opposition is pursuing a recall referendum this year in an effort to remove him from office.

But Maduro, 53, says his foes are waging an “economic war” against him and seeking to foment a coup. Government officials say there is not enough time this year to organize a referendum.

Should there be such a vote in 2017 and Maduro loses, his vice president would take over – rather than a new presidential election being held – meaning the ruling “Chavismo” movement would still be in power.

(Reporting by Diego Ore, writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Sarah Dagher; editing by G Crosse)

As populations swell, the greater demand for food could spark unrest

A passerby walks outside a restaurant, the day Hong Kong government releases its latest consumer price

By Lin Taylor

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Swelling populations and demand for food combined with ever scarcer water and land resources could lead to a doubling of food prices and trigger civil unrest in some developing countries, a new report says.

Demand for food with a higher environmental impact, such as meat, has surged as emerging countries like China and India grow in size and in wealth, said Martin Halle, policy analyst at Global Footprint Network (GFN).

“A few things are very clear: the demand for food is going up tremendously because of population growth,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“[Food production] is becoming more unstable because climate change is affecting production, in the context of growing land and water scarcity. There’s very little leeway between supply and demand.”

In the past, countries were able to meet those demands by growing more food on more land. But this has come at a cost, Halle said, since the planet is now running out of water and arable land.

The last time the world saw a severe food crisis was in 2007 and 2008, the report said, when extreme weather events hit major grain producing regions the year earlier, causing spikes in the demand and cost of food.

The higher prices led to social and political unrest in North Africa, the Middle East and South East and South Asia.

The report published this week by GFN and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)said most of the same countries, namely Morocco, Bangladesh, Tunisia and Indonesia, are again at risk if food prices were to increase in the next few years.

CLIMATE CHANGE VOLATILITY

Climate change and extreme weather patterns will further increase volatility in food production, Halle added, meaning food prices will become more unstable in the coming years.

“The real game-changer comes when you factor in the environmental constraints – climate change, land scarcity and water scarcity, and all of these are linked,” said Halle.

Drought is becoming more frequent and severe in places like southern Africa, and that – combined with the recent El Nino phenomenon – is taking a heavy toll on rural lives and economies.

For example, maize prices in South Africa, the continent’s top producer of the staple crop, reached near record highs late 2015, in the face of rolling heat waves and poor rains over key growing areas.

Using models from data across 110 countries, the study found that if the cost of food doubled, household spending would increase by more than 10 percent in 37 countries.

Five African countries – Benin, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ghana – would be the worst affected in terms of highest percentage loss to GDP.

The major emerging economies of China and India are forecast to lose $161 billion and $49 billion in gross domestic product (GDP) respectively with a doubling of food commodity prices.

“What this provides is a litmus test,” said Ivo Mulder, economics advisor at UNEP. “We are overusing what is available for us and we don’t really know what the magnitude of the risk is.”

While higher income countries, like the United States, could benefit from food price hikes, Mulder said, their high demand for meat-based products is contributing to the problem.

“It’s important to be honest about the types of risks that countries face,” he said. “Because even if developed countries are less exposed than developing countries, it doesn’t mean there is no risk at all.”

(Reporting by Lin Taylor @linnytayls, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters that covers humanitarian news, conflicts, land rights, modern slavery and human trafficking, women’s rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)

Urgent measures needed on living conditions in Greek migrant camps

People queue for free food at a makeshift camp for migrants and refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni

STRASBOURG (Reuters) – Urgent measures are need to address overcrowding and poor living conditions in refugee and migrant camps in Greece, Europe’s top rights watchdog warned on Wednesday.

The Council of Europe, which brings together 47 countries, said some facilities were “sub-standard” and able to provide no more than the most basic needs such as food, hygiene products and blankets.

The report echoes warnings by other rights groups and aid agencies who say Greece has been unable to care properly for the more than 800,000 people reaching its shores in the last year, fleeing wars or poverty in the Middle East and Africa.

The Council described dire living conditions in several sites visited on a March 7-11 trip, just before the European Union and Turkey reached a deal that reduced arrivals but increased the number of people held in detention awaiting asylum decisions or deportation.

It said in its report that people who reached Greece were locked away in violation of international human rights standards and lacked legal access.

At Greece’s Nea Kavala temporary transit camp, people were left burning trash to keep warm and sleeping in mud-soaked tents, according to the report.

The Council called for the closure of a makeshift camp in Idomeni, where some 10,000 people have been stranded en route to northern Europe due to the closure of Macedonia’s border.

Germany has taken in most of the 1.3 million refugees and migrants who reached Europe across the Mediterranean in the past year, triggering bitter disputes among the 28 EU member states on how to handle the influx.

Europe’s deal with Turkey last month gave its leaders some breathing space but has come under pressure since Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, one of the sponsors of the accord, stepped down.

The morality and legality of the deal has been challenged by human rights groups, however, and a provision to grant Turkish citizens visa-free travel to Europe in exchange for Ankara’s help remains politically contentious.

In a separate report, a trio of European Parliamentarians on Tuesday described the poor conditions faced by people who have been returned to Turkey under the deal.

“We have seen how the migration policies imposed by the European Union have terrible consequences on the lives of thousands of people,” said Cornelia Ernst, a German member of the European Parliament and a co-author of that report.

“Turkey has been hired as a deportation agency, putting into practice the migration policies designed in Brussels.”

The left-wing deputies said on their May 2-4 visit to Turkey they had met people who complained of not being able to claim asylum in Europe, which would run counter to international humanitarian law.

They also described poor detention conditions, confiscation of private property and widespread difficulties in getting access to legal help or information, among other issues.

(Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska; Editing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Hugh Lawson)

Stealing food not a crime if you really need it in Italy

ROME (Reuters) – Stealing a little food should not be considered a crime if you really need it, Italy’s highest court has ruled.

Ukrainian national Roman Ostriakov was living rough in the northern Italian city of Genoa in 2011 when he was caught trying to steal some cheese and sausage worth 4.07 euros ($4.71) from a supermarket.

He was found guilty of theft and sentenced to six months in jail and a handed a 100-euro fine.

The state prosecutor appealed the sentence on a technicality, arguing that he should not have been found guilty of theft, but rather attempted theft, because he had been caught before he had left the supermarket premises.

But Italy’s Supreme Court annulled the verdict.

“The condition of the accused and the circumstances in which he obtained the merchandise show that he had taken the little amount of food he needed to overcome his immediate and essential requirement for nourishment,” it said in a written ruling.

(Reporting by Crispian Balmer)

Hyenas attack hungry women as Somaliland’s drought deepens

Women pray as they wait for assistance at Hariirad town of Awdal region, Somaliland.

By Emma Batha

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Somaliland risks descending into famine amid a severe drought that has killed thousands of livestock, an international aid agency warned on Friday, adding there were reports of some women being set upon by hyenas after collapsing from hunger.

“Many people are saying it’s the worst drought in memory,” said Mary Griffin, spokeswoman for Islamic Relief, who visited the region this month.

She said malnourished mothers were unable to breastfeed their babies, and herders were feeding cardboard boxes to their surviving animals because there was no grass left for grazing.

Adan Shariff Gabow, Islamic Relief’s manager for Puntland, neighboring Somaliland, said there were cases in Somaliland of women attacked by starving hyenas.

“They fell down, malnourished, and we understand they were then set on by the animals,” he said.

The United Nations says 1.7 million people – many of them nomadic – need aid in Somaliland and Puntland, Somalia’s two semi-autonomous regions in the north.

Griffin said there was a “terrible sense of deja vu” in the Horn of Africa where a 2011 drought in southern Somalia killed more than a quarter of a million people.

Aid agencies were criticized then for responding too late to warning signs.

Hany El-Banna, chairman of the Muslim Charities Forum, who also visited the region, called on the world not to repeat the same mistakes.

“We cannot wait like we did in 2011 when we acted too late,” he said. “We need to deal with this today – if we don’t this drought will turn into a famine.”

CLIMATE CHANGE

The drought has been caused by successive poor rainy seasons made worse by El Nino conditions in the Horn of Africa.

Thousands of goats and cows have perished and even camels – which are more drought-resistant – are dying.

Britain’s shadow development secretary Diane Abbott, who accompanied aid agencies on the trip, plans to raise the issue in parliament next week.

“I spoke to families who had 500 or more animals three months ago, and now are left with 20 or fewer,” she said.

“For people who rely on their animals for meat, milk and trade, it’s the equivalent of losing your entire life savings.”

The United Nations says malnutrition-related deaths have been reported in Awdal region, bordering Ethiopia, where sprawling makeshift camps have sprung up as people wait for aid to arrive.

Griffin who visited a camp at Qol Ujeed, in Awdal, said 1,200 people were living there without a single toilet. Many of their dead animals are buried around the camp.

Nimo Mohamed Abdi, a mother of three, described how she had lost all her livestock – more than 180 animals including camels – in three months.

“We were living by the coast then and the animals died so quickly, one after another, that we could do nothing with their corpses but throw them into the sea,” Griffin quoted her as saying.

The United Nations has launched a $105 million appeal.

Abbott said conditions that pastoral communities would expect to see every seven to 10 years were becoming an annual occurrence.

“With the increasing effects of climate change we need to look at how to build more resilience; more boreholes, dams, ways to collect and store rainwater.”

(Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, which covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org to see more stories.)

Humanitarian Aid sets off to besieged Syria after blocked for months

A bird flies near a torn Syrian national flag in the city of Qamishli

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Dozens of trucks carrying humanitarian aid set off on Thursday for the town of Rastan in Syria’s Homs province for a delivery to a besieged area where supplies have not been able to enter for months, the Red Crescent said.

Rastan was one of the first areas to be bombed by Russian warplanes when Moscow intervened in the five-year Syrian war in September. New government air strikes have targeted the area in recent days as a partial truce in western Syria has unraveled.

A spokesman for the Red Cross, which was to deliver the aid alongside the Red Crescent, said Thursday’s convoy included 65 trucks carrying food and medical aid. He said it was one of the largest joint humanitarian aid deliveries in Syria.

United Nations and Red Cross aid deliveries have reached a number of besieged areas in Syria this year, including during a U.S.-Russian-brokered cessation of hostilities agreement that took effect in February.

The truce is now in tatters after fighting intensified, and peace talks in Geneva appeared to collapse this week.

Fresh fighting has displaced tens of thousands more people in recent days near the northern city of Aleppo, the United Nations says. Many locations besieged by government forces and their allies, Islamic State fighters and other insurgents remain hard to reach, aid agencies say.

(Reporting by John Davison, editing by Larry King)