Why do more than 800 million people still go hungry in a world marked by incredible affluence? 180 nations are gathering in Rome from June 10 to 13 to address just that question at the "World Food Summit: Fives Years Later" meeting. Since 1996, governments have presided over a set of policies that have conspired to undercut peasant, small and family farmers, and farm cooperatives in nations both North and South. These policies have included runaway trade liberalization, pitting family farmers in the Third World against the subsidized corporate farms in the North (witness the recent U.S. Farm Bill), forcing Third World countries to eliminate price supports and subsidies for food producers, the privatization of credit, the excessive promotion of exports to the detriment of food crops, the patenting of crop genetic resources by corporations who charge farmers for their use, and a bias in agricultural research toward expensive and questionable technologies like genetic engineering while virtually ignoring pro-poor alternatives like organic farming and agroecology.

High-level discussions on Southern Africa's food crisis which began in Johannesburg on Thursday, attracted representatives from a wide range of aid agencies, donors, and regional governments, says the World Food Programme (WFP). The two-day meeting followed warnings by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and WFP that more than 10 million people in six Southern African countries are threatened with starvation over the next year.

Fighting the HIV/AIDS Pandemic Through Information and Strategic Communication: An Integrated Training Course for Program Teams and Journalists. The conference takes place between June 6 and July 16. It is open to those from Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia via distance learning.

The United Nations in July will launch "Heart and Soul," a weekly television and radio soap opera intended to spread HIV/AIDS prevention messages and awareness about other issues affecting Africa.

The international organisation of food security is in disarray. How has this happened? New research on food aid by the Overseas Development Institute, ODI, makes clear the seriousness of the issue. Tackling hunger is crucial to the international targets for reducing poverty. The report shows that the poorest 1.5 billion people in the world live on less than $US1 a day and typically spend 80 percent of their income on food. The study suggests that the chaos arises from a loss of confidence in all forms of food aid except for emergency relief. Furthermore, although there are many ways in which donors can help overcome hunger apart from food aid, internationally negotiated commitments on food security are not adapted to include these. Institutional arrangements exacerbate the problem, notably regarding the role of the World Food Programme (WFP), the USA and the EU.

Unbelievably, with the response to HIV entering its third decade, and as another severe food shortage unfolds, one of our most enduring questions is how the vicious cycle between food insecurity and HIV/AIDS impact and vulnerability can be understood and broken. Research on the impact of HIV/AIDS on agriculture, rural development, nutrition, food security and rural poverty has been carried out. Unravelling the interaction between them has been problematic because of the institutional frameworks that have seen food security as being worlds apart from the biomedical paradigm that has -and still does - characterize the way we have thought of AIDS to date.

The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has welcomed the declaration of a state of emergency over HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe, but has urged a return to democratic accountability and the rule of law.

Ethiopia needs at least US $166 million a year to fight the HIV/AIDS crisis that is devastating the country, a government official has said. It also needs food aid for orphans and victims of the virus, Abebe Kebede from the metropolitan HIV/AIDS secretariat, told IRIN.

Scientists and health officials have criticised what they call the "cool response" of the developed world towards investing in an African AIDS vaccine. "We will continue to challenge the apathy of the rich nations to investing in an AIDS vaccine," Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said at the first forum of the African AIDS Vaccine Programme.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has spurred significant advances in reproductive health policies across Africa. However, governments do not allocate sufficient legal and financial resources to ensure that the policies are effective, according to a report launched by advocates from seven African countries and the U.S.-based Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (CRLP). The report is based on two years of collaborative research and analysis of laws and policies related to the reproductive lives of women.

Africa needs to focus on human resources if it hopes to improve its public health sector, experts said at a three-day conference in Benin. The conference, organised by the World Health Organization (WHO), culminated in the drafting of recommendations to strengthen the knowledge and skills of public health workers in treating patients.

A programme to distribute 60,000 insecticide-treated mosquito nets to thousands of households in Kikimi, an outlying district of Kinshasa, has been launched. The programme is part of the global "Roll Back Malaria" initiative, which seeks to halve the world's malaria burden by 2010.

The systematic sale of live chickens to disadvantaged communities for informal slaughter, has potentially lethal consequences especially for the very young, very old and those carrying the HIV-AIDS virus, says Compassion in World Farming.

Malawi's existing health challenges of cholera, malnutrition, malaria and HIV/AIDS have been joined by another - the bubonic plague. Seventy-one cases of the medieval-sounding disease carried by fleas and rodents have been reported in the far south of the country since April, the World Health Organisation (WHO) says.

The government of Ghana this week began a major, multi-year initiative to improve the health of Ghanaian children by upgrading home-based care for common childhood illnesses. The first phase of the initiative, the “Home-based Care for Malaria” program, was launched on May 22 by the Director-General of Ghana Health Service (GHS), Agyeman Badu Akosa. Malaria is the reason for almost half of all outpatient visits and over one-third of all in-patients at GHS facilities. The disease is the cause of one of every five deaths in children under age five. The high death rate from malaria is due to a number of factors, but chief among them is improper or incomplete treatment.

The Japanese government has donated US $17 million to fight polio - almost half of which will be used to combat the virus in Africa. The money will be spent in six countries - Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Nigeria and Sudan. The contribution brings the total Japan has contributed this year to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) for polio eradication and other child health initiatives to US $31.6 million.

A handful of NGOs are trying to stop AIDS in Angola before it reaches catastrophic proportions. All the ingredients for a crisis exist in the country: four million people are displaced, there are lots of soldiers with weapons and no control, appalling poverty, high unemployment, low education, crowded shantytowns and lots of young women with no jobs, no education and no possibility of earning an income except through sex.

The prevalence in South Africa of morbidity associated with an incomplete abortion -- whether spontaneous or illegally induced -- "immediately decreased" following the legalization of abortion in the country, according to recent study.

No fewer than 700,000 children below five years old die yearly as a result of diarrhoea, malaria and other child-killer diseases. Out of this number, 170,000 children die before they reach one month, just as 45,000 women die yearly of pregnancy related causes.

'Whose Rules Rule? Trade, debt and corporate power.' 8 and 9 June 2002, London. Third World Network's Martin Khor will take on Supachai Panitchpakdi, Director General Designate of the World Trade Organisation, together with Mohau Pheko of the Gender and Trade Network in Africa, and John Pilger will run a 'Forum on Globalisation'. There will also be seminars and workshops, including Martin Khor on the Doha Development Agenda, and WDM's AGM in the morning. On Sunday there will be a Campaigners' Convention with workshops on successful campaigning.