Autumn 2012

Feeding the Masses

by C. Peter Timmer

ONE BILLION HUNGRY:
Can We Feed the World?
By Gordon Conway.
Cornell Univ. Press. 439 pp. $24.95

We all want to end hunger. Gordon Conway’s book One Billion Hungry provides the road map. “Think global, eat local,” the mantra of the sustainable agriculture movement, will not cut it. We need serious new policies in well over a hundred countries to meet this goal. Conway, a professor of international development at Imperial College, London (and, before that, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and of the Royal Geographical Society), is perhaps the most knowledgeable and distinguished agroecologist of his generation, and in One Billion Hungry he does not mince words. The fact that for more than a century the international community has not acted decisively to end hunger is the most galling failure of the modern era. There is more than enough food in the world; what’s the problem?

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C. Peter Timmer is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Development Studies, emeritus, at Harvard University, and the author or editor of several books about agriculture and food security, including Getting Prices Right: The Scope and Limits of Agricultural Price Policy (1986).
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