Today I had a fantastic guest whose name you surely know – Raúl González, the football star of Real Madrid and Schalke 04. He is goodwill ambassador for the campaign against hunger that the European Commission leads together with the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the European Professional Football Leagues. We just launched the campaign, which aims to raise awareness of the plight of hunger and the efforts to solve it.
We will focus the campaign on the Sahel region in Africa. I told Raúl about my recent trip to Niger and Chad, where 300,000 kids die from hunger-related diseases each year. Hunger will kill even more children in 2012 as a new food crisis looms. This is why we are acting now to prevent a bigger disaster. In this effort, the help of ambassadors like Raúl, like Hristo Stoichkov, like Roberto Baggio, is indispensable. Read the full entry
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I am preparing to travel to the Horn of Africa again – this time to Ethiopia. Tomorrow I will attend the pledging conference on the drought and hunger, organised by the African Union with the goal to find an African solution to an African problem. Africans are also showing solidarity with the starving, the refugees and all the other drought-afflicted people in the Horn – and to tell us more about this, I have invited Bea Spadacini, our humanitarian information officer in Nairobi, to be my guest blogger today. 
In my work as Commissioner for crisis response, I often face the type of news that we hope never to face. A month ago I had a moment like this. Japan was hit by one of the strongest earthquakes in history; cities and lives were shredded by the tsunami that followed; and as if that was not enough, the nuclear meltdown cast a shadow of unimaginable danger.
You cannot go to Poland without remembering Solidarity. A little over thirty years ago, a few workers in the Gdansk shipyard got together in a trade union with this name. A year later, Solidarność had turned into a major social movement that included over 80% of Poland’s workers. And the spark Solidarity ignited changed history – not only in Poland, but in Europe as well. Thanks to this spark, Poland is today a transformed country, and a member of the European Union. And so is Bulgaria, among others.