famine and starvation Archives

Bookshelf

What tames inequality? Violence and mayhem, says new book

21st July 2017

From Chronicle.com: In his new book, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Stanford University professor Walter Scheidel puts forth the following thesis: that historically, it took four kinds of violent ruptures –mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics– to reduce widespread inequality….

Conflict/Dispossession

The devastating reality of Somalia on the brink of famine

16th May 2017

Vice News reports: Drought has devastated vegetation and water supplies, and hunger is soaring. More than half the country — 6.2 million people — are in need of emergency aid to avoid starvation. And around 1.4 million children will risk acute malnutrition in 2017, according to UNICEF — 50 percent more than what the charity…

Amit Verma/Forbes India

Economy

Famines and Public Distribution System in India

18th April 2016

Debarshi Das writes: The neoliberal State seeks to cut down welfare expenditure, hence it is against PDS. It also relies on the market. Although contemporary advocates of free market are not motivated by extraction of colonial revenue, in terms of policy prescription they do not differ from the advocates of free market of colonial era….

ALTERNATIVES

Video & Report: Yogendra Yadav on the unfolding famine in Bundelkhand and the need for a farmers’ politics

15th January 2016

Having endured three successive droughts, the region of Bundelkhand in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh continues to be on edge. Governments in both the states have failed to do their bit. Here’s a press conference video and interview of Yogendra Yadav, who leads the Swaraj Abhiyan movement, which recently held an extended survey of the region….