World Hunger: Twelve Myths

Rating:
Summary: Concise, well-researched, eye-opening
Review: It is rare to find a book that has such a perfect balance of research, examples, and analysis. At a total of about 180 pages, "World Hunger" is concise and yet covers an amazing amount of ground. The additional 50 pages of footnotes at the back are a testament to the solid research and reasoning behind the authors' more than 25 years of study and practice in the field.

Each chapter is focused and well-organized, beginning with a statement of the myth being addressed and a one-paragraph summary of the response. The examples are well-chosen and their number appropriate. I never felt overwhelmed by details, and yet I never felt a lack of confidence that there was sufficient evidence to support the authors' point of view.

This book opened my eyes to how globalization, distribution of economic power, and hunger are interrelated. If you are a socially conscious and morally responsible person, this book is invaluable. I only hope I can get others to read it and thus experience a new understanding of the world and their impact on it.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent resource
Review: Over the years, many myths have emerged about the subject of world hunger. People think that if this or that should happen, hunger will disappear, and no longer will westerners have to look at pictures of starving babies in Africa. This book explodes many of those myths.

Some people think that population (or overpopulation) is the problem. Others think that there simply isn't enough food available, or that nature, with her floods and droughts, is the culprit. Still others think that the solution lies with free trade, or letting the market provide, or with the Green Revolution, with its heavy emphasis on pesticides and other chemicals. Other possibilities are that the poor are simply too hungry to revolt, or that the US should increase its stingy foreign aid budget.

The authors place the blame elsewhere. All over the world, there has been a huge concentration of land in fewer and fewer hands, forcing poor and middle-class peasants off the land (in the US, witness the decline of the family farmer). Structural adjustment programs from places like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (part of the requirements when asking for a loan) require a country to reorient its agriculture toward items that are easily exportable rather than items that can feed their people. Another requirement is the removal of internal tariffs and other barriers to the import of grain and other foodstuffs. It results in a flood of cheaper (usually American) agricultural products reaching the market, driving local farmers out of business. The countries that one thinks of when hearing "famine" actually produce enough food to feed their people. The only problem is that much of it has to go overseas to help pay the foreign debt.

This book is excellent. It presents a potentially complex subject in a clear, easy to understand manner. It contains a list of addresses to contact for more information, and is a great activism reference.

Rating:
Summary: Confirms What I Have Always Suspected
Review: The authors of this book have made some compelling and thought provoking arguments- arguments that go beyond the topics they touch upon, namely, hunger, democracy, security, politics and economy. The implications of this book are far-reaching, as the larger issues it addresses call into question the very nature of modern development, and ultimately, the long-term viability of the human race.

It really is hard to believe that there is hunger in a world of plenty. Even when food production is increased, hunger is not abated- it only increases further. Although many famine-stricken countries have been written off as hopeless, a critical look at the histories of these countries will show that hunger and famine are recent phenomena. These phenomena result when time honored agricultural traditions of sustainable stewardship and subsistence cultivation are abandoned for export-led development trajectories heavily reliant on cash crops grown with imported goods, methods, and technologies. This state of affairs is a situation largely encouraged and increasingly demanded by the wealthy nations.

The wealthiest fifth of the world's population eats very well, of that I am certain. The wealthiest fifth can eat what it wants, when it wants, and how much it wants. It can do this by extracting and exporting the natural resources of the third world, in the form of luxury foods such as coffee, tea, pineapples and cashews. These natural resources would otherwise go into the production of subsistence crops, crops biologically suited for the specific climatic, topographic, ecological and cultural conditions found in the third world. As a result, the world's wealthy eats at the expense of the world's poor, all the while irreversibly depleting the productive capacity of the ecosystems at home and in poor nations.

Contrary to popular belief, natural disasters are not becoming more common. Although they may be becoming more severe, closer inspection tells us that despite advances in technology, people are becoming more vulnerable to disasters. In the same way, people are becoming more vulnerable to hunger, and despite considerable advances in agricultural production, technology, and even transport, hunger is more common today than it was fifty or even one hundred years ago. In fact, the specter of hunger is rearing its ugly head in places that we would never expect it- right in our own back yard. Famine and hunger can not be blamed on drought or war. It can not be blamed on a lack of food, or a lack of technology to produce food better or in larger quantities. Famine is ultimately caused by the failure of human institutions to secure critical resources for people. The authors correctly point out that a steady concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a decreasing number of people are to blame for our present situation of overwhelming poverty, hunger, and suffering owing to increasing intractable economic insecurity. However, they failed to underscore the critical point that such a state of affairs can only be perpetuated when a significant minority of the people- the middle class supporting the elites, fully endorse the actions of the elites. As Frantz O. Fanon demonstrated in his book, The Wretched of the Earth, in which he outlines in detail what he calls the psychology of the oppressed, only when the middle class feels threatened does the situation change.

As a scientist and engineer, it is now clear to me that science and technology can not solve any of mankind's fundamental problems. Whether it is the discovery of antibiotics or the development of the automobile, technology tends to create more problems than it solves, as with antibiotics comes the problem of resistance, just as greenhouse emissions and drunk driving go hand in hand with the automobile. Thus, the claims of agribusiness centering on biotechnology as the solution to world hunger now sound extremely hollow to me, just as improved birth control and family planning now look like interesting intellectual and social fantasies. Science and technology can not solve the problem of individual greed, and they can not solve the problems of anti-democratic behavior. Let me be perfectly clear- more technology is not the answer. Nonetheless, given our current political and economic ideologies, and the scientific and technological paradigms that support them, our individual freedom and ultimately our very survival as a species is at stake...

In the end, it all boils down to a choice between short-term economic gain and long-term factor (resource) productivity. As Aldous Huxley stated in the epilogue of his classic, Brave New World, "You pays your money and you takes your choice."

Rating:
Summary: The emperor has no clothes!
Review: There are few people in this country who have done more to raise consciousness about food, economy, and natural resources than Frances Moore Lappe. She was a prophet for sustainability long before it became fashionable to buck the emerging globalism. Her *World Hunger: 12 Myths*, an expanded and updated version of the earlier *World Hunger: 10 Myths*, is a pivotal text.

The central claim defended here is that hunger is a question of distribution, not scarcity of food or surplus of people. Hunger, in short, is a political problem, and in *12 Myths* Lappe and her co-authors systematically debunk the misconceptions and spins that blind us to the real nature of world hunger.

This book is subversive in the best sense of the word. It shakes our own complacency; it dares to say that the self-serving corporate and political explanations for world hunger have no substance; and it offers strategies for actually doing something to solve the problem. The thing is this: we're all implicated in the problem of world hunger. All of us eat, and in eating we at least implicitly condone the maldistribution of foodstuffs that gives us tomatoes and kiwis in the dead of winter while farmers of these exportable cash crops in the third world starve. But it doesn't have to be this way. As Lappe says, "Where and how we spend our money--or don't spend it--is a vote for the kind of world we want to create. For example, in most communities we can now choose to shop at food stores that offer less-processed and less-wastefully-packaged foods, stores managed by the workers themselves, instad of conglomerate-controlled supermarkets. And we can choose to redirect our consumer dollars in support of specific product boycotts . . . "

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Warning Against Market Fundamentalism
Review: This book does an excellent job of showing how despite the economic growth that has been spurred worldwide thanks to deregulation, liberalization of trade and finance, and improvements in information technology, adherence to market fundamentalism has contributed to creating stark disparities in the distribution of wealth between developed and developing nations, as well as within those nations themselves.

Nevertheless, globalization, for whatever faults it possesses, has made the people of the nations of the world feel more connected than ever (In fact, I'm writing this from Japan, where I have lived for seven years). this book sensibly points out that In order to come up with a food policy that will minimize hunger worldwide, naturally poverty must also be reined in. It seems to me that in order to significantly reduce poverty, all nations must make a fundamental shift in their foreign policy away from acting for the benefit of national interests and toward the benefits of the human race as a whole. I cannot say whether mankind is ready for such a change at this juncture.

However, The book concludes that the freedom to eke out a living (the problem of the poor) supersedes the right to accumulate unlimited wealth (the hoarding of wealth by a small number of people). While this is most certainly true, it also seemed to oversimplify the problem of disparity of income based on the very facts presented in the book. While the book did denounce communist regimes at one point in the book, I felt that the conclusion of the book unneccessarily demonized wealthy individuals and major companies and called the proletariat of the world to unite.

For this weakness in its conclusion, I can only give this work four stars, but still I do strongly recommend giving a careful read to this text for the invaluable information it provides on this terrible problem.

Rating:
Summary: Invaluable, Illuminating, Empowering
Review: World Hunger: Twelve Myths clearly identifies the root causes of hunger as stemming from inequity and lack of true democracy, dispelling entirely the common belief that inadaquate food production is to blame. In their plain spoken and positive eloquence, the authors overwhelmingly succeed in conveying otherwise dauntingly complex global social and economic dynamics that contribute to world hunger and how each must be changed to honestly address the plight of the poor.

World Hunger: 12 Myths should have a permanent home in school curricula, libraries, and in the hands of people of all ages wishing to better understand and improve the world in which they live.