Reproach of Hunger

In 2000 the world's leaders and experts agreed that the eradication of hunger was the essential task for the new millennium. Yet in the last decade the price of wheat, soya and rice have spiraled, seen by many as the cause of widening poverty gap and political unrest from the Arab Spring to Latin America. This food crisis has condemned the bottom billion of the world's population who live on less than $1 a day to a state of constant hunger.In The Reproach of Hunger leading expert on humanitarian aid and development, David Rieff, goes in search of the causes of this food security crisis, as well as the failures to respond to the disaster. In addition to the failures to address climate change, poor governance and misguided optimism, Rieff cautions against the increased privatization of aid, with such organization as the Gates Foundation spending more that the WHO on food relief. The invention of the celebrity campaigner - from Bono to Jeffrey Sachs - whose business-led solutions have robbed development of its political urgency. The hope that the crisis of food scarcity of food production can be solved by a technological innovation. In response Rieff demands that we rethink the fundamental causes of the world's grotesque inequalities and see the issue as a political challenge we are all failing to confront.

As refugee crises fill the news, David Rieff reminds that hunger is a war not won. Rieff, a veteran thinker on development issues, spent six years researching the nexus of population, food commodification and persistent poverty for this critical analysis. Scathing about the alarmist or over-optimistic pronouncements of development officials, agribusiness multinationals and philanthropic nabobs, he notes that any issue involving billions of humans cannot be neatly engineered. Thoughtful, trenchant and bracingly sceptical., Rejecting equally utopian humanitarianism and neoconservative ideology, Rieff's collection of essays provides a compelling analysis of when military intervention is necessary and when it is doomed to fail., Hunger, [Rieff] writes, is a political problem, and fighting it means rejecting the fashionable consensus that only the private sector can act efficiently., A stinging indictment of modern philanthropy and development theory's capacity to resolve the pressing issues of poverty and hunger. In the wake of so many books rehashing the same arguments about how to help the developing world, readers will be grateful for a different (and impeccably researched) perspective. This is a stellar addition to the canon of development policy literature., Challenges the consensus, showing it for what it is - an ideology that simplifies the causes of extreme poverty and systematically underestimates the difficulties of eradicating it . . .a substantial work of political thought

David Rieff is the son of Susan Sontag and Philip Rieff. He is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of several books, including the acclaimed At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention; A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; and Slaughterhouse Bosnia and the Failure of the West. He lives in New York City.