World Hunger: Twelve Myths

by Luis Esperanza, Joseph Collins, Frances Moore Lappé, et al.

Book Overview

From best-selling authors Frances Moore Lapp and Joseph Collins comes the 21st century's definitive book on world hunger. Driven by the question, "Why hunger despite an abundance of food?" Lapp and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802135919
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.8" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Invaluable, Illuminating, Empowering

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.

An excellent resource

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.

Confirms What I Have Always Suspected

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 undersc

The emperor has no clothes!

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 . . . "

The truth will come out

This book tells it like it is. There are myths about world hunger. Some are plausible but not true. Others are so clearly silly once you think about it that the author, represents the lad in "The Emporer's New Clothes." He says to Monsanto, for example, your claims of genetic seed stopping world hunger are bogus because world hunger is worsened by your products. To Archers Daniel Midlands big agribiz company's proclamations of helping end world hunger, another "Balogna." You see, there are so many poor farmers all over the world who need to feed local people using simple methods that have worked for thousands of years. Both the chemical companies and other agribusiness firms make hunger worse by enabling practicies that undermine the little guy feeding the poor. Instead, the practices make "First World" investors rich on the backs of the "Third World" farmers and people.This book is one you've got to read if you care about world hunger. It is well researched and well written about the myths of world hunger.