We see famine and look for the likely causes: poor food distribution, unstable regimes, caprices of weather. A technical problem, we tell ourselves, one that modern social and natural science will someday resolve. Jenny Edkins responds to the contrary: famine in the contemporary world is not the...

After over thirty years experience with food aid, there is consensus only on its use as a means of mitigating acute distress; except with regard to disaster relief of that kind, opinions are divided on the rationale of food aid deliveries from industrial countries with a food surplus to Third...