Download or read book Famine written by Cormac Ó Gráda and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History.
Download or read book Mass Starvation written by Alex de Waal and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-12-08 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world almost conquered famine. Until the 1980s, this scourge killed ten million people every decade, but by early 2000s mass starvation had all but disappeared. Today, famines are resurgent, driven by war, blockade, hostility to humanitarian principles and a volatile global economy. In Mass Starvation, world-renowned expert on humanitarian crisis and response Alex de Waal provides an authoritative history of modern famines: their causes, dimensions and why they ended. He analyses starvation as a crime, and breaks new ground in examining forced starvation as an instrument of genocide and war. Refuting the enduring but erroneous view that attributes famine to overpopulation and natural disaster, he shows how political decision or political failing is an essential element in every famine, while the spread of democracy and human rights, and the ending of wars, were major factors in the near-ending of this devastating phenomenon. Hard-hitting and deeply informed, Mass Starvation explains why man-made famine and the political decisions that could end it for good must once again become a top priority for the international community.
Download or read book Famine in European History written by Guido Alfani and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first systematic study of famine in all parts of Europe from the Middle Ages to present. It compares the characteristics, consequences and causes of famine in regional case studies by leading experts to form a comprehensive picture of when and why food security across the continent became a critical issue.
Download or read book Famine in North Korea written by Stephan Haggard and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In their carefully researched book, Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland present the most comprehensive account of the famine to date, examining not only the origins and aftermath of the crisis but also the regime's response to outside aid and the effect of its current policies on the country's economic future. Their study begins by considering the root causes of the famine, weighing the effects of the decline in the availability of food against its poor distribution. Then it takes a close look at the aid effort, addressing the difficulty of monitoring assistance within the country, and concludes with an analysis of current economic reforms and strategies of engagement."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Famine Crimes written by Alexander De Waal and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is responsible for the failures? African generals and politicians are the prime culprits for creating famines in Sudan, Somalia and Zaire, but western donors abet their authoritarianism, partly through imposing structural adjustment programmes.
Download or read book An Economic History of Famine Resilience written by Jessica Dijkman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-18 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food crises have always tested societies. This volume discusses societal resilience to food crises, examining the responses and strategies at the societal level that effectively helped individuals and groups to cope with drops in food supply, in various parts of the world over the past two millennia. Societal responses can be coordinated by the state, the market, or civil society. Here it is shown that it was often a combined effort, but that there were significant variations between regions and periods. The long-term, comparative perspective of the volume brings out these variations, explains them, and discusses their effects on societal resilience. This book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers across economic history, institutional economics, social history and development studies.
Download or read book Eating People Is Wrong and Other Essays on Famine Its Past and Its Future written by Cormac Ó Gráda and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New perspectives on the history of famine—and the possibility of a famine-free world Famines are becoming smaller and rarer, but optimism about the possibility of a famine-free future must be tempered by the threat of global warming. That is just one of the arguments that Cormac Ó Gráda, one of the world's leading authorities on the history and economics of famine, develops in this wide-ranging book, which provides crucial new perspectives on key questions raised by famines around the globe between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. The book begins with a taboo topic. Ó Gráda argues that cannibalism, while by no means a universal feature of famines and never responsible for more than a tiny proportion of famine deaths, has probably been more common during very severe famines than previously thought. The book goes on to offer new interpretations of two of the twentieth century’s most notorious and controversial famines, the Great Bengal Famine and the Chinese Great Leap Forward Famine. Ó Gráda questions the standard view of the Bengal Famine as a perfect example of market failure, arguing instead that the primary cause was the unwillingness of colonial rulers to divert food from their war effort. The book also addresses the role played by traders and speculators during famines more generally, invoking evidence from famines in France, Ireland, Finland, Malawi, Niger, and Somalia since the 1600s, and overturning Adam Smith’s claim that government attempts to solve food shortages always cause famines. Thought-provoking and important, this is essential reading for historians, economists, demographers, and anyone else who is interested in the history and possible future of famine.
Download or read book WHY DOES FAMINE PERSIST IN AFRICA written by Luka Biong Deng Kuol and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the root and proximate causes of the Bahr el Ghazal famine in 1998 as a chain of political, environmental, economic and social factors, as well as a failure of public action and early warning systems. It is estimated about 70,000 persons died as a result of lack of food and mass starvation. This famine emerged from a long history of political repression by successive governments in Sudan that aimed at destroying the lives and livelihoods in Bahr el Ghazal region. This process resulted not only in the erosion of sources of livelihoods of the rural population but also made them increasingly susceptible to exogenous shocks such as climate change, El-Nino and counterinsurgency warfare.The book shows that the poor management of the famine in 1998 was largely related to lack of a common understanding of famine and the poor quality of information generated by early warning systems that resulted in divided opinion among the charity agencies about the severity of food crisis. It was left to the western media to reveal the presence of the famine and trigger, though late, a massive international relief response.This book is a good resource for readers and practitioners in food security, development, and humanitarian assistance and intervention. "Africa famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans." P.J.O'Rourke
Download or read book Food Insecurity and Hunger in the United States written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2006-05-02 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States is viewed by the world as a country with plenty of food, yet not all households in America are food secure, meaning access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life. A proportion of the population experiences food insecurity at some time in a given year because of food deprivation and lack of access to food due to economic resource constraints. Still, food insecurity in the United States is not of the same intensity as in some developing countries. Since 1995 the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has annually published statistics on the extent of food insecurity and food insecurity with hunger in U.S. households. These estimates are based on a survey measure developed by the U.S. Food Security Measurement Project, an ongoing collaboration among federal agencies, academic researchers, and private organizations. USDA requested the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies to convene a panel of experts to undertake a two-year study in two phases to review at this 10-year mark the concepts and methodology for measuring food insecurity and hunger and the uses of the measure. In Phase 2 of the study the panel was to consider in more depth the issues raised in Phase 1 relating to the concepts and methods used to measure food security and make recommendations as appropriate. The Committee on National Statistics appointed a panel of 10 experts to examine the above issues. In order to provide timely guidance to USDA, the panel issued an interim Phase 1 report, Measuring Food Insecurity and Hunger: Phase 1 Report. That report presented the panel's preliminary assessments of the food security concepts and definitions; the appropriateness of identifying hunger as a severe range of food insecurity in such a survey-based measurement method; questions for measuring these concepts; and the appropriateness of a household survey for regularly monitoring food security in the U.S. population. It provided interim guidance for the continued production of the food security estimates. This final report primarily focuses on the Phase 2 charge. The major findings and conclusions based on the panel's review and deliberations are summarized.
Download or read book The Hungry Steppe written by Sarah Cameron and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through the most violent of means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves were integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. The experience of the famine scarred the republic for the remainder of the Soviet era and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991. Cameron uses her history of the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting, in particular, the creation of a new Kazakh national identity, and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.
Download or read book Famine in Somalia written by Daniel G. Maxwell and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some 250,000 people died in the southern Somalia famine of 2011-12, which also displaced and destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands more. Yet this crisis had been predicted nearly a year earlier. The harshest drought in Somalia's recent history coincided with a global spike in food prices, hitting this arid, import-dependent country hard. The policies of Al-Shabaab, a militant Islamist group that controlled southern Somalia, exacerbated an already difficult situation, barring most humanitarian assistance, while donors counter-terrorism policies led to cuts and criminalized any aid falling into their hands. A major disaster resulted from the production and market failures precipitated by the drought and food price crisis, while the famine itself was the result of the failure to quickly respond to these events-and was thus largely human-made. This book analyses the famine: the trade-offs between competing policy priorities that led to it, the collective failure in response, and how those affected by it attempted to protect themselves and their livelihoods.It also examines the humanitarian response, including actors that had not previously been particularly visible in Somalia-from Turkey, the Middle East, and Islamic charities worldwide.
Download or read book Feast and Famine written by Leslie Clarkson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2001-11-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the history of food and famine in Ireland from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. It looks at what people ate and drank, and how this changed over time. The authors explore the economic and social forces which lay behind these changes as well as the more personal motives of taste, preference, and acceptability. They analyze the reasons why the potato became a major component of the diet for so many people during the eighteenth century as well as the diets of the middling and upper classes. This is not, however, simply a social history of food but it is a nutritional one as well, and the authors go on to explore the connection between eating, health, and disease. They look at the relationship between the supply of food and the growth of the population and then finally, and unavoidably in any history of the Irish and food, the issue of famine, examining first its likelihood and then its dreadful reality when it actually occurred.
Download or read book Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon written by Adam Franklin-Lyons and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-01-20 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late fourteenth century, the medieval Crown of Aragon experienced a series of food crises that created conflict and led to widespread starvation. Adam Franklin-Lyons applies contemporary understandings of complex human disasters, vulnerability, and resilience to explain how these famines occurred and to describe more accurately who suffered and why. Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon details the social causes and responses to three events of varying magnitude that struck the western Mediterranean: the minor food shortage of 1372, the serious but short-lived crisis of 1384–85, and the major famine of 1374–76, the worst famine of the century in the region. Shifts in military action, international competition, and violent attempts to control trade routes created systemic panic and widespread starvation—which in turn influenced decades of economic policy, social practices, and even the course of geopolitical conflicts, such as the War of the Two Pedros and the papal schism in Italy. Providing new insights into the intersecting factors that led to famine in the fourteenth-century Mediterranean, this deeply researched, convincingly argued book presents tools and models that are broadly applicable to any historical study of vulnerabilities in the human food supply. It will be of interest to scholars of medieval Iberia and the medieval Mediterranean as well as to historians of food and of economics.
Download or read book The Hungry World written by Nick Cullather and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food was a critical front in the Cold War battle for Asia. “Where Communism goes, hunger follows” was the slogan of American nation builders who fanned out into the countryside to divert rivers, remodel villages, and introduce tractors, chemicals, and genes to multiply the crops consumed by millions. This “green revolution” has been credited with averting Malthusian famines, saving billions of lives, and jump-starting Asia’s economic revival. Bono and Bill Gates hail it as a model for revitalizing Africa’s economy. But this tale of science triumphant conceals a half century of political struggle from the Afghan highlands to the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, a campaign to transform rural societies by changing the way people eat and grow food. The ambition to lead Asia into an age of plenty grew alongside development theories that targeted hunger as a root cause of war. Scientific agriculture was an instrument for molding peasants into citizens with modern attitudes, loyalties, and reproductive habits. But food policies were as contested then as they are today. While Kennedy and Johnson envisioned Kansas-style agribusiness guarded by strategic hamlets, Indira Gandhi, Marcos, and Suharto inscribed their own visions of progress onto the land. Out of this campaign, the costliest and most sustained effort for development ever undertaken, emerged the struggles for resources and identity that define the region today. As Obama revives the lost arts of Keynesianism and counter-insurgency, the history of these colossal projects reveals bitter and important lessons for today’s missions to feed a hungry world.
Download or read book The Great Famine in China 1958 1962 written by Xun Zhou and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on previously closed archives that have since been made inaccessible again, this volume contains the most crucial primary documents concerning the fate of the Chinese peasantry between 1957 and 1962, covering everything from cannibalism and selective killing to mass murder.
Download or read book Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union written by Felix Wemheuer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao Zedong created greater disasters than those suffered under prerevolutionary regimes. Focusing on famine as a political tool, Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts about food among peasants, urban populations, and the socialist state resulted in the starvation death of millions. A major contribution to Chinese and Soviet history, this provocative analysis examines the long-term effects of the great famines on the relationship between the state and its citizens and argues that the lessons governments learned from the catastrophes enabled them to overcome famine in their later decades of rule.
Download or read book Famine in Africa written by von Braun, Joachim and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though famine has affected many parts of the world in the twentieth century, the conditions that produce famineextreme poverty, armed conflict, economic and political turmoil, and climate shocksare now most prevalent in Africa. Researchers differ on how to address this problem effectively, but their arguments are often not informed by empirical analysis from a famine context. Broadening current theories and models of development for conquering famine, Famine in Africa grounds its findings in long-term empirical research, especially on the impact of famine on households and markets. The authors present the results of field work and other research from numerous parts of Africa, with a particular focus on Botswana, Ethiopia, Niger, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. With these data, the authors explain the factors that cause famines and assess efforts to mitigate and prevent them. Famine in Africa is an important resource for international development specialists, students, and policymakers.
