Needless Hunger: Voices from a Bangladesh Village Book

This is a very basic book. It is short and largely to the point.

Where often an older book continues to be useful this book is less useful as it speaks specifically to the environment at the time in Bangladesh and development, rather than a more general theoretical approach. It also has been superseded by their excellent and more detailed later book Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village.

Their general argument is that hunger is not an issue with supply, but an issue with access and that aid programmes do little to alleviate this. They point to how politics often supersedes allegedly well thought out development interventions and those in a locale who can martial political power can often use it to gain economically from development.

At times the book is ahead of it's time, advocating for interventions within the community, and others it is very of it, a discussion of the merits of collectivisation.