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Library Journal Review

Grigg's well-researched analysis of the world food problem does not offer any easy solutions to the problems of hunger. What the author does, very effectively, is to show what has happened in the past 30 years and to infer what lessons might be learned that could be of help in the future. He discusses the growth of both food output and arable land in general and in the context of the specific conditions (population pressure, economic conditions, etc.) in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A short history of world hunger and chapters on population, poverty, and the contributions of trade and food aid round out this valuable resource. Recommended for academic and large public libraries. Ken Phifer, Montgomery Cty. Dept. of Public Libs, Rockville, Md. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

The purpose of this book by Grigg (geography, University of Sheffield, UK), is ``to show what has happened in the immediate past'' with respect to the basic problems of food, population, poverty, and hunger. It is an exercise in macroanalysis, based on extensive but often conflicting data. The broad factual conclusion that emerges from this analysis is that ``although food production has grown more rapidly than population in the world as a whole and in all the major regions except Africa, in many individual countries food production per caput has fallen in the last 20 years.'' There are separate chapters on food problems and agricultural development in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The chapter ``Trade and Aid'' provides detailed information regarding food trade and briefer and more tentative comments on food aid. A less statistically oriented book on this topic is Robert L. Paarlberg's Food Trade and Foreign Policy (see below). Unfortunately, because the human dimensions of the world food problem are missing and because the data are presented in such overwhelming detail (there are 88 tables and 35 figures), this important book will probably have a limited circulation, but it is a solid contribution to the literature and should be in all college and university libraries.-N.D. Palmer, emeritus, University of Pennsylvania