- Steven Block, Tufts University, US
'This excellent volume offers a compact but wide-ranging survey of recent research on important changes in global food markets. Its 20 chapters accurately capture important areas of scholarly agreement as well as on-going debates among economists studying agriculture and nutrition, with several provocative original contributions from other fields. The book draws particularly on the authors' long experience in Asia, offering widely-applicable insights for scholars and policy analysts seeking to understand the past, present and future of food around the world.'
- William A. Masters, Tufts University, US
The global population is forecasted to reach 9.4 billion by 2050, with much of this increase concentrated in developing regions and cities. Ensuring adequate food and nourishment to this large population is a pressing economic, moral and even security challenge and requires research (and action) from a multi-disciplinary perspective.
This book provides the first such integrated approach to tackling this problem by addressing the multiplicity of challenges posed by rising global population, diet diversification and urbanization in developing countries and climate change.
It examines key topics such as:
- the impact of prosperity on food demand
- the role of international trade in addressing food insecurity
- the challenge posed by greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land degradation
- the implication on labor markets of severe under-nutrition
- viability of small scale farms
- strategies to augment food availability.
The Handbook on Food would be a welcome supplementary text for courses on development economics, particularly those concentrating on agricultural development, climate change and food availability, as well as nutrition.
Contributors include: Anshuman Adheleya, Alok Adheleya, M. Das, D. Dawe, O. Ecker, C.L. Gilbert, D. Goswami, J.E. Gready, D. Headey, K.S. Imai, S. Jha, N. Kaicker, S. Kaur, V.S. Kulkarni, A. Mahal, K. Mathur, K. Otsuka, S. Pfuderer, A. Sarris, C. Sathyamala, J. Schmidhuber, P.V. Srinivasan, L. Sutton, G. Thapa, P. Timmer, J.-F. Trinh Tan, F.N. Tubiello, P. Warr, J. You