Social nutrition has once again become topical with the threat of famine in Yemen, South Sudan and Syria and the work of the Global Rights Compliance and the World Peace Foundation on accountability for mass starvation.[1] A social nutrition approach could be one way of providing evidence on the causes of mass starvation. One problem, however, is that social nutrition no longer really exists as an approach in emergencies. In
The hypothesis that financial speculation was behind soaring food prices in 2007-08 and 2010-11, or at least substantially contributed to it, first surfaced in 2008 when ‘The Accidental Hunt Brothers’ Report by Masters and White (2008) drew a link between institutional investors’ positions in commodity futures markets and the significant and synchronised spike of commodity prices. Prices across commodities almost quadrupled between 2004 and 2008, including prices of key staples
On January 19, 2018 the SOAS Food, Nutrition and Health in Development Research Cluster organises a one-day workshop that brings together topics in contemporary food regime studies examined from a political economy perspective. Topics include inequality and food security, the state and food sovereignty, food regimes and the politics of conflict and financialisation of food and were discussed in four panels covering 11 papers. A full descriptions of the panels
The Summer School Food and Nutrition in Development 2017 has taken place over three weeks in August at SOAS. It has been jointly co convened by Deborah Johnston, Fiorella Picchioni and Lorena Lombardozzi, and involved various academics from the department of Economics and the Food Studies Centre. It has offered a unique programme built on the SOAS Economics Department research and teaching expertise in the political economy of food and nutrition. The
A synopsis of a recent article by Dr Hannah Bargawi (SOAS University of London) and Dr Susan Newman (UWE Bristol): From Futures Markets to the Farm Gate: A Study of Price Formation along Tanzania’s Coffee Commodity Chain. Within the social sciences broadly, and within commodities-related research in particular, research has increasingly focused on prices – analysing and evaluating the formation of prices, the transmission of prices, and the impact of prices and price changes
A book review by Matteo Pinna Pintor of ‘A History of Public Health‘ by George Rosen. Ebola and Zika outbreaks in the tropics make the reissue of this classic of medical history a timely event. Written in the late 1950s by a pioneer of American health education, the volume is a retrospective tour de force which tracks the evolution of public health from classical antiquity to the welfare state, focusing largely on
A book review by Matteo Pinna Pintor on ‘Farewell to the God of Plague: Chairman Mao’s Campaign to Deworm China‘ by Miriam Gross. This book’s title refers to a poem written by Mao Zedong in 1958. The God of Plague is schistosomiasis, a tropical disease which, in 2013, affected almost 300 million people around the world. Schistosome worms alternate parasitism of humans and freshwater snails, with aquatic larval stages in-between. Untreated heavy infections cause
The term “Sustainable Diets” (SD) entered the public health lexicon in 1987, but its translation into reality is proving slow. In its most pared-down formulation, SD means good nutrition with low carbon emissions. In more complex forms, it means eating within environmental limits while eating well for health and in a manner appropriate to economic, social and cultural circumstances. Whichever version of SD is adopted, policy-makers have been surprisingly reluctant
Jane Harrigan, Professor of Economics at SOAS University of London and author of ‘The Political Economy of Arab Food Sovereignty‘, William Sitwell, author of ‘Eggs or Anarchy‘, and Bee Wilson, author of ‘First Bite‘ discussed: ‘Food – From Bread Riots to Obesity‘ on BBC4, 27 June 2016. Presenter Andrew Marr guides his listeners through the many links between food and politics through history; from World War II to the Arab Spring. The programme
FNHD at the DSA Annual Conferences 2016 On Wednesday 14th September 2016 during the Development Studies Association conference held at the University of Oxford, Dr. Deborah Johnston (SOAS, University of London), in collaboration with Nazia Mintz-Habib (University of Cambridge) and Sam Mardell (London International Development Centre) organised a panel on “Inequality and complexity in access to food“. The variety of ways that food can be acquired have been studied by