Enough: Why the World's Poorest starve in an age of plenty

By Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman

(Public Affairs, $27.95 / £16.99 / €20.00 approx.; www.publicaffairsbooks. com)

Paul Keenan

Mid-way through this work by two veteran journalists involved in foreign affairs and agriculture respectively, two sets of photographs serve to neatly sum up the central message of the book.

In one set, an Ethiopian warehouse manager, ''dwarfed by sacks of Ethiopian-grown grain'' and a pair of lentil farmers by the Djibouti-Addis Ababa road are pictured in a moment, the authors stress, that American food trucks drive past bringing ''aid'' to the country.

In the second montage, farmer Tesfahun Belachew is pictured on the banks of the Blue Nile. A recipient of food aid since 2003, he is trapped by laws which state he cannot tap the Nile for his withering crops, so as to protect the rights of farmers in Egypt. Alongside, the authors supply a picture of one such farmer, Samir Hamid, snapped during the Ethiopian Famine of 2003 as Hamid gives his cattle a cooling shower.

Mismanagement

It is Thurow's and Kilman's argument in Enough that, while the world has, for the bones of forty years, had the means and technology to end chronic hunger worldwide, bad policies and political mismanagement have stymied the drive to this end.

Taking its start-point with young scientists at the end of World War Two turning their attention to ''scientific farming'', at a time ''when the obligation to fight hunger outside US borders was just a fledgling concept'', Enough traces a path through the heady days of the Green Revolution, when world hunger at last appeared to be a manageable disaster bound for the pages of history, and across numerous countries where the dream has been driven into the mud by the very parties voicing their unwavering commitment to tackling famine.

Part of that journey takes the authors to Ireland in 1997, where Bono was making his first very public soundings on African debt, and giving voice to the authors' thesis.

''The $200 million that Band Aid and Live Aid had raised, a heroic sum, was dwarfed by Africa's debt repayments. Whatever aid had been coming into Africa had been going right back out in debt repayments to Western banks and financial institutions.''

End journey

It is in Ireland, too, where the authors choose to end their journey, appropriately in the Famine Museum in Strokestown, Co. Roscommon, and by way of the photographs there, show that hunger remains a fatal reality for 25,000 victims every day. And, while one billion people go to bed each night hungry, the authors say that, those in the West with the means but not the will to help them, ''should go to bed ashamed''.