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UN unites with European soccer stars to ‘red card’ global hunger

UN unites with European soccer stars to ‘red card’ global hunger

FAO Goodwill Ambassador Roberto Baggio
The biggest stars in professional football and millions of their fans will aim to score a goal against global hunger in the first-ever Europe-wide soccer weekend to draw attention to the plight of the nearly 1 billion hungry people worldwide, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced today.

Over 200 European football clubs in top flight leagues – including the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Italian Lega Calcio and German Bundesliga – will play their matches over the weekend of 20-22 March as part of the “Professional Football against Hunger” campaign.

This initiative was launched last October with the Association of European Professional Football Leagues – made up of 29 Member Leagues and Associated Members comprising over 900 professional football clubs – on the occasion of World Food Day at FAO headquarters in Rome.

The money raised from the campaign will finance FAO TeleFood micro-projects designed to provide solutions to poor families and communities by giving them the know-how and means to produce their own food.

The funding, a maximum of €7,000 each (almost $9,000 at today’s exchange rate) per micro-project, is used to purchase physical resources, such as fishing equipment, seeds and agricultural implements.

A variety of projects have already been financed through the scheme, from helping families raise pigs in Venezuela, through creating school gardens in Cape Verde and Mauritania or providing school lunches in Uganda and teaching children to grow food, to raising fish in a leper community in India.