Status Updates From Hunger and Public Action (W...

Currently on Chapter 8 - Experience and Lessons

"The possible influence of private trade in alleviating or exacerbating distress during famines is a theme that is not always approached dispassionately. ... Famine victims have sometimes been sacrificed at the altar of economic ideology even when a willingness to rescue them apparently existed."

"The long-term value of creative dissatisfaction should not be underestimated."

Whoops. Chapters were uploaded to the course page separately; didn't realize they were all the same book; started with Chapter 11. Back to Chapter 5 now ...

"The one state in India that has made extensive use of support-led security has also been able to avoid some of the disastrous implications of gender bias that plagues so many parts of the world. The possibility of support-led systems making a contribution to gender equality is something that would deserve further investigation."

Rani (Queen) Gouri Parvathi Bai, ruler of Travancore (1817): "the State should defray the entire cost of the education of its people in order that there might be no backwardness in the spread of enlightenment among them, that by diffusion of education hey might become better subjects and public servants and that the reputation of the State might be advanced thereby." ... Def want to read more about her!

"excess mortality" — what a term

"... as India's experience shows, open journalism and adversarial politics provide much less protection against endemic undernutrition than they do against a dramatic famine. Starvation deaths and extreme deprivation are newsworthy in a way the quiet persistence of regular hunger and non-extreme deprivation are not."

"While the political systems are quite different, this feature of absence of political opposition and free journalism in African politics is a cause of famine vulnerability in Africa as it was in China at the time it had its own disaster."