The authors explore ways in which warfare creates hunger. The cases of Angola, Sudan, Tigray, Eritrea, Mozambique and Somalia illuminate the nature of complex emergencies in situations of war. Other chapters focus on the reforms required of the UN's machinery, reassess the role of relief in time of war, and ask how the international community should respond to the new circumstances of post-Cold War international interventions.
Food was a critical front in the Cold War battle for Asia. “Where Communism goes, hunger follows” was the slogan of American nation builders who fanned out into the countryside to divert rivers, remodel villages, and introduce tractors, chemicals, and genes to multiply the crops consumed by millions. This “green revolution” has been credited with averting Malthusian famines, saving billions of lives, and jump-starting Asia’s economic revival. Bono and Bill Gates hail it as a model for revitalizing Africa’s economy. But this tale of science triumphant conceals a half century of political struggle from the Afghan highlands to the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, a campaign to transform rural societies by changing the way people eat and grow food. The ambition to lead Asia into an age of plenty grew alongside development theories that targeted hunger as a root cause of war. Scientific agriculture was an instrument for molding peasants into citizens with modern attitudes, loyalties, and reproductive habits. But food policies were as contested then as they are today. While Kennedy and Johnson envisioned Kansas-style agribusiness guarded by strategic hamlets, Indira Gandhi, Marcos, and Suharto inscribed their own visions of progress onto the land. Out of this campaign, the costliest and most sustained effort for development ever undertaken, emerged the struggles for resources and identity that define the region today. As Obama revives the lost arts of Keynesianism and counter-insurgency, the history of these colossal projects reveals bitter and important lessons for today’s missions to feed a hungry world.
In the First World War the supply of food to civilians became as significant a factor in final victory as success or defeat on the battlefields. Never before had the populations of entire countries lived under siege conditions, yet this extraordinary situation is often overlooked as a decisive factor in the outcome of the conflict. Matthew Richardson, in this highly readable and original comparative study, looks at the food supply situation on the British, German, French, Russian and Italian home fronts, as well as on the battlefields. His broad perspective contrasts with some narrower approaches to the subject, and brings a fresh insight into the course of the war on all the major fronts. He explores the causes of food shortages, as well as the ways in which both combatant and neutral nations attempted to overcome them. He looks at widely differing attitudes towards alcohol during the war, and the social impacts of food shortages, as well as the ways in which armies attempted to victual their troops in the field.
Examines the interconnected events including World War II, India's struggle for independence, and a period of acute scarcity that lead to mass starvation in colonial Bengal.
Drawing on recently released Soviet archival materials, Hunger and War investigates state food supply policy and its impact on Soviet society during World War II. It explores the role of the state in provisioning the urban population, particularly workers, with food; feeding the Red army; the medicalization of hunger; hunger in blockaded Leningrad; and civilian mortality from hunger and malnutrition in other home front industrial regions. New research reported here challenges and complicates many of the narratives and counter-narratives about the war. The authors engage such difficult subjects as starvation mortality, bitterness over privation and inequalities in provisioning, and conflicts among state organizations. At the same time, they recognize the considerable role played by the Soviet state in organizing supplies of food to adequately support the military effort and defense production and in developing policies that promoted social stability amid upheaval. The book makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the Soviet population's experience of World War II as well as to studies of war and famine.
This volume demonstrates how German expansion in the Second World War II led to shortages, of food and other necessities including medicine, for the occupied populations, causing many to die from severe hunger or starvation. While the various chapters look at a range of topics, the main focus is on the experiences of ordinary people under occupation; their everyday life, and how this quickly became dominated by the search for supplies and different strategies to fight scarcity. The book discusses various such strategies for surviving increasingly catastrophic circumstances, ranging from how people dealt with rationing systems, to the use of substitute products and recycling, barter, black-marketeering and smuggling, and even survival prostitution. In addressing examples from Norway to Greece and from France to Russia, this volume offers the first pan-European perspective on the history of shortage, malnutrition and hunger resulting from the war, occupation, and aggressive German exploitation policies.
