Whose Hunger?

Book excerpt: We see famine and look for the likely causes: poor food distribution, unstable regimes, caprices of weather. A technical problem, we tell ourselves, one that modern social and natural science will someday resolve. To the contrary, Jenny Edkins responds in this book: Famine in the contemporary world is not the antithesis of modernity but its symptom. A critical investigation of hunger, famine, and aid practices in international politics, Whose Hunger? shows how the forms and ideas of modernity frame our understanding of famine and, consequently, shape our responses.