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.

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.

This is an important and innovative book which was well-received and attracted much media attention when it appeared in hardback in 1990. It advocates a new approach to the relief of famine and hardship in developing countries by addressing the political issues that prevent fair distribution of resources, rather than by simply seeking to provide more food and services. As such this book could prove extremely influential, and, in paperback, will be more easily available to relief agencies and third world charities, as well as to students and concerned individuals.

Amartya Sen, the co-author is internationally eminent - he is a former delegate and Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, and he recently won the Fiat-sponsored Giovanni Agnelli Prize for promoting the understanding of ethical issues in modern society. Lengthy articles about Sen and his books have appeared in The Independent, the Times Higher Education Supplement, and the New York Review of Books, to name a few.

When news of the Darfur famine in the '80s broke in the West, relief experts predicted that, without massive food aid, millions of people would starve to death. Food aid on this scale did not arrive, but millions did not starve to death. Analyzing the famine from the perspective of the rural people in the region who suffered it, Alex de Waal uncovers a number of new and important insights into the dynamics of famine and famine relief. The author argues that deaths during the famine were not due to starvation, but instead were caused by disease, which ensued in the aftermath of the social disruption caused by the famine. In addition, the priority for rural people during the crisis was not to try to save every possible life, but to preserve their way of life for the future. Consequently, he concludes, the huge international relief effort was largely irrelevant to their survival. De Waal's findings have profound implications, not just for famine relief, but for our very conception of 'famine' itself. Already a classic in the field, this revised edition Famine that Kills provides critical background and lessons of past intervention for a region that finds itself in another moment of humanitarian crisis.

South-west Donegal, Ireland, June 1856. From the time that the blight first came on the potatoes in 1845, armed and masked men dubbed Molly Maguires had been raiding the houses of people deemed to be taking advantage of the rural poor. On some occasions, they represented themselves as 'Molly's Sons', sent by their mother, to carry out justice; on others, a man attired as a woman, introducing 'herself' as Molly Maguire, demanding redress for wrongs inflicted on her children. The raiders might stipulate the maximum price at which provisions were to be sold, warn against the eviction of tenants, or demand that an evicted family be reinstated to their holding. People who refused to meet their demands were often viciously beaten and, in some instances, killed - offences that the Constabulary classified as 'outrages'. Catholic clergymen regularly denounced the Mollies and in 1853, the district was proclaimed under the Crime and Outrage (Ireland) Act. Yet the 'outrages' continued. Then, in 1856, Patrick McGlynn, a young schoolmaster, suddenly turned informer on the Mollies, precipitating dozens of arrests. Here, a history of McGlynn's informing, backlit by episodes over the previous two decades, sheds light on that wave of outrage, its origins and outcomes, the meaning and the memory of it. More specifically, it illuminates the end of 'outrage' - the shifting objectives of those who engaged in it, and also how, after hunger faded and disease abated, tensions emerged in the Molly Maguires, when one element sought to curtail such activity, while another sought, unsuccessfully, to expand it. And in that contention, when the opportunities of post-Famine society were coming into view, one glimpses the end, or at least an ebbing, of outrage - in the everyday sense of moral indignation - at the fate of the rural poor. But, at heart, The End of Outrage is about contention among neighbours - a family that rose from the ashes of a mode of living, those consumed in the conflagration, and those who lost much but not all. Ultimately, the concern is how the poor themselves came to terms with their loss: how their own outrage at what had been done unto them and their forbears lost malignancy, and eventually ended. The author being a native of the small community that is the focus of The End of Outrage makes it an extraordinarily intimate and absorbing history.

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.

Global food production has more than doubled over the past 40 years, growing faster than population, and will likely keep pace in the 21st century. Yet today one-eighth of the world's people lack secure access to the food they need to live active and healthy lives. This volume describes how together innovative technologies and sound policies can help close the global food gap--the gap between demand for and supply of food.

Although markets will continue to supply sufficient food to those with money to spend, getting food to the poor will require that government policies and investments supplement the operation of markets in three critical areas: protecting the natural resources on which agriculture depends; focusing the benefits of agricultural research, including biotechnology, on the needs of small farmers in developing countries; and ensuring that access to food, resources, and income-generating opportunities is equitable and secure.

Contributors to this book show how soil degradation, biotechnology, and other resources and technologies might affect the future supply of food, as well as how poverty, conflict, and gender roles might affect demand. They also consider the roles that institutions must play in meeting the challenge of global hunger. Finally, they outline the policy priorities required to achieve a food-secure world in the 21st century.

Contributors: Bruce Alberts, Nicole Ballenger, Donald Duvick, Craig Gundersen, Eileen Kennedy, Rattan Lal, Alex F. McCalla, Susan R. McCouch, Ellen Messer, Rajul Pandya-Lorch, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, G. Edward Schuh, and Keith Wiebe.