Bangladesh is Not a Hopeless Basketcase...

Why is a country with some of the world's most fertile land also the home of so many hungry people?

Betsy Hartmann and James Boyce, both Bengali-speaking anthropologists, spent two years in Bangladesh investigating the paradox of hunger in a "basketcase" country that actually produces enough grain for its people.

Needless Hunger follows the history and structure of Bangladesh society, and also draws us into the daily lives of the people of Katni, the village where the authors lived.

Every minute, someone in the Third World becomes a victim of pesticide poisoning. Circle of Poison documents the international marketing of restricted pesticides that leave a globe-circling trail of sickness and death. But the circle's victims are not silent. Around the world, people are fighting back.

Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World

David Weir and Mark Schapiro

1981
Paperback
112 pages

"The very model of investigative journalism at its finest."

-- Stewart Brand, Co-Evolution Quarterly

A quiet violence today stalks the villages and shanty towns of the Third World, the violence of needless hunger. In this book, two Bengali-speaking Americans take the reader to a Bangladesh village where they lived for nine months. There, the reader meets some of the world's poorest people--peasants, sharecroppers, and landless laborers--and some of the not-so-poor people who profit from their misery. The villagers' poverty is not fortuitous, a result of divine dispensation or individual failings of character.