Famine and Hunger

Compassion Fatigue : How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death by Susan D. Moeller. 

In her impassioned new book, Compassion Fatigue, Susan Moeller warns that the American media threaten our ability to understand the world around us. Why do the media cover the world in the way that they do? Are they simply following the marketplace demand for tabloid-style international news? Or are they creating an audience that has seen too much - or too little - to care? Through a series of studies of the "four horsemen of the Apocalypse" - disease, famine, war and death - Moeller investigate how newspapers, newsmagazines and television have covered international crises over the last two decades, identifying the ruts into which the media have fallen - and revealing why.

The Politics of Hunger

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Now here's a statistic you might have missed. The total wealth of the world's three richest individuals is greater than the combined gross domestic product (1) of the 48 poorest countries - a quarter of all the world's states.

Everybody knows inequality has increased over the last 20 years of unfettered ultra-liberalism. But who could have imagined the gap had widened so far? In 1960 the income of the 20 % of the world's population living in the richest countries was 30 times greater than that of the 20 % in the poorest countries. Now we learn that in 1995 it was 82 times greater (2). In over 70 countries, per capita income is lower today than it was 20 years ago. Almost three billion people - half the world's population - live on less than two dollars a day.

National Center for Policy Analysis

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Hunger and Famine

Excerpt:

Questions of food supply and hunger are intertwined with a number of other environmental matters, including population, pesticides, biotechnology, and soil erosion. The human dimensions of food issues -- starvation, hunger, undernourishment -- makes them especially compelling, but their political and economic dimensions are often complex

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