In 1996, the United States and more than 180 world leaders pledged to halve the number of undernourished people globally by 2015 from the 1990 level. The global number has not decreased significantly -- remaining at about 850 million in 2001-2003 -- and the number in sub-Saharan Africa has increased from about 170 million in 1990-1992 to over 200 million in 2001-2003. On the basis of analyses of U.S. and international agency documents, structured panel discussions with experts and practitioners, and fieldwork in four African countries, the author was asked to examine (1) factors that contribute to persistent food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa and (2) the extent to which host governments and donors, including the United States, are working toward halving hunger in the region by 2015.

"Reconnecting Consumers, Producers and Food" presents a detailed and empirically grounded analysis of alternatives to current models of food provision. The book offers insights into the identities, motives and practices of individuals engaged in reconnecting producers, consumers and food. Arguing for a critical revaluation of the meanings of choice and convenience, "Reconnecting Consumers, Producers and Food" provides evidence to support the construction of a more sustainable and equitable food system which is built on the relationships between people, communities and their environments.

Ever since 9/11, many have considered al Queda to be the leading threat to global security, but falling water tables in countries that contain more than half the world's people and rising temperatures worldwide pose a far more serious threat. Spreading water shortages and crop-withering heat waves are shrinking grain harvests in more and more countries, making it difficult for the world's farmers to feed 70 million more people each year. The risk is that tightening food supplies could drive up food prices, destabilizing governments in low-income grain-importing countries and disrupting global economic progress. Future security, Brown says, now depends on raising water productivity, stabilizing climate by moving beyond fossil fuels, and stabilizing population by filling the family planning gap and educating young people everywhere. If Osama bin Laden and his colleagues succeed in diverting our attention from the real threats to our future security, they may reach their goals for reasons that even they have not imagined.

Between 1845 and 1855, 2 million Irish men and women fled their famine-ravaged homeland, many to settle in large British and American cities that were already wrestling with a complex array of urban problems. In this innovative work of comparative urban history, Matthew Gallman looks at how two cities, Philadelphia and Liverpool, met the challenges raised by the influx of immigrants. Gallman examines how citizens and policymakers in Philadelphia and Liverpool dealt with such issues as poverty, disease, poor sanitation, crime, sectarian conflict, and juvenile delinquency. By considering how two cities of comparable population and dimensions responded to similar challenges, he sheds new light on familiar questions about distinctive national characteristics--without resorting to claims of ""American exceptionalism."" In this critical era of urban development, English and American cities often evolved in analogous ways, Gallman notes. But certain crucial differences--in location, material conditions, governmental structures, and voluntaristic traditions, for example--inspired varying approaches to urban problem solving on either side of the Atlantic. |This work of comparative history looks at how two rapidly growing cities, Philadelphia and Liverpool, coped with the urban challenges raised by the influx of Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century.

This volume corrects that distortion "the Famine didn't happen in Ulster." Ulster was indeed spared what a local newspaper called "the horrors of Skibereen," but nonetheless, the severity of the famine, particularly in the winter 1846-7, is all too apparent in each of the nine counties. 95 inmates of Lurgan Workhouse died in one week in February 1847; and 351 people queued to get into Enniskillen Workhouse in one day. What was done to limit the tragedy? Contentious issues such as the effectiveness of government relief measures, the response of local landlords, and the role of the churches are all assessed.

"Hunger in History" represents the culmination of two years' work in human hunger by the members of the World Hunger Program at Brown University. In bringing together original and specially commissioned articles by some of the world's leading authorities on this topic, Amartya Sen, David Herlihy, Peter Garnsey, among others, the editors have succeeded in providing a strong cross-disciplinary base for the study of hunger. The volume, which includes 16 papers, looks at the problem of hunger from the beginnings of human society, defining and redefining the problem in ancient society and again in early modern and then contemporary society, and ends with an essay by the editors on solutions to the contemporary problem of hunger.

In " The World Food Problem, updadted in every respect since its first edition in 1985, David Grigg provides a full account of who is hungry, where and why.

For nearly a decade, international efforts to combat famine and food shortages around the globe have concentrated on the critical situations in sub-Saharan Africa. In the Sudan, the largest country in Africa, prolonged drought, complicated by civil strife and debilitating economic problems, has caused widespread human suffering. The Sudan illustrates the proverbial worst-case scenario in which urgent food needs have been denied, food has been used as a weapon, and outside assistance has been obstructed. The Challenges of Famine Relief focuses on the two famine emergencies in the Sudan in the 1980s the great African drought-related famine of 1984-86 and the conflict-related famine that afflicted the southern Sudan in 1988-91. Francis Deng and Larry Minear analyze the historical and political setting and the response by Sudan authorities and the international community. The book outlines four problem areas exemplified in the response to each crisis: the external nature of famine relief, the relationship between relief activities and endemic problems, the coordination of such activities, and the ambivalence of the results. The authors identify the many difficulties inherent in providing emergency relief to populations caught in circumstances of life-threatening famine. They show how such famine emergencies reflect the most extreme breakdown of social order and present the most compelling imperatives for international action. Deng and Minear also discuss how the international community, alerted by the media and mobilized by the Ethiopian famine, moved to fill the moral void left by the government and how outside organizations worked together to pressure Sudan's political authorities to be more responsive to these tragedies. Looking ahead, the authors highlight the implications for future involvement in humanitarian initiatives in a new world order. As recent developments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union demonstrate, such humanitarian challenges of global dimensions are no longer confined to third world countries. As the international community apportions limited resources among a growing number of such challenges, more effective responses to crises such as those described in this book are imperative.

Famine is more than a short-lived season of hunger. It is a profound crisis of survival and order that strains social fabric, threatens political stability, and may force long-term change in economy and society. In the past, as in much of the contemporary world, famine has been a central part of human experience.

In this original and timely work, David Arnold draws upon the history of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, to explain the origins and characteristics of famine. He considers whether some societies are more vulnerable to famine than others, and contests the assumption that those affected by famine are simply passive 'victims'. He compares the ways in which individuals and states have responded to the threat of mass starvation, and the relation of famine to political and social power.

The author outlines the main theories of famine causation and tests these against historical experience. He considers the effects of famine upon a wide range of human activities and institutions - on for example systems of agriculture and patterns of migration - from the rise of the modern state in Europe to the impact of western imperialism on Asia and Africa. The western world, having rid itself of mass hunger, now tends to regard famine as evidence of backwardness and inferiority in those Third World countries in which it continues to occur: David Arnold weighs the justice of this perception.

A work of historical breadth and significance, "Famine "offers a fresh understanding of the phenomenon and critical reassessments of many established ideas about it.

The depiction of historical humanitarian disasters in art exhibitions, news reports, monuments and heritage landscapes has framed the harrowing images we currently associate with dispossession. People across the world are driven out of their homes and countries on a wave of conflict, poverty and famine, and our main sites for engaging with their loss are visual news and social media. In a reappraisal of the viewer's role in representations of displacement, Niamh Ann Kelly examines a wide range of commemorative visual culture from the mid-nineteenth-century Great Irish Famine. Her analysis of memorial images, objects and locations from that period until the early 21st century shows how artefacts of historical trauma can affect understandings of enforced migrations as an ongoing form of political violence. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of museum and heritage studies, material culture, Irish history and contemporary visual cultures exploring dispossession.

The horrors of the Great Famine (1315-1322), one of the severest catastrophes ever to strike northern Europe, lived on for centuries in the minds of Europeans who recalled tales of widespread hunger, class warfare, epidemic disease, frighteningly high mortality, and unspeakable crimes. Until now, no one has offered a perspective of what daily life was actually like throughout the entire region devastated by this crisis, nor has anyone probed far into its causes. Here, the distinguished historian William Jordan provides the first comprehensive inquiry into the Famine from Ireland to western Poland, from Scandinavia to central France and western Germany. He produces a rich cultural history of medieval community life, drawing his evidence from such sources as meteorological and agricultural records, accounts kept by monasteries providing for the needy, and documentation of military campaigns. Whereas there has been a tendency to describe the food shortages as a result of simply bad weather or else poor economic planning, Jordan sets the stage so that we see the complex interplay of social and environmental factors that caused this particular disaster and allowed it to continue for so long.

Jordan begins with a description of medieval northern Europe at its demographic peak around 1300, by which time the region had achieved a sophisticated level of economic integration. He then looks at problems that, when combined with years of inundating rains and brutal winters, gnawed away at economic stability. From animal diseases and harvest failures to volatile prices, class antagonism, and distribution breakdowns brought on by constant war, northern Europeans felt helplessly besieged by acts of an angry God--although a cessation of war and a more equitable distribution of resources might have lessened the severity of the food shortages.

Throughout Jordan interweaves vivid historical detail with a sharp analysis of why certain responses to the famine failed. He ultimately shows that while the northern European economy did recover quickly, the Great Famine ushered in a period of social instability that had serious repercussions for generations to come.

In "Closing the Food Gap," food activist and journalist Mark Winne poses questions too often overlooked in our current conversations around food: What about those people who are not financially able to make conscientious choices about where and how to get food? And in a time of rising rates of both diabetes and obesity, what can we do to make healthier foods available for everyone?
To address these questions, Winne tells the story of how America's food gap has widened since the 1960s, when domestic poverty was "rediscovered," and how communities have responded with a slew of strategies and methods to narrow the gap, including community gardens, food banks, and farmers' markets. The story, however, is not only about hunger in the land of plenty and the organized efforts to reduce it; it is also about doing that work against a backdrop of ever-growing American food affluence and gastronomical expectations. With the popularity of Whole Foods and increasingly common community-supported agriculture (CSA), wherein subscribers pay a farm so they can have fresh produce regularly, the demand for fresh food is rising in one population as fast as rates of obesity and diabetes are rising in another.
Over the last three decades, Winne has found a way to connect impoverished communities experiencing these health problems with the benefits of CSAs and farmers' markets; in "Closing the Food Gap," he explains how he came to his conclusions. With tragically comic stories from his many years running a model food organization, the Hartford Food System in Connecticut, alongside fascinating profiles of activists and organizations in communities across the country, Winne addresses head-on the struggles to improve food access for all of us, regardless of income level.
Using anecdotal evidence and a smart look at both local and national policies, Winne offers a realistic vision for getting locally produced, healthy food onto everyone's table.

The Great Famine, an Gorta Mor in Irish, was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. Often referred to as the Irish Potato Famine, particularly outside Ireland, as around forty percent of the population were reliant on this crop. Over a million people died and over a million more emigrated, often in appalling circumstances. This book explains what happened before and during the Famine, with an account of the consequences of this epic tragedy.

This multi-layered history of a horrific famine that took place in late-nineteenth-century China focuses on cultural responses to trauma. The massive drought/famine that killed at least ten million people in north China during the late 1870s remains one of China's most severe disasters and provides a vivid window through which to study the social side of a nation's tragedy. Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley's original approach explores an array of new source materials, including songs, poems, stele inscriptions, folklore, and oral accounts of the famine from Shanxi Province, its epicenter. She juxtaposes these narratives with central government, treaty-port, and foreign debates over the meaning of the events and shows how the famine, which occurred during a period of deepening national crisis, elicited widely divergent reactions from different levels of Chinese society.

In the century before the great famine of the late 1840s, the Irish people, and the poor especially, became increasingly dependent on the potato for their food. So when potato blight struck, causing the tubers to rot in the ground, they suffered a grievous loss. Thus began a catastrophe in which approximately one million people lost their lives and many more left Ireland for North America, changing the country forever. During and after this terrible human crisis, the British government was bitterly accused of not averting the disaster or offering enough aid. Some even believed that the Whig government's policies were tantamount to genocide against the Irish population. James Donnelly's account looks closely at the political and social consequences of the great Irish potato famine and explores the way that natural disasters and government responses to them can alter the destiny of nations.

Dublin did not escape the Great Famine: many of its inhabitants experienced acute poverty and illness, while the capital witnessed an influx of the rural poor seeking refuge and relief. However, Dublin has remained largely neglected in popular and scholarly narratives of the Famine. This collection of essays breaks new ground and reconsiders the Famine and its historiography by locating Dublin city and its inhabitants at the centre of its focus. This volume, containing work by established and emerging scholars, presents some of the most recent research into life in Dublin during this period of unprecedented distress. As such, it constitutes the most detailed analysis to date of the impact of the Great Famine on Dublin and its inhabitants, and is the first monograph wholly devotedto this subject. This pioneering volume offers an interdisciplinary approach and a range of perspectives from its thirteen contributors. Featuring a foreword by Cormac O Grada and including a comprehensive overview of Famine scholarship on Dublin to date, its twelve additional essays cover such diverse topics as business life and industry in the city, the impact of the Famine on Dublin's charity and welfare landscapes, suicide and trauma at this time of acute crisis, experiences of the marginalised within prisons and hospitals, and cultural representations of Famine-era Dublin. It examines both direct and indirect impacts of the Famine on the city, noting promising future areas of research, and arguing for the reinvigoration of urban histories with Famine studies. This volume of essays will appeal to students, scholars and general enthusiasts of 19th-century Irish history, especially those interested in the history of the Great Famine and of Dublin. Generously illustrated, it illuminates an overlooked but essential dimension of Irish history.

With one million dead, and just as many forced to emigrate, the Irish Famine (1845-52) is among the worst health calamities in history. Because historical records of the Victorian period in Ireland were generally written by the middle and upper classes, relatively little has been known about those who suffered the most, the poor and destitute. But in 2006, archaeologists excavated an until then completely unknown intramural mass burial containing the remains of nearly 1,000 Kilkenny Union Workhouse inmates. In the first bioarchaeological study of Great Famine victims, Jonny Geber uses skeletal analysis to tell the story of how and why the Famine decimated the lowest levels of nineteenth century Irish society.Seeking help at the workhouse was an act of desperation by people who were severely malnourished and physically exhausted. Overcrowded, it turned into a hotspot of infectious disease--as did many other union workhouses in Ireland during the Famine. Geber reveals how medical officers struggled to keep people alive, as evidenced by cases of amputations but also craniotomies. Still, mortality rates increased and the city cemeteries filled up, until there was eventually no choice but to resort to intramural burials. Deceased inmates were buried in shrouds and coffins--an attempt by the Board of Guardians of the workhouse to maintain a degree of dignity towards these victims. By examining the physical conditions of the inmates that might have contributed to their institutionalization, as well as to the resulting health consequences, Geber sheds new and unprecedented light on Ireland's Great Hunger.

In 1837, the power of Daniel O'Connell's oratory focused the attention of Europeans on Ireland. They were horrified at what they saw there. The Irish poor - a third of the population - had no food except the potatoes they grew, and not enough clothing to cover themselves. They went hungry for two months of the year, and half-naked for all the year. Yet this would be their last 'good' decade before more than a million of them would vanish into unmarked graves in the 1840s. The idealistic young Baron Eotvos - a humanitarian and already a much-praised poet - struggled to understand how Ireland could have been reduced to this state under English rule, and why English journalists wrote with such bigotry about the Irish. In Hungary, he was a campaigner for the freedom of serfs, but conceded that those serfs lived in better conditions and had more protection than Irish tenants and labourers. The only protection for the Irish poor came from illegal organizations such as the Whiteboys.His visit coincided with a pivotal moment in Irish history, when debate was raging about the introduction of a 'Poor Law' (with Poor Tax to pay for it) - a charitable-sounding term for a cruel Act aimed at clearing the land of people who had no other means of survival. His deeply researched summary of the English occupation of Ireland - uninfluenced by modern revisionism - makes compelling, often harrowing reading.

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.

The nutrition title of the omnibus 2008 "farm bill" is the focus of legislation affecting domestic food assistance programs in the 110th Congress. The program areas that are addressed include the regular Food Stamp program, programs operating in lieu of food stamps (e.g., Puerto Rico, Indian reservations), The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, Community Food Projects, the Seniors Farmers' Market Nutrition Program, initiatives to provide fresh fruit and vegetable in schools, and newly proposed nutrition and health promotion or support projects. Other nutrition programs (child nutrition and WIC programs) have not been a major part of the active legislative debate, although a number of bills noted in this new book address them, and some legislative changes affecting them are part of appropriations law and the farm bill. The 2008 farm bill has been enacted as P.L. 110-246. The nutrition title of this law has a projected new cost of about $3 billion over the next 5 years (FY2008- FY2012) and well over $9 billion over the next 10 years (FY2008-FY2017). The major share of this spending is due to changes in food stamp rules -- increasing benefits and loosening eligibility standards -- and expansion of support for TEFAP and fresh fruit and vegetable initiatives. The most significant substantive nutrition program issues that were raised in the farm bill debate were those surrounding the Food Stamp program and support for fruit and vegetable programs, particularly how much to add in new spending. Despite cost differences, the House and Senate bills were very similar in the policy changes they proposed. Their nutrition titles (Title IV) renamed the Food Stamp program, increased program benefits, and loosened some eligibility rules. They increased spending for TEFAP, added support for the fresh fruit and vegetable program, and allowed exercise of geographic preference when procuring food for child nutrition programs. However, they differed in some policy aspects. The House proposed substantial limits on states' ability to "privatise" their administration of food stamps (not adopted in the final measure). And the Senate's bill included a number of initiatives not covered in the House (only some of which were incorporated in the final law) relating to food stamp eligibility for able-bodied adults without dependants, eased access to the Food Stamp program, support for farmers' markets, projects to promote health and nutrition through the Food Stamp program, and dietary supplements. A lingering issue involves the response of food assistance programs to recent, relatively rapid, food price inflation, although no legislation has been introduced in this regard.

What kind of agriculture do we need to feed the world? World leaders have come up with yet another target: halving (not ending) hunger by the year 2015, but is this more likely to be achieved than previous targets? What ab out: animal diseases like BSE, foot and mouth disease and salmonella; declining food variety and quality; and disappearing topsoil, hedgerows and biodiversity in the rural areas? Better access to land and a more equitable income distribution are part of the solution. The other is to move away from a monoculture production system monopolized by a handful of giant corporations. John Madeley argues for the spread of a low-external input approach, a reintegration of traditional farming techniques, new farming practices like organic agriculture and permaculture and a range of "green" technologies to offer a viable livelihood to farmers, food for the hungery and safe and good tasting food for the rest of us.

Between 1845 and 1852, Ireland was devastated by the 'Great Hunger' - the most severe famine in modern European history. The view widely held by historians is that the impact of the Famine on the northern province of Ulster, in particular the largely Protestant city of Belfast, was minimal. In the first book on the Famine to focus specifically on Belfast, Christine Kinealy, one of Ireland's leading historians of the period, and Gerard MacAtasney, challenge this view and offer a new interpretation. Drawing on a wealth of original research, Kinealy and MacAtasney begin with an examination of society and social behaviour in Belfast prior to 1845. They then assess the official response to the crisis by the British government, the response by the Church in both England and Ireland, and the part played by the local administration in Ulster. The authors examine the impact of the cholera epidemic on Belfast in 1849-50, the city's recovery after the Famine, and the beginnings of open sectarianism among the business and landed classes of the province.

The great Irish Famine of 1845-52 was the last major famine in Europe, yet is occurred at a time when Ireland was still joined by Act of Union to Britain, then the wealthiest country in the world. The Famine traumatized the Irish nation for many decades: the population declined from eight million in 1841 to only four million in 1901. Ireland is now a modern European republic, but what role does the Famine have in the Irish consciousness, and the theories of non-Irish historians? This book provides an overview of the differing images of the Famine, from the popular nationalist viewpoint, to the sanitized interpretations of revisionist historians who refuse to regard the Famine as a pivotal event in Irish history. In addition to received views, the author questions the accepted idea that the course of the Famine was inevitable, arguing that more could have been done to mitigate the effects and the suffering and also looks at the attitudes of other governments and their policies regarding food shortages.

The incredible true story of how a cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European history--years before the Black Death, from the author of Justinian's Flea and the forthcoming Miracle Cure In May 1315, it started to rain. For the seven disastrous years that followed, Europeans would be visited by a series of curses unseen since the third book of Exodus: floods, ice, failures of crops and cattle, and epidemics not just of disease, but of pike, sword, and spear. All told, six million lives--one-eighth of Europe's total population--would be lost. With a category-defying knowledge of science and history, William Rosen tells the stunning story of the oft-overlooked Great Famine with wit and drama and demonstrates what it all means for today's discussions of climate change.