The preeminent thinker about food and hunger, Amartya Sen, learned about famine from direct experience. In his work, notably in Poverty and Famines, he argues that democracy and a free press can ward off famine.

Test this hypothesis in his native India, the world's largest democracy, and the results aren't terribly encouraging. As he notes, India has worse malnutrition rates than many countries in which democracy is observed only in the breech. But Sen's encouraged by a new Right to Food Act in India. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 5 comments

Posted on 27 August, 2009 - 08:36

An IFPRI report, released in October 2008, has this wee accompanying widget. Drag the flag to find out the hunger index in your country. As with all these indices, it's important to remember that it's a national average - countries with low averages might still have pockets of high hunger, particularly if the country's wealth is unequally shared.

Teasing this apart is an important InfoChange article from India, which not only provides nuance about regions within the country, but also the increasing hunger rates since India adopted its free market policies. So, go figure. Free market policies increased death rates in Russia, and it's causing hunger in India. Turns out that the free market isn't quite as liberating as it pretends. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 1 comment

Posted on 15 January, 2009 - 02:42

The Indian government is pissing about on climate change, seeming somehow to think that because it wasn't responsible for it, that it will remain unaffected. The extent to which the Indian Government has got this very wrong is something to which the Indian press is starting, slowly, to wake up, as this article on the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers shows. The consequences of this for food production in Asia are profound, as Lester Brown notes here. With most ... read more »

Raj's blog | 2 comments

Posted on 21 November, 2008 - 20:46

Goodness. Seems like every post today has an imperative title, and a reference to innocent causalties in needless wars. This post is something that came up a few weeks back at my Cody's reading in Berkeley.

One of the questions was about Binayak Sen, and while Preeti Shekar from ASATA gave a fine answer about the situation, we were both swimming a little on the details.

The short version of the story is this. The government of Chhattisgarh, a state in India, is fighting a war against Naxalites, the Mao-inspired rural agitators, whose bretheren have recently succeeded in overthrowing the monarchy in Nepal. Land reform is never far from the surface of trouble in rural areas, and this is one such case. ... read more »

Raj's blog | login to post comments

Posted on 31 May, 2008 - 04:40

Just when you thought it couldn't get any more apocalyptic, the food crisis looks like it's getting a helping hand from another horseman: pestilence. ... read more »

Raj's blog | login to post comments

Posted on 21 April, 2008 - 03:53

Image:AboutColonBlank

A reporter at Bloomberg dropped a line with this story about diet pills in India. What with Indians ballooning (as we all are) there's something of a demand for weight-loss remedies.

The remedies that make sense (eat less, be a little more physically active, don't eat processed food, enjoy fresh food more) aren't terribly popular. Generating far more interest are the solutions that let you carry on eating unhealthily, but where you don't have to bother trying too hard. The chemical companies have been lining up to provide something like this, a magic regulator of free will that can help take the edge off our food cravings.

Through the cunning use of cannabis, specifically the discovery of how to switch off that part of the brain that makes you crave Mars bars when you're high, the drug giant Sanofi-Aventis has hit on a billion dollar weight-loss drug: Acompli. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 4 comments

Posted on 5 April, 2008 - 09:58

Photo Credit: Debt Slayer

This is some interesting populist politics. The Indian government has just announced that it will be cancelling all farmer debt by the beginning of next year, at a cost of $15bn. Predictably, this spike in rural funding comes before an election year, and 70% of Indians live in rural areas. Also, the government has pledged to keep food prices under control because, well, many Indians are having a hard time affording it.

So what to think of this? ... read more »

Raj's blog | 1 comment

Posted on 29 February, 2008 - 16:29

It's been a while since we had a post mentioning bird flu, but in the past couple of days, folk've written in with avian influenza news. So it seems appropriate to acknowledge, first, that bird flu is alive and killing people - over 100 in Indonesia (out of 124 cases - those aren't good odds). But it's also spreading dangerously through India, in West Bengal. The Times of India quotes Mamata Banerjee even going so far as to say that it's "man-made" and part of a concerted strategy to destroy the rural economy. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 1 comment

Posted on 28 January, 2008 - 18:55

A reader writes from the UK with the following observation about Stuffed and Starved.

There is one issue which is scarcely mentioned in the book or on this web-site, and that is human over-population. This seems to me to be the Achilles heel of the political left.

Let’s remedy the omission, because for people who care about food, population is a serious concern. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 10 comments

Posted on 26 November, 2007 - 17:59

The Ecologist has just run a story that I penned last month, about farmer suicides, drawing the line between those in the UK, those in India and, most recently, those in Australia. ... read more »

Raj's blog | 4 comments

Posted on 9 November, 2007 - 03:04