Youth Revolution is the inspirational story of how a sixteen-year-old high-school student from Johannesburg, Kiara Nirghin, overcame huge health obstacles to win the grand prize at the 2016 International Google Science Fair for her unique and innovative solution to worldwide drought. Having experienced bacterial meningitis, undiagnosed bilharzia and severe weight loss, Kiara was forced to postpone her school career for hospitalisation, with a real chance of losing her hearing, her sight and the use of her limbs.

Youth Revolution not only covers her journey from the hospital bed to the stage as the winner of the science award, but also looks at issues surrounding stagnant youth innovation, while considering the dangers of lacking diversity in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths). It also includes contributions from prominent women in science and education, among them Malala Yousafzai, VP of Education and University Programs for Google and the recipient of the L’Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science.

Youth Revolution is a deeply human and truly inspirational real-life story that will enthral teenagers and adults alike, and proves that even ‘ordinary’ teenagers can do extraordinary things.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world currently facing both widespread chronic food insecurity and threats of famine. Why is this so and what can be done? In seeking to answer these questions, have brought together eleven different perspectives on critical food security issues, from the causes of food insecurity to planning and policy interventions. They have drawn on a variety of disciplines, from agricultural economics to nutrition. An evolution of thinking would appear to have taken place over the last ten years. Food insecurity is no longer seen simply as a failure of agriculture to produce sufficient food at the national level, but instead as a failure of livelihoods to guarantee access to sufficient food to people at the household level. This conceptual shift and related arguments are presented in a clear and accessible way for the non-specialist reader as well as the development specialist.

A richly illustrated source book for the study of the Irish famine.

Historically, food security was the responsibility of ministries of agriculture but today that has changed: decisions made in ministries of energy may instead have the greatest effect on the food situation. Recent research reporting that a one degree Celsius rise in temperature can reduce grain yields by 10 per cent means that energy policy is now directly affecting crop production. Agriculture is a water-intensive activity and, while public attention has focused on oil depletion, it is aquifer depletion that poses the more serious threat. There are substitutes for oil, but none for water and the link between our fossil fuel addiction, climate change and food security is now clear. While population growth has slowed over the past three decades, we are still adding 76 million people per year. In a world where the historical rise in land productivity has slowed by half since 1990, eradicating hunger may depend as much on family planners as on farmers. The bottom line is that future food security depends not only on efforts within agriculture but also on energy policies that stabilize climate, a worldwide effort to raise water productivity, the evolution of land-efficient transport systems, and population policies that seek a humane balance between population and food. Outgrowing the Earth advances our thinking on food security issues that the world will be wrestling with for years to come.

The force of hunger in shaping human character and social structure has been largely overlooked. This omission is a serious one in the study of primitive society, in which starvation is a constant menace. This work remedies this deficiency and opens up new lines of anthropological inquiry. The whole network of social institutions is examined which makes possible the consumption, distribution, and production of food-eating customs, as well as the religion and magic of food-production.

An eye-opening guide to how America feeds itself and an essential companion book to the new documentary.

America’s food system is broken, harming family farmers, workers, the environment, and our health. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Here, brilliant innovators, scientists, journalists and activists explain how we can create a hopeful new future for food, if we have the courage to seize the moment.

In 2008, the award-winning documentary Food, Inc. shook up our perceptions of what we ate. Now, the movie’s timely sequel and this new companion book will address the remarkable developments in the world of food—from lab-grown meat to the burgeoning food sovereignty movement—that have unfolded since then.

This book is the perfect roadmap to understanding not only our current dysfunctional food system, but also what each of us can do to help reform it.

The first edition of this incisive text on the problems of drought and famine facing Africa won worldwide critical acclaim. Revised with a new introduction, Lloyd Timberlake's bestselling study is invaluable reading for anyone interested in Africa.

A groundbreaking history of China's Great Famine: winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize 2011 'A gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao, based on new research but also written with great narrative verve' Simon Sebag Montefiore 'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre 'A critical contribution to Chinese history' Wall Street Journal Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the West in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known. Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

Development schemes are common throughout the third world. Many fail, but the reasons for failure or success are only too often not adequately studied. In this monograph two schemes started in Basutoland - now Lesotho - are intensively analysed and compared: the first, which was abandoned in 1961, primarily by means of documentary material; the second, which was and still is successful in at least part of the area, mainly through observation and field research. The analysis reveals the factors making for success or failure, particularly in the fields of politics, economics, and communication. The relevance of the study extends beyond Lesotho and even Africa, the analysis dealing with problems common to introduced social change and development in any part of the world.

Ireland's Great Famine of 1845-52 was among the most devastating food crises in modern history. A country of some eight-and-a-half-million people lost one million to hunger and disease and another million to emigration. According to land activist Michael Davitt, the starving made little or no effort to assert "the animal's right to existence," passively accepting their fate. But the poor did resist. In word and deed, they defied landlords, merchants and agents of the state: they rioted for food, opposed rent and rate collection, challenged the decisions of those controlling relief works, and scorned clergymen who attributed their suffering to the Almighty. The essays collected here examine the full range of resistance in the Great Famine, and illuminate how the crisis itself transformed popular politics. Contributors include distinguished scholars of modern Ireland and emerging historians and critics. This book is essential reading for students of modern Ireland, and the global history of collective action.

The Economics of Famine presents an important collection of outstanding contributions to the economic analysis of famine. The first part consists of theoretical papers, including Amartya Sen's classic exposition of the entitlement approach to famine analysis, various extensions and critiques of this approach, and more recent developments in the economics of famine. The second part consists of empirical case studies of famine in specific countries or regions, including Ireland, Russia, China, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. This innovative volume provides invaluable reference material for development economists and all those concerned with the persistence of famine in the modern world.

A History of World Agriculture begins with the emergence of agriculture after thousands of years in which human societies had depended on hunting and gathering. It shows how agricultural techniques developed in the different regions of the world, and how this extraordinary wealth of knowledge, tradition, and natural variety is endangered today by global capitalism, as it forces the unequal agrarian heritages of the world to conform to the norms of profit. During the twentieth century, mechanization, motorization, and specialization have brought to a halt the pattern of cultural and environmental responses that characterized the global history of agriculture until then. Today, a small number of corporations have the capacity to impose on the planet the farming methods that they find most profitable. Mazoyer and Roudart propose an alternative global strategy that can safeguard the economies of the poor countries, reinvigorate the global economy, and create a livable future for all.

Despite substantial economic growth, India has one of the highest undernutrition rates in the world; it is home to almost 40 per cent of the world's stunted children. This volume assesses the status and causes of undernutrition in the country, and examines the effectiveness of policies designed to address undernutrition. The essays tackle wide-ranging themes and challenging issues including nutrition; water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH); maternal, neonatal and child health; Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS); Public Distribution System (PDS); crop procurement; and National Food Security Act 2013. With contributions from leading academic researchers, policymakers, as well as civil society representatives, this volume will be indispensable to scholars, teachers and students of public policy, development economics, development sociology, and Indian economy. It will also be useful to government institutions, think tanks and NGOs.

The force of hunger in shaping human character and social structure has been largely overlooked. This omission is a serious one in the study of primitive society, in which starvation is a constant menace. This work remedies this deficiency and opens up new lines of anthropological inquiry. The whole network of social institutions is examined which makes possible the consumption, distribution, and production of food-eating customs, as well as the religion and magic of food-production.

Meghnad Desai's work presents a significant challenge to economics as currently practised. Poverty, Famine and Economic Development brings together essays which reflect his long-standing interest in economic development. Issues discussed include econometric testing of the disguised unemployment hypothesis, theoretical and applied approaches to famine, poverty in rich as well as poor countries, poverty in Latin America and state involvement in economic development. The volume also includes a discussion of the essay by Lenin which was the basis of the 'New Economic Policy', the first attempt at Market Socialism in the Soviet Union. The volume also includes a substantial autobiographical preface, in which Lord Desai explains how he became an economist and the influences behind the development of his thought, as well as a specific introduction explaining how he came to produce the papers included in this volume.

A new and incisive analysis of the political viability of human rights, with an in-depth investigation of its largest violation: world hunger.
Gonzalez-Pelaez develops John Vincent's theory of basic human rights within the context of the international political economy and demonstrates how the right to food has become an international norm enshrined within international law. She then assesses the international normative and practical dimensions of hunger in connection with international trade and poverty. Using the society of states as the framework of analysis, she explores the potential that the current system has to correct its own anomalies, and examines the measures that can move the hunger agenda forward in order to break through its current stagnation.

Drawing on newly available archival materials including official documents, reports, and personal accounts, this remarkable study presents a detailed picture of the living standards of various social groups in prewar Soviet Russia, and the role of state-controlled distribution of food and goods as a tool of the Stalinist dictatorship. The study offers a new perspective not only on the period of collectivization, industrialization, and terror but also on the regime's most rudimentary method of controlling human behavior and reshaping the social order. In her conclusion the author analyzes the long-term impacts of the Stalinist "dictatorship of distribution", from bureaucratization to rural depopulation to the emergence of a distinctive type of black-market economy.

World Hunger explores the nature and extent of contemporary world hunger, explaining why hunger still persists while agricultural production increases and genetic engineering revolutionises food production and distribution. Numerous case studies, drawn from the North and South, illustrate the diversity of diets in the world and the connections between the global and local. Globalisation and access to food in the global supermarket is examined.
Explaining the essential political character of hunger, the author exposes popular myths and identifies positive changes where prevailing inequalities and ideologies are challenged and it becomes possible to envisage a world where hunger is history.

eBook available with sample pages: 020313687X

The Hunger Report 1995 highlights progress during the past five years on the problems of food shortage, poverty-related hunger, maternal-child nutrition and health, and micronutrient malnutrition. It is constructed from papers and discussions presented at the five-year-follow-up to the Bellagio Declaration, 'Overcoming Hunger in the 1990s' (1989). Individual essays by hunger researchers, monitors, and policy makers assess advances in achieving the Bellagio goals, which are: 1) to end famine deaths, especially by moving food into zones of armed conflict; 2) to end hunger in half the world's poorest households; 3) to eliminate at least half the hunger of women and children by expanding maternal-child health coverage; and 4) to eliminate vitamin A and iodine deficiencies as public health problems.

Managing climate variability and change remains a key development and food security issue in Bangladesh. Despite significant investments, floods, droughts, and cyclones during the last two decades continue to cause extensive economic damage and impair livelihoods. Climate change will pose additional risks to ongoing efforts to reduce poverty. This book examines the implications of climate change on food security in Bangladesh and identifies adaptation measures in the agriculture sector using a comprehensive integrated framework. First, the most recent science available is used to characterize current climate and hydrology and its potential changes. Second, country-specific survey and biophysical data is used to derive more realistic and accurate agricultural impact functions and simulations. A range of climate risks (i.e. warmer temperatures, higher carbon dioxide concentrations, changing characteristics of floods, droughts and potential sea level rise) is considered to gain a more complete picture of potential agriculture impacts. Third, while estimating changes in production is important, economic responses may to some degree buffer against the physical losses predicted, and an assessment is made of these. Food security is dependent not only on production, but also future food requirements, income levels and commodity prices. Finally, adaptation possibilities are identified for the sector. This book is the first to combine these multiple disciplines and analytical procedures to comprehensively address these impacts. The framework will serve as a useful guide to design policy intervention strategies and investments in adaptation measures.

This is an innovative new history of famine relief and humanitarianism. The authors apply a moral economy approach to shed new light on the forces and ideas that motivated and shaped humanitarian aid during the Great Irish Famine, the famine of 1921-1922 in Soviet Russia and the Ukraine, and the 1980s Ethiopian famine. They place these episodes within a distinctive periodisation of humanitarianism which emphasises the correlations with politico-economic regimes: the time of elitist laissez-faire liberalism in the nineteenth century as one of ad hoc humanitarianism; that of Taylorism and mass society from c.1900-1970 as one of organised humanitarianism; and the blend of individualised post-material lifestyles and neoliberal public management since 1970 as one of expressive humanitarianism. The book as a whole shifts the focus of the history of humanitarianism from the imperatives of crisis management to the pragmatic mechanisms of fundraising, relief efforts on the ground, and finance. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Some urgent new thinking is needed if any lessons are to be learnt from the recent disasters. This book brings together the experience of a number of writers who have worked on, or studied, poverty alleviation programmes in Asia and Africa.

There is overwhelming evidence that the climate is changing. It is the poorest countries and people who are the most vulnerable to this threat and who will suffer the most. This book shows how increasing urbanization and growing poverty levels mean that it is imperative to ask how climate change might impact on asset accumulation and food security for the urban poor. It demonstrates how these three, often separate foci, can be brought together to frame a holistic urban adaptation approach. Furthermore, although much has been written about climate change, limited evidence exists in southern Africa of how climate change has been integrated in urban planning. The authors explore the urban climate change nexus linking asset adaptation, climate change science and food security through several case study cities. These include Cape Town, George and Khara Hais (South Africa), Lusaka (Zambia), Maputo (Mozambique), Mombasa (Kenya) and Harare (Zimbabwe). The results shed light on how this nexus might be explored from different perspectives, both theoretical and practical, in order to plan for a more resilient future. Climate Change, Assets and Food Security in Southern African Cities comprises ten chapters which focus on southern African cities, with each chapter written by highly experienced academics, research-focused practitioners and professional planners. Although the book concentrates on southern African cities, the insights which are presented can be used to understand other urban centres in low and middle-income countries outside of this region and around the world.

Historically, food security was the responsibility of ministries of agriculture but today that has changed: decisions made in ministries of energy may instead have the greatest effect on the food situation. Recent research reporting that a one degree Celsius rise in temperature can reduce grain yields by 10 per cent means that energy policy is now directly affecting crop production. Agriculture is a water-intensive activity and, while public attention has focused on oil depletion, it is aquifer depletion that poses the more serious threat. There are substitutes for oil, but none for water and the link between our fossil fuel addiction, climate change and food security is now clear. While population growth has slowed over the past three decades, we are still adding 76 million people per year. In a world where the historical rise in land productivity has slowed by half since 1990, eradicating hunger may depend as much on family planners as on farmers. The bottom line is that future food security depends not only on efforts within agriculture but also on energy policies that stabilize climate, a worldwide effort to raise water productivity, the evolution of land-efficient transport systems, and population policies that seek a humane balance between population and food. Outgrowing the Earth advances our thinking on food security issues that the world will be wrestling with for years to come.

During the past, there have been many changes in food availability, production and selection around the world. These changes, such as genetically modified foods, raise questions about their long-range implications. How will they affect the worldwide economics and management of agriculture? food legislation? the environment? the determination of food safety and quality? nutrition and health? Food, Consumers, and the Food Industry: Catastrophe or Opportunity? describes the major changes and answers the questions concerning them. It presents information that decision-makers in the field can utilize on such topics as:

o Consumers and consumerism
o Marketing and the marketplace
o Retailing
o Nutrition and health
o Impact of new technologies


Food, Consumers, and the Food Industry encourages you to set aside the "truth" of science to consider how political, economic, social, and cultural institutions can work to avoid a possible crisis.