Food: Hunger

Saad identifies the causes for global hunger embedded in the current global political and economic system and highlights the key challenges facing low income food deficit countries. She shows how Western countries share the blame for global hunger through their support for subsidies to agricultural production and biofuels, which have created new challenges to food security worldwide. Bne Saad argues that, as world population rises, there needs to be a "second green revolution" to grow more food.

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 suffer from seasonal hunger. 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 and presents an evaluation of several policy interventions.

Hunger is not the result of inadequate resources and technologies; rather, its cause is a lack of political will to ensure that all people have access to the food to which they are entitled; food distributed safely, fairly, and equitably. The authors provide in-depth coverage of the biology of human nutrition, malnutrition and associated health-related factors; political theories of inadequate nutrition and famine; historical-political behaviors that have led to famine in the past; and the current political behaviors that cause hunger and malnutrition to remain a major health problem today.