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This is thought-provoking book, carefully researched, containing much valuable material demonstrating the often complex relationships between nutrition, or lack of it, and development. Yet in one important way I found it a disappointment. While there may well be excess food in some parts of the world, while food aid may be a necessary short-term response to famine and malnutrition, and while the encouragement of local food production is clearly desirable, the contributors to this book in the main either ignore or merely mention in passing what I believe to be the basic problem. There are simply too many people in the world. If some underdeveloped countries with perennial nutrition problems continue to breed at a rate beyond their ability to feed themselves then the best laid schemes of the best intentioned people in more fortunate countries will do little to help them. Population control is something peoples have to take charge of themselves. Unless the will to do so is there, outside help is of no value. Providing food aid can lead to dependency and the continued generosity of the developed western nations is not something which can be relied on to last indefinitely. It would disappear overnight if they themselves suffered a series of poor harvests, not impossible if global warming, the greenhouse effect, actually happens as some predict. Even now repeated appeals for relief show diminishing returns. There is also a sense in which this book has been overtaken by events in Eastern Europe. It is assumed that malnutrition is something which happens only in the Third World but as we all now know some countries which were not officially on the edge of starvation, Rumania for example, may be no better off nutritionally than some underdeveloped nations. The whole problem of undernutrition may be much wider than the contributors to this book realised when it was written. Some of the statistics quoted from some regimes may also be ‘less than reliable. The trouble with central planning is that all too often the planners are also the people who provide the statistics to "prove" that their plan has been successful. A more critical approach to government figures, all government figures, would have been welcome. However the problems discussed in this book remain and it is useful to have them set out in considerable detail as many of the contributors have done. If defining a problem is part way towards its solution then, within the limited geographical range covered, that part has been well done. Solutions, of course, are more difficult but I wonder if in the long term it would not have been better to provide Third World nations with contraceptives, or the means to make them locally, rather than massive food aid or the enormous "loans" now being written off by western banks. JOHN TIMSON | ||||||