Fighting Global Hunger

A young girl sips milk as she waits with her mother to receive food rations at a CRS food distribution in the Sanajaba community in Guatemala. Expectant mothers and mothers with children under age 3 receive supplemental food rations and attend educational workshops that promote proper childhood development. Guatemala has the highest levels of malnutrition in Latin America—the infant mortality rate is 33 percent higher than the regional average.

Haiti once imported 90 percent of its eggs from the Dominican Republic—but a project in the town of Gros Morne is changing that. The Church of the Resurrection in Burtonsville, Maryland, the local Haitian parish and CRS have come together to fund and construct a hen house so eggs can be sold to local entrepreneurs. Traders like Enel Poleus will no longer have to take a 2-day trip to buy eggs for his sandwich stall, which supports his young family.

Sudama Devi volunteered one of her plots of land to test new varieties of rice, lentils and wheat as part of a CRS-supported project in her flood-prone village in India. The project is experimenting with improved varieties that can survive in flooded conditions for a longer period of time. The project is also testing varieties that are drought-resistant. While the project focuses on rice, it’s also testing different crops for the other two seasons. At first, people in Sudama’s village were reluctant to try new seeds and methods. Now, she tells us, “Everyone wishes they had participated from the beginning!"

Cousins Dennis, 2, and Maina, 3, drink hot goat’s milk prepared by her grandmother in Nyeri, Kenya. Maina’s family are coffee farmers. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. supports Kenyan coffee farmers by providing dairy goats, banana tissue culture plants, access to financial services through the formation of Savings and Internal Lending Communities, and training in intercropping and farming through CRS and Caritas Nyeri. The support has helped diversify their diet and given them the means to earn an income. The project supports 1,500 coffee farmers and their families.

A CRS project is teaching people in Mauritania, West Africa, how to build half- moon gardens. The project, which has touched the lives of more than 2,500 families, teaches agricultural techniques to help families become self-sufficient. The results so far are promising. After 1 year, people were better able to meet their urgent household needs. The number of days per week that families say they have enough to eat has risen from 31/2 to more than 51/2.

Schools in rural areas of Laos have struggled with enrollment and consistent attendance because they keep their children at home to help with household chores and agriculture work. CRS and our partner provided lunches for primary school children in 384 schools in 6 provinces to encourage attendance and enrollment. CRS and our partner contributed commodity foods, and the community supplements it with vegetables. Above, students at Dong Savanh school learn a new recipe for the rice and lentils provided by the project.

Mary Ngok, a farmer in Bor County, South Sudan, received sorghum, oil and lentils in exchange for road construction work she completed as part of the CRS-led Jonglei Food Security program. The program teaches people skills that help them fight hunger and become self-sufficient. Roads, dykes and water- retention ponds have been built by participants, helping communities access markets, mitigate flood risks and provide watering holes for livestock during the dry season.

CRS helped Ramazan and other farmers in a village near Herat, Afghanistan, start greenhouses and plant higher-yield, more profitable crops such as strawberries. The plastic-sheeted greenhouses CRS helped Ramazan create means he can grow strawberries in the winter and sell them at high prices in the spring, when strawberries are scarce. Because he is part of a CRS-formed farmers’ group, his group can bargain and have more control over the selling price. The money they earn helps buy food, clothing and school supplies for his 10 children.

Students from Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, St Students from Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, St. Joseph’s and the Church of the Nativity, all in Maryland, pack 10,000 meals to be shipped overseas to schoolchildren, orphans and the elderly. Before the event, the groups held fundraisers to pay for the meals and raise additional funds for CRS emergency food programming in Nigeria. After learning about CRS and our work to ease global hunger, the young people had an opportunity to connect with the hungry and poor overseas by packing fortified soy-based rice meals. What can you do to help stand in solidarity with those around the world who experience hunger?