About Feeding Minds, Fighting Hunger
“Feeding Minds, Fighting Hunger,” is a global education initiative for schools and youth groups designed to enable and encourage teachers, students and young people to become actively involved in helping create a world free from hunger and malnutrition. Launched on World Food Day 2000, Feeding Minds has been created by a group of 10 international partners and non-profit organizations , spearheaded by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and the U.S. National Committee for World Food Day. Together, the FMFH partners have created a global classroom and interactive discussion forum on key aspects of hunger, nutrition and food security.
Intended for use by teachers around the world, three easy to introduce teaching modules have been developed for use by each of three levels of education – primary, intermediate, and secondary – all of which cover, in varying degrees of complexity, the topics of What are Hunger and Malnutrition? Who Is Malnourished? Why Is There Hunger in the World? and What Can We Do To Help End Hunger and Malnutrition? Background information and additional resources are provided to assist teachers in studying these topics with their students. Teachers around the world adapt and refine the materials, as necessary, to meet local needs and conditions. The lessons and teaching materials are available in Arabic, Chinese, English, Farsi, French, Greek, Bahasa Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Kiswahili on the Internet (www.feedingminds.org), on CD-ROM and in print form upon request. The website provides a forum through which teachers and students around the world can talk with each other and exchange ideas and experiences on these issues.
Feeding Minds also reaches out directly to youth through its “Youth Window”, which provides information, resources and activities for young people to use on their own. Providing additional information not included in the main Feeding Minds lessons, the “Youth Window” aims to interest and motivate teens inside or outside the classroom to join in global efforts to end hunger and malnutrition.
The Feeding Minds, Fighting Hunger initiative has been developed as one of many efforts being undertaken worldwide to fight hunger and malnutrition. Today, 850 million people in the world never get enough to eat to meet their basic energy requirements; some 2 billion people cannot consume the quantity and variety of foods necessary to meet their vitamin and mineral needs. Even in the United States, where problems of overnutrition predominate, approximately 31 million people, including some 12 million children, do not have regular access to enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs. Hunger and malnutrition prevent the normal growth and development of children. They limit the learning capacity and productivity of both children and adults and, when widespread, are serious constraints to the social and economic development of communities and nations.
Widespread hunger and malnutrition are not inevitable in today’s world. We have the means to end these problems, but all too often we lack the will and commitment to do so. An important step in developing and strengthening commitment to eliminating hunger and malnutrition is to ensure that children and young people understand the causes and consequences of such problems, and are motivated to seek ways to help solve and prevent them.
Feeding Minds offers a unique opportunity for a broad coalition of partners to work together to foster greater awareness and understanding among young people of the problems of hunger and malnutrition around the world. It is only by helping this group become aware of these problems and of the opportunities for solving them that we can generate and sustain in future generations the political will necessary to create a world free from hunger.
