The 925 million people who went hungry in 2010 are just one facet of an ever-worsening food security crisis. Both food producers and consumers face the consequences of price volatility and unsustainable agricultural practices - challenges that leave leaders on local and global levels alike seeking sustainable models for agriculture.

Roma leaders are alarmed at the growing discrimination faced by their people in Europe, especially because of the anti-gypsy stance taken by many political parties, which blame the ethnic minority group for a wide range of social ills.

For a start, stop calling it 'aid', Brian Atwood, chair of the Development Assistance Committee at the OECD, tells IPS.

Carbon markets are under attack on all sides, despite ongoing faith in their ability to deliver meaningful reductions in greenhouse gases (GHGs).

The shop is filled to bursting with buyers. One by one, customers follow a salesperson to one of a row of booths where they are provided with a wealth of information on the mobile phones for sale. But nobody tells them what to do with the old phones they are replacing.

Thousands of people are being left physically and psychologically scarred as countries around the world continue to breach international law in handing out brutal but 'ineffective' corporal punishment for drug offences, it has been claimed.

Cracey Fernandes, the president of the Guyana Sex Work Coalition, does not hide the fact that he is homosexual.

When he decided to publicly express his views about Islam, Kacem El Ghazzali had no idea that he was going to be beaten up and his life threatened. In spite of this, he continues his fight from his country of asylum for the freedom of faith in the Islamic kingdom of Morocco.

Mosammet Monwara walks more than three km every alternate day to fetch water for her family of five in a heavy earthen pitcher.

'Hatred against us has now spread to small towns and villages,' Saleemuddin, spokesperson of the persecuted Ahmadiya community in Pakistan, told IPS.