This book examines the effects of high and volatile food prices during 2007-08 on low-income farmers and consumers in developing, transition, and industrialized countries. Previous studies of this crisis have mostly used models to estimate the likely impacts. This volume includes actual evidence from the field as to how higher prices affected access to food and farm income among poor people. In addition to country and regional case studies, the book presents discussions of cross-cutting themes, including gender, risk management, violence, the importance of subsistence farming as a coping strategy, and the role of governments and markets in addressing higher prices.

With 2011 witnessing an unprecedentedly high level of food prices, the findings and policy recommendations presented here should prove useful to both scholars and policy makers in understanding the causes and consequences, as well as the policies needed to ensure food security in light of the skyrocketing cost of food.

This book was published as a special double issue of Development in Practice.

Indigenous people constitute a large portion of Latin America's population and suffer from widespread poverty. This book provides the first rigorous assessment of changes in socio-economic conditions among the region's indigenous people, tracking progress in these indicators during the first international decade of indigenous peoples (1994-2004). Set within the context of existing literature and political changes over the course of the decade, this volume provides a rigorous statistical analysis of indigenous populations in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru, examining their poverty rates, education levels, income determinants, labour force participation and other social indicators. The results show that while improvements have been achieved according to some social indicators, little progress has been made with respect to poverty.

First published in 1984, Toynbee Hall, The First Hundred Years is not just a centenary study, but a personal contribution to the continuing history of Toynbee Hall, which is the Universities' settlement in East London, and an institution that has inspired respect and affection. Its pioneering role as a residential community living and working in the heart of one of London's most deprived areas has been maintained. Called a 'social workshop' by its late chairman John Profumo, Toynbee Hall promotes ventures such as Free Legal Advice, the Workers Educational Association, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The book looks at the social changes that have taken place over the 100 years since Toynbee Hall was founded in 1884, but also notes curious parallels, with persistent patterns of poverty, deprivation, squalor and racial separation which characterise the area. Questions about the facts and perceptions of poverty, the nature of community, the visual as well as the social environment, and the roles of voluntary, local and national statutory policy still require answers.

This study analyses the problems and prospects of the Third World. It formulates a general economic and political theory the author calls the "global strategic transition" (GST) model. The central feature of this model is the global strategic demand response mechanism involving an interaction between the world's expanding strategic core and its fringe, which is facilitated through strategic inflation. This model also provides the basis for a new policy approach to economic development.

Numerous studies have revealed that the poor disproportionately bear the burden of environmental problems in America today. Issues range from higher levels of poisonous wastes, carbon dioxide, and ozone, to greater than normal incidences of asthma and lead poisoning. The environmental justice movement, which has emerged in working class and low-income African American and Latino communities since the early 1990s, is an effort that is reinterpreting the definition of the environment as "where we live, work, and play" to connect new constituencies traditionally outside of the postwar environmental movement. Novotny documents this expanding constituency through case studies of four community groups ranging from South Central Los Angeles to Louisiana. "Environmental racism" is understood as yet another type of discrimination which results in a high incidence of environmental concerns in poorer communities due to what many activists see as discriminatory land use practices, decisions by industry that intentionally locate hazardous wastes in these communities, and the uneven enforcement of environmental regulations by federal, state, and local officials. Community leaders have added environmental causes to their fight against unemployment, impoverishment, and substandard housing. This study explores various attempts to put a halt to illegal practices and to broaden public awareness of the issues involved.

As in many developing countries, the prospects for land reform in Iran seemed promising. It was expected to improve rural poverty and stimulate agricultural development by replacing the traditional landlord-peasant system with more peasant-biased, modern farming. This book assesses the economic consequences of land reform, focusing particularly on its effect on the living standards of the rural poor. Amid describes a ?biomodal? system of large and small farms that emerged after the reform. Large farms, with government support, modernized and grew more profitable cash crops, whereas small farms found difficulty in obtaining credit and continued to rely on traditional techniques and staple food crops. Land reform was not, the author argues a success for the majority of the Iranian rural population who experienced virtually no improvement in living standards and a growth of rural inequality as a result.

First published in 1976, this book deals with contemporary tensions between the West and the Third World, caused by hunger, malnutrition and poverty, perpetuated by an imbalance in the distribution of world resources. The book deals with the issue of malnutrition in the Third World, which owes much more to poverty and unemployment than to agricultural failure. The author also believes that population control can do little in the absence of a more equitable distribution of world resources and political power within and between countries involving a fundamental change in ideology and education. This is a challenging and critical book, whose arguments cannot be ignored by anyone concerned with the creation of a just and stable world order.

"The book evaluates alternative policy options for the African countries to overcome the food crisis and the changing structure of world trade to sustain their impressive growth of the early 2000s. These policies must go beyond economic reforms and seek a solution to the entrenched political problems that divided the continent"--Provided by publisher.

Urban development cooperation needs innovative solutions. Despite many efforts, international assistance has failed to address the challenges faced by cities in developing countries. This book seeks to raise awareness about the value of corporate social responsibility as a tool in urban development assistance.

Over the past decade, the European Union and national policy-makers alike have paid more attention to childhood poverty and children's rights. Whether this has led to better policies, and whether these policies have in turn resulted in less childhood poverty and more human dignity, remains debatable. Children's rights may provide some common ground for the different perspectives on the causes of poverty. They also introduce specific process requirements, in particular the participation of the poor. At the same time, children's rights may gain from an encounter with child poverty studies, not least in grasping the complexity of child poverty and in making a realistic assessment of their own potential for addressing child poverty. This book introduces several approaches in the field of child poverty and children's rights studies, and identifies intersections between different theoretical approaches from both domains. It is a collaborative project of Centrum OASeS and the UNICEF Chair in Children's Rights, both located at the University of Antwerp. The Chair, established in 2007, acts as a knowledge broker of children's rights within the academic community and between the academic community and policy and practice, through teaching, research, and service to the community. The research topics of the Centrum OASeS include poverty and other forms of social exclusion, ethnic minorities, urban policy, social economy and supported employment, and social networks.

"This slim, useful book ... is suitable for students ... The fairly tight North American focus allows for great accuracy and detail, and the Canadian material is especially interesting, because Canadian social policy is less well known than that of the United States, and seems far more progressive on homelessness." . The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

" The authors] present key themes from the available literature in a way that affords policy makers and other practitioners access to what it is that anthropology has to offer in thinking about and responding to homelessness on a day-to-day, ground level. In this endeavor, the book] is supremely successful." . American Anthropologist

As homelessness continues to plague North America and also becomes more widespread in Europe, anthropologists turn their attention to solving the puzzle of why people in some of the most advanced technological societies in the world are found huddled in a subway tunnel, squatting in a vacant building, living in a shelter, or camping out in an abandoned field or on a beach. Anthropologists have a long tradition of working in poverty subcultures and have been able to contribute answers to some of the puzzles of homelessness through their ability to enter the culture of the homeless without some of the preconceptions of other disciplines.

The authors, anthropologists from the U.S.A. and Canada, offer us an analysis of homelessness that is grounded in anthropological research in North America and throughout the world. Both have in-depth experience through working in communities of the homeless and present us withthe results of their own work and with that of their colleagues.

Irene Glasser has widely published on homelessness and has been Professor of Anthropology at Eastern Connecticut State University, specializing in urban, applied, and medical anthropology. Since 1994 she has also been Director of Canadian Studies. Rae Bridgman is Research Associate at the Department of Social Anthropology of York University, Canada."

The numbers of Africans living in absolute poverty continues to increase. Through bolder and more innovative approaches, the poor can be helped, at very reasonable cost, to break out of poverty. We use the experience from one of the poorest countries on the continent, Malawi, to illustrate both the challenges that poverty creates, and the opportunities for change that exist. We develop a model easily replicable at modest cost to lift people quickly out of poverty, with sustainable benefits.

The world's urban population now exceeds the world's rural population. What does this mean for the state of our cities, given the strain this global demographic shift is placing upon current urban infrastructures? Following on from previous State of the World's Cities reports, this edition uses the framework of 'The Urban Divide' to analyze the complex social, political, economic and cultural dynamics of urban environments. In particular, the book focuses on the concept of the 'right to the city' and ways in which many urban dwellers are excluded from the advantages of city life, using the framework to explore links among poverty, inequality, slum formation and economic growth. The volume will be essential reading for all professionals and policymakers in the field, as well as a valuable resource for researchers and students in all aspects of urban development. Published with UN-Habitat.

The Young Lives project is a long-term study of childhood poverty in developing countries. International experts follow two groups of children in poor communities in four countries as they grow into young adults with five rounds of surveys, interspersed with on-going participatory research with a smaller number of the children, planned to cover a period of 15 years. This book represents the engagement of Young Lives with researchers and debates in the field, reflecting on the first two rounds of data coming from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam, with supporting material from Tanzania and South Africa. Topics include the ethics of research, the long-term causes and consequences of childhood poverty, and the resilience and optimism shown by children and their families. The authors also look at the dynamics of childhood poverty -- how and why some families move in and out of poverty as well as learning, children's timeuse and life transitions -- focusing on children's daily lives, their families and communities.

This interdisciplinary study applies human rights theory to the problems of rural poverty in the Third World. Considering the interdependence of minimal food and health security with minimal assurance of basic freedoms, political scientist Alan G. Smith traces the linkage to the need of the food-insecure to seek "clientelistic dependencies" on better-off neighbors--relationships that often operate to restrict freedom of choice. In contrast to conventional rural development aid, which can introduce new client dependency if pursued alone, Smith stresses the need to find other forms of aid that would provide the option of assured minimal survival while avoiding the constraints imposed by dependency. Arguing for bolstering bottom-up human rights momentum, he suggests the transfer of appropriate tools into the hands of the target group. Recipients would make use of them to enhance autonomous food-crop production, thereby making client dependency a matter of choice rather than necessity. Smith illustrates the Third World predicament of food insecurity leading to infringement of rights by drawing together empirical evidence from Bangladesh, Botswana, and Tanzania. He further argues that respect for human rights involves a duty on the part of advantaged nations to address the Third World predicament with practical measures fully consistent with human rights, and for each of these three country cases, Smith recommends direct locally specific minimalist aid. His model, its practical illustration, and recommendations should be valuable to academics and students in the fields of rural sociology, anthropology, and political science--especially those focusing on human rights, poverty, and Third Worlddevelopment--as well as bureaucrats and consultants in the development aid field.

The 1840s witnessed widespread hunger and malnutrition at home and mass starvation in Ireland. And yet the aptly named 'Hungry 40s' came amidst claims that, notwithstanding Malthusian prophecies, absolute biological want had been eliminated in England. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were supposedly the period in which the threat of famine lifted for the peoples of England. But hunger remained, in the words of Marx, an 'unremitted pressure'. The politics of hunger offers the first systematic analysis of the ways in which hunger continued to be experienced and feared, both as a lived and constant spectral presence. It also examines how hunger was increasingly used as a disciplining device in new modes of governing the population. Drawing upon a rich archive, this innovative and conceptually-sophisticated study throws new light on how hunger persisted as a political and biological force. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2, Zero hunger. -- .

A volume in Advances in Cultural Psychology Series Editor: Jaan Valsiner, Clark University This book covers the results of investigation of social realities and their public representation in Brazilian poor communities, with a particular emphasis on the use of cultural tools to survive and create psychological and social novelty under conditions of severe poverty. A relevant part of it brings together the multi-faceted evidence of a decade of research concentrated in two particular low-income areas in the city of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Other studies conducted in other Brazilian areas and in Cali, Colombia are included. In contrast to most representations of poverty in the social sciences which create a "calamity story" of the lives of poor people, the coverage in this book is meant to balance the focus on harsh realities with the cultural-psychological resiliency of individuals and families under poverty.

Social protection is fast becoming one of the most important themes in development policy. This book examines the political processes shaping the formulation of social protection policies; compares the key conceptual frameworks available for analysing social protection; and provides a comparative discussion on social protection policies focused on the poor and the poorest.

This volume provides comprehensive updated coverage of inequality and poverty issues in China. Some of the methodologies developed herein are published for the first time and may be used in other contexts and for other countries. The use of different data sources and state-of-art research techniques ensures that the findings and conclusions can be substantiated and that the policy recommendations are reliable and robust. Contributors to this volume are renowned experts in their respective areas, including, notably, Justin Lin, Xing Meng, Kai-yuen Tsui, and Guanghua Wan. For these reasons, those with an interest in income distribution in general and China's development in particular, will find this volume essential reading.
Rapidly rising inequality in China has contributed to the sluggishness of domestic demand and emerging poverty. It has thus exerted considerable pressure for commodity exports and represents a root cause of increased trade disputes. These have profound ramifications for the US, EU, and other economies, and the international business community. Consequently, economists and sociologists, among others, are increasingly focused upon inequality and poverty issues in China and relevant policy implications.
This volume, arising from a two-year UNU-WIDER project, addresses issues that include the inequality-growth relationship, regional/personal variation in incomes and human well-being such as education, the determinants of inequality and poverty or their changes, gaps in innovation capability, and the role played by China's development strategies in affecting inequality.