June 18, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
NEW BOOKS
Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty
by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman
Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, both reporters for The Wall Street Journal, argue that global hunger is the result of often well-meaning programs run by foundations, financial institutions, governments that do more harm than good for developing countries.
The book starts with the story of the “Green Revolution,” an effort financed by the Rockefeller Foundation beginning in the 1940s to boost agricultural production in developing countries and culminating with the agronomist Norman Borlaug’s introduction of high-yield wheat crops in Mexico.
The movement resulted in a significant alleviation of food shortages in Asia and Latin America and left millions of farmers with extra crops to sell. However, the authors say, governments and international financial institutions such as the World Bank failed to capitalize on the revolution’s success by not investing in rural infrastructure, not developing markets to ensure farmers would receive fair prices, and not providing subsidies. Instead the wealthiest countries chose to pay “$260-billion in support to their own farmers, making it impossible for competing unsubsidized farmers to grow strong in places such as sub-Saharan Africa.”
As a result, global grain reserves have plummeted while the price of grain has skyrocketed, and in 2007, sub-Saharan Africa had 457 million hungry people, a figure 53 percent higher than in 1992. Nevertheless the authors feel that not all is lost. They devote the second half of the book to people fighting hunger including Bill Gates and Bono. The authors write, “We believe that finding the solution to a problem often begins with people reading about it.”
Publisher: PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1321, New York, N.Y. 10107; http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com; 293 pages; $27.05; ISBN 978-1-58648-511-5.
