Myths and Root Causes: Hunger, Population, and Development

By Peter Rosset, John Gershman, Shea Cunningham & Marilyn Borchardt, Food First, 17 March 1995

Twenty years ago at the World Food Conference in Rome, Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins met, and a year later founded Food First. Today, two decades after the Rome Conference, it’s time to assess where we stand.

During the past twenty years, the United States and other First World countries have sent massive amounts of food aid to Africa and other parts of the Third World, and spent untold millions on development assistance. Yet over 20% of the Third World’s population is still chronically hungry. In addition to hunger and poverty, many are caught in civil war, forced to migrate, or eke out an existence on marginal land.

Is it hopeless? Are the problems just too great to tackle? Or do practical alternatives exist? We at Food First believe that real and practical alternatives do exist. All too often government policies fail to resolve the problems they are directed at, and in many cases actually make them worse, because of a lack of understanding of root causes. In development policy, as in health care, treatments have been directed at symptoms, not at the underlying diseases. For example we send contraceptives and food aid to people who have been displaced into arid areas unsuitable for farming, when what they need is the redistribution of quality farmland. Or we insist that a Third World country open its economy to imports, when it is precisely those imports that drive local producers out of business, creating hunger and unemployment.

The true root causes of hunger, and the policies that promote it, must be tackled if we are to reduce hunger and poverty. Yet these root causes and exacerbating policies are often obscured by myths that make it difficult for us to see clearly.

MYTH: There is simply not enough food to go around
FACT: Growing more food will not end hunger: people go hungry even in a world of plenty

Food First’s research over the past twenty years has consistently shown that hunger is not caused by an absolute scarcity of food.(1) World production of wheat, corn, rice and other grains is sufficient to give every person on the planet 3,500 calories per dayPmore than enough to keep healthy, without even counting other kinds of foods. Recent World Bank projections show that this is unlikely to change in the next twenty years.(2)

Yet a food crisis undeniably exists. 800 million people currently do not eat enough to live a productive life. If enough food is already produced, why is there hunger? Simply growing more food does not eliminate hunger. Today Brazil is the third largest agricultural exporter in the world. Yet government figures indicate that nearly 32 million people are destitute. In 1990, the richest one percent of Brazilians had a greater percentage of national income than the poorest fifty percent combined. The share earned by the bottom half has declined over the last decade. Land ownershipQa measure of access to land by poor farmersQis highly concentrated, with less than 1% owning 43.7% of the agricultural, and in most cases, most fertile land.(3)

In the U.S., the world’s largest agricultural exporter, an estimated 30 million people go hungry.(4) The hungry are mostly unemployed, or earn wages too low to feed themselves and their families. People go hungry when they lack the opportunities necessary to obtain adequate foodQsuch as land, jobs that pay a living wage, or social programs that insure people have access to food.

MYTH: There’s not enough food because there are too many people
FACT: The root causes of poverty and hunger are the uprooting of peoples from their land and livelihoods

There clearly are severe imbalances in some areas of the world between human population density and the capacity of local economies and environments to provide people with decent livelihoods. However, this does not mean that there are too many people overall.

For example, population densities on the poor soils of the Chiapas Highlands in Mexico are too high for the local farming economy. But the origin of these population densities goes back to when Mexico was a Spanish colony, and indigenous people were forcibly moved to the Highland area.(5) This forced relocation of such a large number of people onto a small area of marginal land is the root cause of their impoverishment. Today this is one of the poorest regions of Mexico, with rampant malnutrition and diseases of poverty like infant diarrhea, cholera and tuberculosis. Yet nearby parts of Chiapas with very fertile soilsQthe Grijalva Valley, the Soconusco Mountains, and the coastal plains of the PacificQhave extremely low population densities. These fertile lands are farmed by wealthy and in many cases, absentee landlords, who grow cotton, beef and sugar for export to the U.S., and corn for Mexico City, while the nearby indigenous people continue to go hungry.(6) This pattern of too many people in fragile areas and too few on nearby fertile soils is repeated worldwide.

It is useful to remind ourselves that the great pre- colonial civilizations in Africa, Asia and the Americas were all based on food production. In every case staple foods were grown on the best lands: generally those with deep, fertile soils, relatively flat, with good access to water for irrigation or with regular rainfall. Areas that were marginal for agriculture, like rainforests in Latin America or desert edges in Africa, were less populated and not farmed intensively.

In Africa, desert margins were inhabited by small groups of nomadic pastoralists, whose patterns of long- distance migration were in tune with natural variations in rainfall and vegetation growth. They lived for millennia in a sustainable, harmonious fashion, despite the marginality of their habitat.

Central and South American rainforests typically were populated by small numbers of indigenous people, who lived sustainably through a combination of hunting and gathering and active tending of rainforest plant species underneath the forest canopy. In no case did pre- colonial civilizations attempt to grow monocultures of annual crops in marginal habitats.

All that changed with colonialism. Food producers were displaced from the best lands onto ever more marginal ones, especially desert edges, steep slopes and rain forests. Despite the achievement of independence, this process has been accelerated in the post-colonial era. Today the wealthy use the best lands in Africa and the Americas to produce cotton, coffee, peanuts, tobacco, bananas, sugar cane, cattle, and fruits and vegetables for exportQprimarily to North America, Europe, and Japan. Meanwhile fragile regions are overcrowded, as the expansion of export farming forced the poor into ever smaller areas. Famines occur in Africa not because droughts are more common today, but rather because food is now being grown in areas where droughts were always common, the areas of irregular rainfall that were traditionally used by nomadic pastoralists.(7)

Occasionally global market forces have led to Ttoo few people’ on marginal land as well. In the Las Lagunas area of Mexico, the policy-driven collapse of corn prices in recent decades has made it necessary for many members of every family to migrate and seek employment elsewhere. The traditional agricultural system, which had been ecologically sustainable for centuries was based on communal labor. When the number of able-bodied workers dropped, the communal system collapsed, leaving increased hunger and ecological devastation in its wake.(8)

MYTH: Population control is the answer to hunger and poverty
FACT: Only raising the living standards of the poor and increasing the social and economic status of women will end hunger and lower fertility rates

The world population has grown by 1.9% per year since 1950, yet grain production has grown by 2.7% per year over the same period.(9) Scarcity of food is not the problem. Declining birth rates mean that the world human population will eventually stabilize itself. However, many remain concerned that growth rates are not dropping fast enough.

In our 1977 classic, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins showed that poverty is the root cause of population growth, and numerous studies since have reaffirmed the basic premise that population growth accelerates with economic destitution, as poor people need more children to get by.(10)

This is true in both rural and urban areas. The only resource a poor farmer has to increase his or her food production is family labor. Without sufficient income it is out of the question to buy fertilizer and machinery, obtain more land, or hire outside labor. The only option left to increase income is to put one’s children to work on the family plotQthus children have value as family labor.

Shanty towns that encircle major Third World cities are filled with people driven out of the countryside by the expansion of export agriculture. Urban slums have few employment opportunities for adults. Children and young adults are often the main breadwinnersQshining shoes, selling newspapers, and prostituting themselves. At the same time, the inadequacy of old age social security programs encourages parents to have more children to care for them in their old age.

Numerous studies have shown that improving living standards and employment opportunities for women inevitably eases hunger and brings down fertility rates much more effectively than birth control programs.(11) As people move up in social class, children are no longer an economic help, and, in fact, cost more money. For the middle class, a child means medical bills, clothes, a larger house, child care, books and tuition. And as women are better educated and have more job opportunities, children mean more time at home, leading to foregone income.

Despite this scientific evidence we are experiencing a resurgence of Malthusian demands that birth control programs be greatly expanded. Proponents of this viewpoint make two claims: socioeconomic changes necessary to bring birth rates down will be too slow and too late, and that there is a large unmet demand for birth control among Third World women.(12) They conclude that it would be much simpler to meet the demand that already exists for smaller families by promoting birth control, rather than attempt the impossible, namely social change.

The claim that birth rates can be reduced solely by increasing access to contraceptives is based on faulty analyses, which incorrectly deduces a desire for fewer children from an expressed desire for better contraceptive methods. Recent studies confirm that people are able to plan their families with or without modern contraceptive methods, as they have done for thousands of years.(13) Family size remains far more influenced by economic factors and the status of women.

Food First supports quality reproductive health services as a basic human right, just as we support access to all kinds of quality health care and other ingredients for a decent life. But it is a false hope to think that contraception will reduce population growth significantly.

MYTH: Overpopulation in Third World countries is degrading the environment and provoking massive migration
FACT: Expansion of export agriculture is the root cause of much environmental destruction and migration in the Third World

Overpopulation in Third World countries is commonly thought to be responsible for substantial destruction of the environment, including deforestation and destruction of the rainforest, desertification, and soil erosion. While it is indeed true that the poor in the Third World are forced to destroy their environment in a desperate battle for survival, the root cause is not over- population. Rather, once the growth of export agriculture forces the poor to farm fragile lands, environmental problems are the inevitable result.

On the desert edges in Africa, plowing the soil each season degrades these fragile areas and expands deserts. Thus peasants are blamed for desertification, when in fact they have been forced into a position where they have no choice.

Throughout Central America many small farmers have been driven from fertile Pacific lowlands up steep mountain slopes, like El Salvador, where they try to farm thin, rocky soils that rapidly erode away. Others are driven into rainforests, like the Atlantic Coasts of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, where soils lose all fertility within two or three seasons after the trees are cut. Thus peasants are blamed for soil degradation and rainforest destruction, even as they become poorer and more desperate by the day. (14)

Meanwhile wealthy local elites and foreign companies who export from the best land, and displaced the poor in the first place, are rapidly destroying their own land. Abuse of pesticides, fertilizers, heavy machinery and large scale monocultures has led to massive pesticide poisoning, ruined fisheries, dust storms, and lost soil fertility. As yields drop and the debt crisis forces poor countries to export ever larger quantities to meet debt repayment obligations, export farming expands out from the best soils and pushes peasants off somewhat marginal lands onto ever more infertile ones.(15)

These same forces also lead to mass migration and provoke conflict. When people cannot make a decent living, enough to feed themselves and their families, they have no choice but to leave, moving to the slums of burgeoning cities like Mexico City, Lagos, or Bangkok. Those who go to the city rarely find a job that pays a living wage, as industry is seldom able to absorb more than a fraction of the labor displaced from the countryside. Many people go into the informal economy or a life of crime, while others migrate to other countries, often in the North. This has become an enormous global political issue, with both rich and poor nations alike now hosting large numbers of economic refugees from neighboring countries. This has caused a backlash and in some cases violence, against new arrivals.

MYTH: The key to development for the Third World lies in a renewed emphasis on exports and free-trade
FACT: Free-trade policies and export agriculture have increased poverty throughout the Third World

Policies that integrate agriculture into the world economy without concern for the social, economic, and political effects on the poor, have been the driving force behind hunger, poverty, population growth, and much environmental destruction. Two current policies stand out for their negative impacts, both forced upon Third World countries by the United States and other First World countries, with the complicity of local governing elites. These are the opening of economies to imports from the North, and the promotion of export- led growth. Both are old policies that received new impetus from the export of Reaganomics in the 1980s, or what is called structural adjustment in the Third World.(16)

Structural adjustment policies mandated by the World Bank, the IMF, and U.S. AID, have required lowering or elimination of tariff barriers, import quotas and production subsidies, all in the name of free-trade. That has meant an influx of imported grains and other foodstuffs at low prices. This, combined with food donations, has undercut the ability of local farmers to compete and survive throughout the Third World.

For example, in Burkina Faso imported wheat goes for $60 per ton because of subsidies by exporting countries, about a third lower than the cost to produce local grains, millet and sorghum.(17) In Costa Rica, corn prices fell dramatically in the 1980s due to U.S. food aid and structural adjustment mandated cuts in support prices. The number of Costa Rican peasants who grow corn has dropped by as much as 60%, accompanied by unprecedented social strife.(18) This pattern has been repeated in country after country. In short, a poor farmer on the worst soils in his or her country, must try to compete with grains produced on the best farm land in the world, the U.S. corn belt, and not only that, but face U.S. subsidies that make the cost of this food cheaper than it costs to produce it.

Export promotion in Third World countries has had similar effects. For example, during the 80s U.S. AID money was withdrawn from programs promoting basic needs and redirected toward new export crops in 33 countries. These non-traditional exportsQmostly fresh fruits and vegetablesQrequired large scale production, transport, and marketing, virtually excluding the poor from any benefits. In Central America this amounted to a massive transfer of resources from programs favoring small farmers to ones favoring large exporters and foreign companies.(19)

Between the effects of free trade and export promotion, the rural poor in the Third World suffered setbacks in the 80s that generally returned their standard of living to pre-1970 and in some cases pre-1960 levels. Together with the end of the Cold War, this has led to a predictable increase in conflicts and migration to Northern countries. Mexico is a good case in point, having implemented a multitude of IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs. Just six years ago the minimum wage would buy a family 94% of the basic necessities. Today it buys only 20%.(20) Between 1980 and 1992 the support price that Mexican farmers received for their corn dropped by 20%, while the amount of credit available for growing corn fell by 77%.(21) Massive unrest in Mexico and migration to the United States are a result of this deepening poverty.

After independence in 1980, Zimbabwe introduced price supports for corn and invested heavily in extension, marketing, credit services for small farmers, and access to seeds and other supplies. Within five years Zimbabwe was producing an exportable surplus, while the percent of peasants selling corn rose from 10% to 60%. Nonetheless, the forced opening of its market to imports proved to be costly for Zimbabwe, according to Oxfam UK:

By the mid-1980s, the country had increased self- sufficiency to the point where it had built up a stockpile of maize from which it was able to export to food-deficit neighbors. As the U.S.-European Tfarm war’ intensified, however, maize imports flooded into local markets at around half the levels paid to Zimbabwean producers. By driving down prices, these imports left Zimbabwe’s Grain Marketing Board with a huge financial deficit and a maize stockpile which, under World Bank advice, was sold at a loss. The result: Zimbabwe was left without a strategic food reserve when the 1992 drought struck, forcing the government to turn to costly commercial imports food to avert a food security crisis. There is little doubt that, if freed from competition from subsidized maize imports, Zimbabwe could again become a major regional exporter... However, Zimbabwe will not fulfill its agricultural potential in the face of continued dumping by Europe and the USA.(22)

While increasing globalization of the world economy in the past half century has left mostly casualties in its wake, there have been exceptions. The post-World War II economic successes of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan offer important insights. At the end of World War II, each was as destitute as any Third World country is today. The key policies that they needed to recover, centered around making the peasantry the engine of economic development, through expensive food policies that allowed farmers to receive high prices for their produce. This was achieved by trade barriers against cheap subsidized imports of agricultural products, combined with agrarian reform under which nobody could possess more than three hectares of farmland. Together these measures created a peasantry with the purchasing power to live well,and as consumers, to sup port the fledgling domestic industries that later became international powerhouses.(23)

Though we might not wish to repeat other aspects of this TAsian Model,’(24) we can take from it the lesson that investment in the peasantry can lead to Tbubble-up’ economics to benefit the entire society, rather than the failed Western concept of trickle-down economics. Just as important, East Asia shows the merits of first focusing on developing a strong domestic economy before opening to the world economy.

MYTH: Food should be obtained wherever it’s cheapest, even if that means subsidized imports
FACT: Third World governments must protect local food production and prioritize the creation of jobs in rural areas

The issue of protection for farm prices in developing countries must be reexamined. Even if it is cheaper, both for a country and its consumers, to allow subsidized North America and European wheat and corn to flow into an area, do such savings outweigh the costs to society of the millions of people displaced from agriculture by such Tdumping’ practices?(25) The lesson of East Asian agricultural protectionism could be applied to today’s Third World countries as a way to move them out of poverty. Tariff barriers cost a government nothing, yet maintain fair prices for local farmers.

We also need to recognize that the penetration of capitalist business relations into all but the remotest areas of the world means that the rural poor now make as much income, or more, on off farm labor than they do on farming. Typically a peasant’s plot is inadequate to support a family, making it necessary to sells one’s labor as a part-time plantation worker, often at well below minimum wage.

Development policies need to be geared toward creating more and better rural employment opportunities. Processed farm products, for example, obtain much higher prices than do raw agricultural commodities. Even rudimentary communally-owned processing facilities can greatly increase farmers’ profits, as well as provide needed off-farm employment.(26)

MYTH: Agrarian reform is passe; where it’s been tried it hasn’t worked
FACT: Real agrarian reform is a necessary, but not sufficient, step toward eliminating rural poverty and hunger

We have to reopen the issue of agrarian reform, which was in vogue for much of the post-World War II period, but became taboo in the 80s. We cannot continue to accept land tenure systems that allocate the vast majority of good land to a few wealthy owners and relegate the vast majority of the rural population to miserably small parcels of the worst possible farmland. Not only is this an issue of social justice, but redistribution can lead to increases in food production at lower cost, as labor-intensive peasant multiple cropping systems produce higher yields with fewer inputs than conventional systems on the same land.(27)

For peasants farming desert edges in Africa and facing drought-induced famines, birth control programs will not improve the situation. They will still face famine because of uneven rainfall patterns. By the same token food aid can only help temporarily, and in fact, it can even drive people off the land as donated food drives local prices below the cost of production for local farmers. Only agrarian reform that gives the poor access to land with regular rainfall or irrigation can make a difference. That is the bottom line for Africa, and for everywhere else where the poor have been forced onto impossibly marginal lands.

Even in Zimbabwe, success must be balanced against the failure to proceed with redistribution. Oxfam UK reports that:

One million smallholder communal farms are [still] restricted to half of the total area suitable for agricultural production. The other half is occupied by 4,500 commercial farmers, most of whom are white. Moreover, the commercial farms are almost all located in areas with prime land and assured rainfall, while communal farms operate mainly in drought-prone areas with poor soils. The grossly unequal distribution of land explains why, despite impressive gains in food production since the early 1980s, almost half a million rural families remain vulnerable to malnutrition.(28)

We must learn from the mistakes of the past. The much heralded Latin American agrarian reforms of the post- World War II period, which moved peasants to remote areas to farm small plots of infertile land, cut them off from markets and supportservices. It was inevitable that such efforts would fail to reduce poverty. True agrarian reform must redistribute quality land. But land alone does not make a successful farmer. Global market participation is now unavoidable in most of the Third World. To succeed, peasants must have credit, education, extension services, and new marketing channels that give them a fair chance to compete.(29)

Sustainable Rural Livelihoods

The benefit of an analysis that focuses on root causes is that we see how the causes ofQand therefore the solutions toQpoverty, hunger, rapid population growth, migration, and environmental destruction are inter- related. It has been collapse of rural livelihoods over centuries, accentuated in the 1980s and 90s, that produced this nexus of problems. Thus the key task at hand is to create real and sustainable livelihoods in rural areas. Three elements are necessary for a viable alternative policy. These are:

• managed integration into the world economy on terms that give the poor a fair chance
• agrarian reform
• policies that promote fair prices and decent employment

Change is Possible

China has only half as much cropped land as India, yet Indians suffer widespread and severe hunger while the Chinese do not. Sri Lanka has only half the farmland per person of Bangladesh, yet when effective government policies kept food affordable, Sri Lankans were considerably better fed than Bangladeshis. Costa Rica, with less than half of Honduras’ cropped acres per person, boasts a life expectancyQone indicator of nutritionQfourteen years longer... And Cuba, which led the Third World in life expectancy, low infant mortality rates, and good nutrition [until the recent collapse of relations with the ex-socialist bloc], has a population density similar to Mexico’s, where hunger is rampant.(30)

What all of these cases have in common is that the better-off countries have instituted land reform and other policies aimed at improving rural livelihoods. Zimbabwe also supported this thrust, as progressive government policies made it possible to dramatically increase food production. Nevertheless, steps still remain to be taken toward greater agrarian reform and protection for Zimbabwean maize producers.

The state of Kerala in India offers one final lesson. Average incomes make it historically one of the poorest states in India, yet in 1991 literacy was 39% higher, life expectancy nine years longer, and infant mortality and birth rates were 80% and 33% lower, respectively, than the rest of India. Land reform, education for women and health care for all contributed to this success. Grassroots organizations including strong peasants’, workers’ and women’s movements helped to keep the progressive governments that implemented these policies in power.(31)

Because the basis of hunger is powerlessness, real change can only be achieved by supporting grassroots movements for self-determination, rather than continuing to prop up local elites and subsidize transnational corporations. Thus our conclusion at Food First: it is not a scarcity of food, but rather a scarcity of real democracy, that keeps people hungry. The kind of changes we propose can only be implemented following a redistribution of decision-making power. The poor majority must have a say in determining how productive resources are used. There must be a redistribution of the economic, social, and political resources which make the exercise of such power possible. This is the essence of democracyQparticipation in the decisions which affect our lives. The corollary is that strong grassroots movements can make a difference, when they, instead of ruling elites, receive our support.

NOTES

1. Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins (1977), Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, Ballantine Books, 619 pp.; Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins (1986), World Hunger: Twelve Myths, Grove Press, 208 pp.

2. International Economics Department. 1993. The World Food Outlook. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 256 pp.

3. John Gershman, Brazil: Looking Beyond Soccer, Food First News & Views 16(54):1,3, Summer/ Fall 1994.

4. John Gershman, The Faces of Hunger in America, Food First News & Views 16(53):13, Spring 1994.

5. George Collier with Elizabeth Quaratiello (1994), Basta! Land & the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, Food First Books, 165 pp.

6. ibid.; Peter Rosset with Shea Cunningham, Understanding Chiapas, Food First Action Alert, Spring 1994, 6 pp.

7. Eric Wolf (1982), Europe and the People Without History, University of California Press.

8. Ral Garca Barrios and Luis Garca Barrios, The remnants of community: migration, corn supply and social transformation in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Transformation of Rural Mexico, No. 2:99-118, 1994.

9. International Economic Department, op. cit.

10. William Murdoch (1980), The Poverty of Nations: the Political Economy of Hunger and Population, Johns Hopkins, 382 pp; Frances Moore Lapp and Rachel Schurman (1990), Taking Population Seriously, Food First Books, 87 pp; Frederick Buttel and Laura Raynolds Population Growth, Agrarian Structure, Food Production, and Food Distribution in the Third World pp 325-361 in, David Pimentel and Carl Hall (eds), Food and Natural Resources, Academic Press, 1989.

11. ibid.

12. Bryant Robey, Shea Rutstein and Leo Morris, The Fertility Decline in Developing Countries, Scientific American 269(6):60-66, December 1993.

13. Lant H. Pritchett, Desired Fertility and the Impact of Population Policies, Population and Development Review 20(1):1-55, 1994.

14. John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto (forthcoming in 995), 1Breakfast of Biodiversity: the Truth About Rain Forest Destruction, 1Food First Books; Piers Blaikie (1985), The Political Economy of Soil 1Erosion in Developing Countries, Longman, 188 pp.

15. Lappe and Collins, World Hunger, op. cit.; Peter Goering, Helena Norberg-Hodge and John Page (1993), From the Ground Up: Rethinking Industrial Agriculture, Zed Books, 120 pp.

16. Walden Bello et al. (1994), Dark Victory: the United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty, Food First Books, 144 pp.

17. Oxfam UK (1993), Africa: Make or Break, Oxfam UK, 38 pp.

18. Alicia Korten, A Bitter Pill: Structural Adjustment in Costa Rica, Food First Development Report No. 7, January 1995.

19. ibid., Peter Rosset, Sustainability, Economies of Scale and Social Instability: Achilles Heel of Non- traditional Export Agriculture? Agriculture & Human Values 8(4):30-37, 1991; Michael Conroy, Douglas Murray and Peter Rosset (forthcoming), The Fruits of Crisis: Gambling on Nontraditional Export Agriculture in Central America, Food First Books.

20. IPS. Mxico: Suba de precios triplico la de salarios en ultimo sexenio. InterPress Service wire report, November 6, 1994.

21. Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara (ed), Corn and the Crisis of the 1980s: Economic Restructuring and Rural Subsistence in Mexico. Special Issue, Transformation of Rural Mexico, No. 2, 172 pp, 1994.

22. Oxfam UK, op. cit.

23. Jeffrey Sachs, Trade and Exchange Rate Policies in Growth-oriented Adjustment Programs, pp 291-325 in Vittorio Corbo et al. (1987), Growth-Oriented Adjustment Programs, Proceedings of a Symposium held in Washington, DC, IMF and World Bank.

24. Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld (1992), Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis, Food First Books, 428 pp.

25. Collier and Quaratiello, op. cit.

26. Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet, Investment Strategies to Combat Rural Poverty: a Proposal for Latin America, World Development 17(8):1203-1221, 1989.

27. Miguel Altieri and Susanna Hecht (1990), Agroecology and Small Farm Development, CRC Press, 262 pp.

28. Oxfam UK, op. cit.

29. Alain de Janvry (1981), The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America, Johns Hopkins, 311 pp; Rehman Sobhan (1993), Agrarian Reform and Social Transformation: Preconditions for Development, Zed Press, 146 pp.

30. Lappe and Schurman, op. cit.

31. Richard W. Franke and Barbara H. Chasin (1994), Kerala: Radical Reform as Development in an Indian State, 2nd Edition, Food First Books.