How food pantries stigmatize their clients through a discourse that emphasizes hard work, self help, and economic productivity rather than food justice and equity. The United States has one of the highest rates of hunger and food insecurity in the industrialized world, with poor households, single parents, and communities of color disproportionately affected. Food pantries—run by charitable and faith-based organizations—rather than legal entitlements have become a cornerstone of the government's efforts to end hunger. In Feeding the Other, Rebecca de Souza argues that food pantries stigmatize their clients through a discourse that emphasizes hard work, self help, and economic productivity rather than food justice and equity. De Souza describes this “framing, blaming, and shaming” as “neoliberal stigma” that recasts the structural issue of hunger as a problem for the individual hungry person. De Souza shows how neoliberal stigma plays out in practice through a comparative case analysis of two food pantries in Duluth, Minnesota. Doing so, she documents the seldom-acknowledged voices, experiences, and realities of people living with hunger. She describes the failure of public institutions to protect citizens from poverty and hunger; the white privilege of pantry volunteers caught between neoliberal narratives and social justice concerns; the evangelical conviction that food assistance should be “a hand up, not a handout”; the culture of suspicion in food pantry spaces; and the constraints on food choice. It is only by rejecting the neoliberal narrative and giving voice to the hungry rather than the privileged, de Souza argues, that food pantries can become agents of food justice.

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.

* Argues strongly for overlooked approach to development by showing how the poor use money in ways that confound stereotypical notions of aid and handouts * Team authored by foremost scholars in the development field Amid all the complicated economic theories about the causes and solutions to poverty, one idea is so basic it seems radical: just give money to the poor. Despite its skeptics, researchers have found again and again that cash transfers given to significant portions of the population transform the lives of recipients. Countries from Mexico to South Africa to Indonesia are giving money directly to the poor and discovering that they use it wisely “ to send their children to school, to start a business and to feed their families. Directly challenging an aid industry that thrives on complexity and mystification, with highly paid consultants designing ever more complicated projects, Just Give Money to the Pooroffers the elegant southern alternative “ bypass governments and NGOs and let the poor decide how to use their money. Stressing that cash transfers are not charity or a safety net, the authors draw an outline of effective practices that work precisely because they are regular, guaranteed and fair. This book, the first to report on this quiet revolution in an accessible way, is essential reading for policymakers, students of international development and anyone yearning for an alternative to traditional poverty-alleviation methods.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, is one of the most controversial forms of social welfare in the United States. Although it’s commonly believed that such federal programs have been cut back since the 1980s, Maggie Dickinson charts the dramatic expansion and reformulation of the food safety net in the twenty-first century. Today, receiving SNAP benefits is often tied to work requirements, which essentially subsidizes low-wage jobs. Excluded populations—such as the unemployed, informally employed workers, and undocumented immigrants—must rely on charity to survive. Feeding the Crisis tells the story of eight families as they navigate the terrain of an expanding network of food assistance programs in which care and abandonment work hand in hand to regulate people on the social and economic margins. Amid calls at the federal level to expand work requirements for food assistance, Dickinson shows us how such ideas are bad policy that fail to adequately address hunger in America. Feeding the Crisis brings the voices of food-insecure families into national debates about welfare policy, offering fresh insights into how we can establish a right to food in the United States.

Examines John Wesley's radical commitment to the poor called "evangelical economics."

The inspirational story of how Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus invented microcredit, founded the Grameen Bank, and transformed the fortunes of millions of poor people around the world. Muhammad Yunus was a professor of economics in Bangladesh, who realized that the most impoverished members of his community were systematically neglected by the banking system -- no one would loan them any money. Yunus conceived of a new form of banking -- microcredit -- that would offer very small loans to the poorest people without collateral, and teach them how to manage and use their loans to create successful small businesses. He founded Grameen Bank based on the belief that credit is a basic human right, not the privilege of a fortunate few, and it now provides $24 billion of micro-loans to more than nine million families. Ninety-seven percent of its clients are women, and repayment rates are over 90 percent. Outside of Bangladesh, micro-lending programs inspired by Grameen have blossomed, and serve hundreds of millions of people around the world. The definitive history of micro-credit direct from the man that conceived of it, Banker to the Poor is the moving story of someone who dreamed of changing the world -- and did.

This book examines the political and economic dimensions of food security in Bangladesh and assesses the role of the state in meeting the challenges of food security. The key concern, which is at the heart of this study, is to explore how Bangladesh responds, when its people go hungry. There are no detailed empirical studies that examine the Bangladesh’s role by providing an historical cum political analysis; however conventional approaches are primarily concerned with a partial diagnosis of the economic or nutritional problems of food security. The book then provides a detailed picture of the missing dimensions of state that include the strength of institutions, the scope of state functions, and other important attributes. In doing so, it uses the concept of neo-patrimonialism to explore the political system of Bangladesh. This book explicates the various impediments to food security, ranging from the process of policy formulation to their implementation mechanisms. It unpacks the structural weaknesses of the Bangladesh's institutional capacity in promoting food security, and, in the process, argues that the root cause of food insecurity is deeply embedded in the nature of the government itself, and the political institutions that link the state and society.

Food insecurity rates, which skyrocketed with the Great Recession, have yet to fall to pre-recession levels. Food pantries are stretched thin, and states are imposing new restrictions on programs like SNAP that are preventing people from getting crucial government assistance. At the same time, we see an increase in obesity that results from lack of access to healthy foods. The poor face a daily choice between paying bills and paying for food.