Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity

by Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins

Book Overview

Clean copy of terrific book from 1981 This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395253470
• ISBN13: 9780395253472
• Release Date: January 1977
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 466 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

One of my all time favorites

This book is an eye opener. We have been led to believe that there is not enough food in the world to feed all of the starving people. We are told that the only solution is a combination of more technology and global trade. Is it possible that these assumptions are not true? Read this book and make up your own mind.

Food First by Lappe

This is an excellent work which discusses the negations involvedin major agriculture. The author explains how an increasein food productive capability can result in greater unavailability of foodstuffs for the needy. For instance,the following consequences may follow increases in landproductivity:o land values increase forcing tenants and small farmers elsewhereo payments in money become the rule although money buys lesso control of scarce land becomes concentrated in fewer handso even communal lands are expropriated by powerful individualso peasants are trapped into debt bondageo quantity and market value rather than nutrition become theformula for agricultural planningThe author explains negations in the Philippines, Bangladesh, West Malaysia and Sri Lanka.Surprisingly, some researchers have found that a country's decrease in export earnings may make people better off.In such circumstances, tenants are better able to enforce theirdemands for land and for permission to grow subsistence crops.This work is an important treatise on the economic aspectsof agriculture. It complements works by David Ricardo andothers.