Ill Fares the Land

TNI
July 2005

  Cover Ill Fares the Land 2

Ill Fares the Land
Essays on Food, Hunger and Power
Susan George
Penguin Books, revised and expanded version 1990
ISBN 0 14 012790 9

Contents

  1. Famines, Food Systems and Solutions
    • Overcoming Hunger: strengthen the weak, weaken the strong
    • Dangerous Embrace: culture, economics, politics and food systems
    • Food, Famine and Service Delivery in Times of Emergency
    • Food Strategies for Tomorrow
  2. Science and Technology
    • Caveat emptor: the "transfer" of technology
    • Biobusiness: life for sale
  3. Research, Ideology abd Culture
    • Decolonizing Research
    • The SNOB Theory of Underdevelopment
    • The Knowledge of Hunger
    • Utopia, the University and the Third World: an imaginary cooperation programme
    • Ordering the World: from ICIDI to ICIHI
  4. Human Rights
    • The Right to Food and the Politics of Hunger

Cover Ill Fares the Land

Ill Fares the Land
Essays on Food, Hunger, and Power
Susan George
Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, 1984
ISBN: 0 89758 039 7

The essays collected in this volume expand on one of the major themes of Susan George's work: the role of power in perpetuating hunger.

The causes of poverty and hunger are not to be found primarily among the poor and the hungry but rather in their relationships with the powerful - locally, nationally and internationally. Just as poverty lies behind hunger, so injustice and inequality - within and between nations - lie behind poverty. These twelve essays expand that analysis: some deal directtly with food systems, hunger or famine; others ask who determines our assumptions and knowledge about poverty and hunger. All are concerned with the means by which some groups gain ascendancy over others.

Whether she deals with biotechnology or the "transfer" of technology, with development research or the ideal university, Susan George demonstrates with characteristic commitment and conviction that the rich and powerful who control the world food system control technology and ideology, scholarship and culture as well. This dangerous hegemony is absolutely central to the horrors of hunger.

Susan George's clear and compelling analysis again demonstrates why she has become one of the world's most forceful and esteemed critics of development models that generate the very hunger they claim to be alieviating

Frances Moore Lapré


No author better expresses that sense of indignation that we should all feel, at the manner in which the industrialized countries, the international agencies, the multinational corporations and the elites have plundered the resources of the peasantry of the poor in the non-industrialized countries. This book should be required reading for all scholars of development, and politicians both in the north and south

Dr. Michael Latham, Cornell University


Susan George, in her most important book to date, analyzes the disturbing reality of deepening world poverty

Laurence R. Simon, Oxfam America


In "Ill Fares the Land", Susan George strips away the illusion that there is anything natural about hunger in the 20th century. Her engaging, eloquent and angry prose exposes the links between the social and economic system we've created and the hunger [it] creates

Jack Clark, World Hunger Year