The Atlas of World Hunger (review)

Thomas Bassett and Alex Winter-Nelson document the geography of hunger in a volume that provides a new tool for scholars and policymakers and a clear, vivid, accessible account of global poverty and hunger for students and an enquiring general public. Bassett and Winter-Nelson emphasize that hunger problems are "rooted and experienced" at multiple levels, that poverty and lack of entitlements cause hunger, and that "these realities are ultimately rooted in policies and political economies that fail to protect the poor from exacerbating conditions and events that push people deeper into poverty, heighten their vulnerability, and produce hunger"(71).

After demonstrating that measures of hunger through food availability are inadequate because they fail to consider distribution of food within a nation, and measures of prevalence of undernutrition (POU) do not capture the consequences of seasonal hunger or unequal distribution of food within a household, they propose a new scale, the Hunger Vulnerability Index. This index combines food availability, $2.00/day poverty, and growth failure for children under five in order to capture the individual, household, and national dimensions of the problem of hunger. Using the Hunger Vulnerability Index, the book investigates the sources of hunger, considering the role of resources, technology, institutions, power relations, and forms of distribution at the national and international levels, and the incidence of poverty, the distribution of entitlements, and the role of exacerbating factors at the household level, all of which lead to malnutrition for individuals. The result is maps, tables, and graphs demonstrating that population growth, changes in the resource base, and environmental disaster are not the causes of hunger. Instead, the authors find strong correlations between hunger vulnerability and health care, literacy, technology, and gender equality.

Africa's extreme vulnerability to hunger, and the reasons for it, are vividly portrayed in the volume's eighty-two maps, its informative tables and graphs, and the text, which is lucid and nuanced. Bassett's deep knowledge of African political ecology, and Winter-Nelson's work on African agricultural economics are evident in the analysis, the illustrations, and clear, engaging explanations of such topics as the origins of African debt, the effect of U.S. agricultural subsidies on West African cotton farmers, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and why supporting the purchasing power of the poor is a more effective intervention than food price controls. Readers are asked to draw connections among the book's key map, of the hunger vulnerability index, the map of European colonies in 1914, and the map of primary products as a share of merchandise exports.

Observing that "all maps reflect the objectives of their makers"(7), they draw attention to the discursive power of maps, contrasting maps of the number of undernourished people with maps of the percentage of undernourished people, and showing the difference between mapping food supply as a percentage of daily need at 2100 calories and at 2300 calories. Chapters on growth failure in Uruguay and hunger in the United States demonstrate that national averages mask regional differences, especially between rural and urban areas and within urban areas.

Policymakers ought to read this book, faculty who teach courses on development in Africa will want it on their shelves for reference, and although $45 might be a barrier for course adoption, it would be wonderful for teaching.