From famine to food security: Lessons for building resilient food systems

From famine to food security: Lessons for building resilient food systems
Author: Dorosh, Paul A.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 5
Release: 2017-07-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Armed conflict combined with prolonged drought has put about 20 million people at risk of starvation and death in Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen, and northern Nigeria. The international development and aid communities are caught between the enormity of the humanitarian crisis, which demands an estimated US$4.4 billion to address, and the lack of resources forthcoming from donors. Food crises, famine-like conditions, and famines recur with regularity in many developing countries (see Box 1 for definitions of terms). Although the current famines can be largely attributed to conflicts, chronic food insecurity also threatens several other African countries. For example, 6.7 million people were affected by Malawi’s largest food crisis in decades in 2016–2017, and the country remains vulnerable to weather extremes that could create food emergencies (World Bank 2017). In Kenya, food security has deteriorated since the end of 2016 and half of its 47 counties face food shortages (Chatterjee and Mengistu 2017). How do countries prepare to prevent shocks—natural and man-made—from generating food crises? What does it take to break the cycle of chronic food insecurity and build resilient food systems? How have some countries managed to prevent drought from leading to famine? In this brief, we document lessons for building resilient food systems to prevent future famines.

Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society

Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society
Author: John Walter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1991-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521406130

An examination of the complex interrelationships among past demographic, social, and economic structures demonstrates how the impact of hunger and disease can enhance the exploration of early modern society.

The Aid Lab

The Aid Lab
Author: Naomi Hossain
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2017-02-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0191088323

From an unpromising start as 'the basket-case' to present day plaudits for its human development achievements, Bangladesh plays an ideological role in the contemporary world order, offering proof that the neo-liberal development model works under the most testing conditions. How were such rapid gains possible in a context of chronically weak governance? The Aid Lab subjects this so-called 'Bangladesh paradox' to close scrutiny, evaluating public policies and their outcomes for poverty and development since Bangladesh's independence in 1971. Countering received wisdom that its gains owe to an early shift to market-oriented economic reform, it argues that a binding political settlement, a social contract to protect against the crises of subsistence and survival, united the elite, the masses, and their aid donors in the wake of the devastating famine of 1974. This laid resilient foundations for human development, fostering a focus on the poorest and most precarious, and in particular on the concerns of women. In chapters examining the environmental, political and socioeconomic crisis of the 1970s, the book shows how the lessons of the famine led to a robustly pro-poor growth and social policy agenda, empowering the Bangladeshi state and its non-governmental organizations to protect and enable its population to thrive in its engagements in the global economy. Now a middle-income country, Bangladesh's role as the world's laboratory for aided development has generated lessons well beyond its borders, and Bangladesh continues to carve a pioneering pathway through the risks of global economic integration and climate change.

Famine

Famine
Author: Laura Thalassa
Publisher: Bloom Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-08-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781728280141

They came to earth--Pestilence, War, Famine, Death--four horsemen riding their screaming steeds, racing to the corners of the world. Four horsemen with the power to destroy all of humanity. They came to earth, and they came to end us all. Ana da Silva always assumed she'd die young, but she never expected it to be at the hands of the haunting immortal who spared her life years ago. Famine. But if the horseman remembers her, he must not care, for when she comes face to face with him for the second time in her life, she's stabbed and left for dead. Only, she doesn't quite die. If there's one thing Famine is good at, it's cruelty. He can't forget the pain humanity has brought him, and he's ready to bring it back to them tenfold. But when Ana, a ghost from his past, corners him for what he did to her, she and her empty threats captivate him, and he decides to keep her around. In spite of themselves, Ana and Famine are drawn to each other. But at the end of the day, the two are enemies. Nothing changes that. Not one kind act, not two. And definitely not a few steamy nights. But enemies or reluctant lovers, if they don't stop themselves soon, heaven will.

Seasonal Hunger and Public Policies

Seasonal Hunger and Public Policies
Author: Shahidur R. Khandker
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2012-06-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 082139553X

Agricultural development through crop diversification, irrigation, high yielding crop varieties, and public investments in infrastructure has improved food security and its seasonal dimension worldwide in recent years. Consequently, the severity of seasonal hunger caused by agricultural crop cycles has lessened substantially. Yet in agricultural pockets scattered throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, seasonal hunger persists, especially among the rural poor, owing primarily to idiosyncratic shocks caused by agricultural seasonality. More than four-fifths of the world's poor live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for livelihoods. Because of seasonal income shocks, the poor who are generally poor are likely to be even poorer during a particular agricultural season, while those who are not poor year-round may also be so during that season. Also, seasonal hunger may lead to endemic poverty if its adverse effects on income and consumption are irreversible. Policies aimed at reducing overall poverty often disregard its seasonal dimension, because standard poverty statistics do not consider seasonal hunger in the official data collection and analysis, there is no direct way to determine how many of the “bottom billion,” as economist Paul Collier refers to the world's poorest people, suffer from seasonal hunger. Even worse, regions prone to severe seasonal hunger are unlikely to attract the public investments required to raise the local economy's resilience through income diversification and thus break the seasonal-poverty cycle. The book provides an exhaustive inquiry of Bangladesh's seasonal hunger with special reference to the North West region. The seasonality of poverty and food deprivation is a common feature of rural livelihood but it is more marked in the north-west region of Bangladesh. The book also presents an evaluation of several policy interventions launched recently in mitigating seasonality, which provide a test case of what works and what does not in combating seasonal hunger. The major findings of the book are the following: (a) Policies to improve food security should explicitly take into account the seasonal dimension of food deprivation. (b) Gains from initiatives to combat seasonal hunger should be monitored and consolidated to ensure sustainable impacts. (c) Policies should also focus on areas that, owing to environmental degradation and climate change, are increasingly vulnerable to seasonal hunger and food insecurity in general.

In the Shadow of the Sun

In the Shadow of the Sun
Author: Anne Sibley O'Brien
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2017-06-27
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0545905761

Hatchet in North Korea: A sister and brother go on the run with explosive forbidden photographs in this gripping and timely survival adventure. North Korea is known as the most repressive country on Earth, with a dictatorial leader, a starving population, and harsh punishment for rebellion.Not the best place for a family vacation.Yet that's exactly where Mia Andrews finds herself, on a tour with her aid-worker father and fractious older brother, Simon. Mia was adopted from South Korea as a baby, and the trip raises tough questions about where she really belongs. Then her dad is arrested for spying, just as forbidden photographs of North Korean slave-labor camps fall into Mia's hands. The only way to save Dad: get the pictures out of the country. Thus Mia and Simon set off on a harrowing journey to the border, without food, money, or shelter, in a land where anyone who sees them might turn them in, and getting caught could mean prison -- or worse.An exciting adventure that offers a rare glimpse into a compelling, complicated nation, In the Shadow of the Sun is an unforgettable novel of courage and survival.

The Famine Ships

The Famine Ships
Author: Edward Laxton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2016-08-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1408884003

___________________ 'A splendid book' - Irish Times Between 1846 and 1851, the Great Famine claimed more than a million Irish lives. The Famine Ships tells the story of the courage and determination of those who crossed the Atlantic in leaky, overcrowded sailing ships and made new lives for themselves, among them William Ford, father of Henry Ford, and twenty-six-year-old Patrick Kennedy, great-grandfather of John F. Kennedy.

The Coming Famine

The Coming Famine
Author: Julian Cribb
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2010
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520271238

Lays out a picture of impending planetary crisis - a global food shortage that threatens to hit by mid-century - that would dwarf any in our previous experience. This book describes a dangerous confluence of shortages - of water, land, energy, technology, and knowledge - combined with the increased demand created by population and economic growth

Feast and Famine

Feast and Famine
Author: Leslie Clarkson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2001-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191543675

This book traces the history of food and famine in Ireland from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. It looks at what people ate and drank, and how this changed over time. The authors explore the economic and social forces which lay behind these changes as well as the more personal motives of taste, preference, and acceptability. They analyze the reasons why the potato became a major component of the diet for so many people during the eighteenth century as well as the diets of the middling and upper classes. This is not, however, simply a social history of food but it is a nutritional one as well, and the authors go on to explore the connection between eating, health, and disease. They look at the relationship between the supply of food and the growth of the population and then finally, and unavoidably in any history of the Irish and food, the issue of famine, examining first its likelihood and then its dreadful reality when it actually occurred.

The Famine Plot

The Famine Plot
Author: Tim Pat Coogan
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2012-11-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137045175

During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies." In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland''s best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history, arguing that Britain was in large part responsible for the extent of the national tragedy, and in fact engineered the food shortage in one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing. So strong was anti-Irish sentiment in the mainland that the English parliament referred to the famine as "God's lesson." Drawing on recently uncovered sources, and with the sharp eye of a seasoned historian, Coogan delivers fresh insights into the famine's causes, recounts its unspeakable events, and delves into the legacy of the "famine mentality" that followed immigrants across the Atlantic to the shores of the United States and had lasting effects on the population left behind. This is a broad, magisterial history of a tragedy that shook the nineteenth century and still impacts the worldwide Irish diaspora of nearly 80 million people today.