This book analyses the role of public action in solving the problem of hunger in the modern world and is divided into four parts: Hunger in the modern world, Famines, Undernutrition and deprivation, and Hunger and public action.

How to focus anti-hunger efforts not on charity but on the root causes of food insecurity, improving public health, and reducing income inequality. Food banks and food pantries have proliferated in response to an economic emergency. The loss of manufacturing jobs combined with the recession of the early 1980s and Reagan administration cutbacks in federal programs led to an explosion in the growth of food charity. This was meant to be a stopgap measure, but the jobs never came back, and the “emergency food system” became an industry. In Big Hunger, Andrew Fisher takes a critical look at the business of hunger and offers a new vision for the anti-hunger movement. From one perspective, anti-hunger leaders have been extraordinarily effective. Food charity is embedded in American civil society, and federal food programs have remained intact while other anti-poverty programs have been eliminated or slashed. But anti-hunger advocates are missing an essential element of the problem: economic inequality driven by low wages. Reliant on corporate donations of food and money, anti-hunger organizations have failed to hold business accountable for offshoring jobs, cutting benefits, exploiting workers and rural communities, and resisting wage increases. They have become part of a “hunger industrial complex” that seems as self-perpetuating as the more famous military-industrial complex. Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and economic democracy. He points to the work of numerous grassroots organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the rest of the anti-hunger sector. It is only through approaches like these that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it.

This text comprises three works by two well-known economists. The trilogy discusses causes of hunger, the role public action can play in its alleviation and the Indian experience in this context. It provides a comprehensive, theoretical and empirical analysis of relevant developmental issue.

In the US, there is a wide-ranging network of at least 370 food banks, and more than 60,000 hunger-relief organizations such as food pantries and meal programs. These groups provide billions of meals a year to people in need. And yet hunger still affects one in nine Americans. What are we doing wrong? In Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, Katie Martin argues that if handing out more and more food was the answer, we would have solved the problem of hunger decades ago. Martin instead presents a new model for charitable food, one where success is measured not by pounds of food distributed but by lives changed. The key is to focus on the root causes of hunger. When we shift our attention to strategies that build empathy, equity, and political will, we can implement real solutions. Martin shares those solutions in a warm, engaging style, with simple steps that anyone working or volunteering at a food bank or pantry can take today. Some are short-term strategies to create a more dignified experience for food pantry clients: providing client choice, where individuals select their own food, or redesigning a waiting room with better seating and a designated greeter. Some are longer-term: increasing the supply of healthy food, offering job training programs, or connecting clients to other social services. And some are big picture: joining the fight for living wages and a stronger social safety net. These strategies are illustrated through inspiring success stories and backed up by scientific research. Throughout, readers will find a wealth of proven ideas to make their charitable food organizations more empathetic and more effective. As Martin writes, it takes more than food to end hunger. Picking up this insightful, lively book is a great first step.

First World Hunger examines hunger and the politics of food security, and welfare reform (1980-95) in five 'liberal' welfare states (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA). Through national case-studies it explores the depoliticization of hunger as a human rights issue and the failure of New Right policies and charitable emergency relief to guarantee household food security. The need for alternative integrated policies and the necessity of public action are considered essential if hunger is to be eliminated.

This unique book adds an ethics dimension to the debate and research about poverty, hunger, and globalization. Scholars and practitioners from several disciplines discuss what action is needed for ethics to play a bigger role in reducing poverty and hunger within the context of globalization. The book concludes that much of the rhetoric is not followed up with appropriate action, and discusses the role of ethics in attempts to match action with rhetoric.

The hidden problem of student hunger on college campuses is real. Here's how colleges and universities are addressing it. As the price of college continues to rise and the incomes of most Americans stagnate, too many college students are going hungry. According to researchers, approximately half of all undergraduates are food insecure. Food Insecurity on Campus—the first book to describe the problem—meets higher education's growing demand to tackle the pressing question "How can we end student hunger?" Essays by a diverse set of authors, each working to address food insecurity in higher education, describe unique approaches to the topic. They also offer insights into the most promising strategies to combat student hunger, including • utilizing research to raise awareness and enact change; • creating campus pantries, emergency aid programs, and meal voucher initiatives to meet immediate needs; • leveraging public benefits and nonprofit partnerships to provide additional resources; • changing higher education systems and college cultures to better serve students; and • drawing on student activism and administrative clout to influence federal, state, and local policies. Arguing that practice and policy are improved when informed by research, Food Insecurity on Campus combines the power of data with detailed storytelling to illustrate current conditions. A foreword by Sara Goldrick-Rab further contextualizes the problem. Offering concrete guidance to anyone seeking to understand and support college students experiencing food insecurity, the book encourages readers to draw from the lessons learned to create a comprehensive strategy to fight student hunger. Contributors: Talia Berday-Sacks, Denise Woods-Bevly, Katharine M. Broton, Clare L. Cady, Samuel Chu, Sarah Crawford, Cara Crowley, Rashida M. Crutchfield, James Dubick, Amy Ellen Duke-Benfield, Sara Goldrick-Rab, Jordan Herrera, Nicole Hindes, Russell Lowery-Hart, Jennifer J. Maguire, Michael Rosen, Sabrina Sanders, Rachel Sumekh

At 4:00 am, Leonida Wanyama lit a lantern in her house made of sticks and mud. She was up long before the sun to begin her farm work, as usual. But this would be no ordinary day, this second Friday of the new year. This was the day Leonida and a group of smallholder farmers in western Kenya would begin their exodus, as she said, "from misery to Canaan," the land of milk and honey. Africa's smallholder farmers, most of whom are women, know misery. They toil in a time warp, living and working essentially as their forebears did a century ago. With tired seeds, meager soil nutrition, primitive storage facilities, wretched roads, and no capital or credit, they harvest less than one-quarter the yields of Western farmers. The romantic ideal of African farmers -- rural villagers in touch with nature, tending bucolic fields -- is in reality a horror scene of malnourished children, backbreaking manual work, and profound hopelessness. Growing food is their driving preoccupation, and still they don't have enough to feed their families throughout the year. The wanjala -- the annual hunger season that can stretch from one month to as many as eight or nine -- abides. But in January 2011, Leonida and her neighbors came together and took the enormous risk of trying to change their lives. Award-winning author and world hunger activist Roger Thurow spent a year with four of them -- Leonida Wanyama, Rasoa Wasike, Francis Mamati, and Zipporah Biketi -- to intimately chronicle their efforts. In The Last Hunger Season, he illuminates the profound challenges these farmers and their families face, and follows them through the seasons to see whether, with a little bit of help from a new social enterprise organization called One Acre Fund, they might transcend lives of dire poverty and hunger. The daily dramas of the farmers' lives unfold against the backdrop of a looming global challenge: to feed a growing population, world food production must nearly double by 2050. If these farmers succeed, so might we all.

Hunger and Starvation in Kalahandi: An Anthropological Study argues that starvation despite adequate food resources is a recurring phenomenon. The book focuses on the afflicted, the influence of various factors. It covers a critique of the conventional disaster approach to famine, alternate theoretical framework of famine as a process of gradual socio-economic and biological decline, state-society dynamics involved in the failure of the government to acknowledge the prevalence of persistent starvation in Kalahandi, and, failure to ameliorate the situation.

For more than thirty years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the ''Green Revolution'' succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every year - most of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse. In the west we think of famine as a natural disaster, brought about by drought; or as the legacy of brutal dictators. But in this powerful investigative narrative, Thurow & Kilman show exactly how, in the past few decades, American, British, and European policies conspired to keep Africa hungry and unable to feed itself. As a new generation of activists work to keep famine from spreading, Enough is essential reading on a humanitarian issue of utmost urgency.