CALL FOR APPLICATIONS IS OPEN

Are you involved in an initiative that sustainably provides food and/or water where previously there was insecurity? If so we would like to hear from you.

The Water and Food Award recognises and promotes sustainable initiatives from around the world. Every year, we shortlist applicants and select finalists who we fly to Copenhagen to receive publicity and contacts with companies looking to sponsor and assist their efforts.

The night of the award we choose a winner and present them with the Water and Food Award statuette as well as prizes provided by our sponsors.

To apply, simply download the application kit and complete the form about the initiative you are involved in.

WATER AND FOOD FOR ALL – STRENGTHENING WHAT WORKS

The Winner of the Humanitarian Water and Food Award 2010, Permaculture Institute with their Greening the Desert project in Jordan, represented by Rhamis Kent, and Founder and General Secretary of WAF, Tina Lindgreen

TOGETHER SOLVING A GLOBAL CHALLENGE

Over 1,4 billion human beings (1 in 6) are without access to clean water and more than 1 billion are undernourished. Through The Water & Food Award, we strengthen innovative and sustainable initiatives that are making a significant difference by empowering the poor and forgotten.

To see the WINNERS 2010 click here

To read more about the first Award Event from the 26th November 2010 click here

State-of-the-art nominees click here

SUSTAINABLE CSR WIN-WIN PARTNERSHIPS

To maximize social, financial and environmental impact, WAF facilitates Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) opportunities for mutual gain. The strategic fit between a Corporations and Award Winner give both an opportunity to prosper.

WAF

It is about human beings, about lives, about existence

The Water & Food Organisation has a vision – Water and Food for All. This concerns everyone and requires global outreach and collaboration. Award winners have the innovativeness and heart. Corporations the resources to scale up what works and can save many more lives.

The Water & Food Organisation conveys a message of hope and a call for public awareness about the Water and Food challenge. WAF calls for joint action across the business, citizen and public sectors of society.

Water is the universal elixir of life. It makes up more than 70 percent of our total body mass and covers the same proportion of the Earth’s surface. We can live without food for a month or more, but we will perish in a matter of days without water. Hence the

importance of keeping unseparated Water-and-Food as the most basic necessity.

 

 

Ambassador of Peace – Prem Rawat Honored in Potenza, Italy

“Our differences of opinion should be our strength, not our weakness. We have to learn to come together, and that can only happen when we see the necessity.”

Climate Action member of the Barroso Commission designate, Connie Hedegaard

“I am pleased to see that The Humanitarian Water & Food Award works for furthering Corporate Social Responsibility and the collaboration between business life and humanitarian organisations”

Former Danish Minister of Development, Ulla Toernes

WAF

“Denmark is internationally at the forefront. The Award goes hand-in-hand with the government’s efforts. So I want to say best foot forward and I hope that it will be a yearly event”

WAF

The Water & Food Organisation …

• offers a Corporate Social Responsibility platform for corporations who want to bring their best to help empower the poor and forgotten and expand their own business at the same time
• raises awareness of what works
• encourages that all people enjoy clean water and food in abundance
• short-lists humanitarian initiatives that make a significant difference and is scalable
• has fun volunteering – what can you do?

AWARD APPLICATION FOR 2012 IS OPEN

VIDEOS OF THE WINNERS 2010

Solvatten │ The Permaculture Institute│The Hunger Project │IKO toilets │ Sadhana Forest

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And other inspirational videos about positive initiatives

Read more about the award here…

A new documentary “Finding North” premiers  at the Sundance Film Festival exposes how one in every four American children suffers from hunger, despite living in the wealthiest nation in the world, and nearly 30 percent of American families, more than 49 million people, often go without meals.

While Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich decries President Obama as “the food stamp president,” author Raj Patel in this interview on Democracy Now says what is really needed is a conversation about poverty and why the need for food stamps is so high. “It’s true that disproportionately people of color are affected by food insecurity. But what Gingrich is doing, of course, is racially coding poverty by calling President Obama ‘the food stamp president,’” Patel said. “He’s invoking these ideas of racialized poverty. Of course, if you look at the people who are on the food stamp program, you see that the majority of them are white and poor.” Patel is author of the popular book, “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.”

See the video on Democracy Now

According to the Vancouver Sun, a new study shows that if Canadians know little about something, they avoid finding out more, especially if the issues are really complicated. In fact, some would avoid the crisis altogether.The authors of the study note that this tendency to avoid threatening information about complex issues is called “motivated avoidance.”

So the more worried people are about something, the less they read about it and the more they leave it to their government ot handle.

Read more here.

 

By WAF researcher P.Chinamaringa
Extensive degradation and increased scarcity of natural resources have placed global food production systems at risk, posing a growing challenge to the task of feeding a world population projected to reach 9 billion by 2050, according to a new FAO report The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture (SOLAW) | managing systems at risk published on 27 th of November 2011.

The report notes that the last 50 years witnessed an increase in food production, but in most instances, achievements come at the expense of degraded land and water systems. Between 1961 and 2009, the world’s cropland grew by 12 percent, but agricultural production rates have been slowing in many areas and are today only half of what they were during the peak of the Green revolution. Farmers must produce 70% more food by 2050 to meet the world’s food requirements. This amounts to 1bn tonnes more wheat, rice and other cereals, 200m more tonnes of beef and other livestock, the report says.
Climate change is also expected to change patterns of temperature, precipitation and river flows upon which the world’s food production systems depend. Agriculture now accounts for 13.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
SOLAW pioneered a global assessment of the state of the planet’s land resources. A frightening quarter of the worlds land is reported as highly degraded, 8 percent are moderate, 36 percent stable or slightly degraded and 10 percent ranked as “improving”, 18 percent bare and inland water bodies (around 2%).High incidences of land degradation are reported west coast of the Americas, Southern Europe and North Africa and throughout Asia resulting in loss of soil quality, biodiversity and water resources depletion.
Large inland water bodies are experiencing reduced inflows, salinization, eutrophication and wetlands loss. Declining aquifer levels and continued abstraction in some regions, particularly i the Middle East, Northern Africa and Central Asia have reached critical thresholds whilst in Western, Central and South Asia and Northern Africa withdrawals for irrigation have exceed renewable levels, the report cautions.
Degradation is a risk across all income groups but the poor are mostly affected with 40 percent of the world’s degraded lands found in areas with high poverty rates, mostly developing countries, 30% in moderate poverty areas while 20% are in low poverty areas.
In trying to resolve the impeding crisis exacerbated by economic challenges, the report recommended sustainable intensification, improving the efficiency of water use; innovative farming practices, increasing investment in agricultural development and modernization of national policies and institutions.

Maybe you aren’t thinking of 2012 yet, just trying to organize Christmas and New Year. But the end of the year is a good time to take stock. What have we learnt during 2011? What has become clearer? For many of us with a focus on feeding the world, the urgent need to reverse economic, energy and environmental trends is growing by the day.

Unless we address these challenges, food supply is threatened – and not only food to developing countries.

This video, THE OIL JOURNEY produced by the Post Carbon Institute and narrated by actor Peter Coyote, says it the clearest.

We are happy to announce that a new version of our application form has just been published on our website. It replaces all earlier versions and it slightly simplified from last year’s versions.  You can read more on our page “APPLY“. Contact us if you need another version of the file. 

Click here to read the report

Click here to see the whole video

 

 

 

The BBC has produced a website to track our approach to seven billion on the Earth. I just took a screen shot.

The site helps  you get perspective and you can see world population when you were born. Here is mine:

Click on the graph to explore where you are in the picture.

As we in the Award are quick to point out, we cannot feed just now one of the billions, and two of the billions are under-nourished. The challenges are discussed in a New United Nations report.

The economic system we have is incapable of delivering prosperity and the transition to a zero or negative carbon system we need, says professor Tim Jackson.

The system pulls economic resources through the system.  But nearly two billion are undernourished. If we not buy the system crashes, but if it continues we are in debt with a degraded environment. This is about  people being persuaded to spend  money they do not have, to buy things they do not need that create impressions that do not last on people they do not care about.

So people want to save. But it would be better if we spend. It is the system that creates these paradoxes.