“The Atlas of World Hunger paints a comprehensive picture of hunger in our time. Bassett and Winter-Nelson thoroughly examine the roots of hunger and poverty and incontrovertibly show their association. By devising a new scale to measure hunger vulnerability and by naming the multiple causes of hunger and poverty around the globe, from local to international levels, the Atlas provides an outline for solutions that will reduce the roster of hungry people from one billion today to zero as soon as possible.”

“The Atlas of World Hunger could not come at a more propitious moment, when progress toward the goal of reducing hunger at the global scale has lurched into reverse, with a growing proportion of the world population unable to secure adequate food. Thomas Bassett and Alex Winter-Nelson have produced a sophisticated yet accessible volume, sacrificing neither complexity nor legibility, to provide a nuanced and powerful account of the political, economic, and social processes that shape people’s ability to escape chronic hunger.  Deploying maps not merely to illustrate the geographic patterns of hunger but also to interrogate the root causes, they rule out simple explanations such as population growth while finding strong correlations among such factors as gender equality and literacy.  The Atlas will serve as an enduring reference and resource for library collections, of course, but also for countless university courses in development, agriculture, and food.”—Gail Hollander, Florida International University

“The Atlas of World Hunger has accomplished something of exceptional importance. By combining innovative cartography with critical social science, Bassett and Winter-Nelson have exploded many of the myths surrounding the persistence of hunger and provided in turn a complex, nuanced picture of the relations between social vulnerability, poverty, and food insecurity. The Atlas has extraordinary insights at a variety of geographical scales—from the household to the nation, from the region to the globe—analyzing factors that range from food insecurity in northern California, to obesity in Albania, to child growth failure in Uruguay. Mass hunger and chronic food insecurity continue to flourish despite the purported successes of neoliberal growth policies and global commitments to the Millennium Development Goals. Bassett and Winter-Nelson have provided a graphic account of why this is so, and what to do about it. A magnificent achievement.”

“[Bassett and Winter-Nelson] have produced the first global atlas of hunger while at the same time devising an innovative metric for world hunger that yields a surprising and thought-provoking new way to look at data on world hunger.—National Catholic Reporter

“Thomas Bassett and Alex Winter-Nelson document the geography of hunger in a volume that provides a new tool for scholars and policymakers and a clear, vivid, accessible account of global poverty and hunger for students and an enquiring general public. . . . Africa’s extreme vulnerability to hunger, and the reasons for it, are vividly portrayed in the volume’s eighty-two maps, its informative tables and graphs, and the text, which is lucid and nuanced. Bassett’s deep knowledge of African political ecology, and Winter-Nelson’s work on African agricultural economics are evident in the analysis, the illustrations, and clear, engaging explanations of such topics as the origins of African debt, the effect of U.S. agricultural subsidies on West African cotton farmers, malaria,

HIV/AIDS, and why supporting the purchasing power of the poor is a more effective intervention than food price controls.”