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. * Nature * 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. -- George Soros Hunger, [ Rieff] writes, is a political problem, and fighting it means rejecting the fashionable consensus that only the private sector can act efficiently. * New Yorker * 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. * Publishing Weekly -- starred review * 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 -- John Gray * New Statesman *
