NONFICTION: Books call for action on world hunger

More than four decades after Norman Borlaug won a Nobel Prize for helping to end famine in Mexico and Asia, more than 9 million people still die each year of hunger and malnutrition worldwide, and 1 billion don't get enough to eat. It's not that the world doesn't have the tools and resources to end hunger. It does, thanks to Borlaug, the University of Minnesota grad who died in September, and his work with crop breeding.

But self-serving laws, farm subsidies and shifting political will among rich nations have prevented Borlaug's Green Revolution from sprouting in Africa. That's the argument laid out by Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman in "Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty" (PublicAffairs Books; 336 pages; $27.95). Theirs is one of two recent books to examine the global food crisis.

In "Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal" (W.W. Norton; 352 pages; $27.95), British author Tristram Stuart sifts through landfills and grocery-store Dumpsters to show how much food North America and Europe waste -- enough to feed the world's hungry three times over. Farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets and consumers are complicitous in this cycle of overproduction, he argues. Consumers expect fully stocked shelves when they go to the grocery store. Sell-by dates and other rules send tons of perfectly edible food to landfills.

While the books have different angles and approaches, both aim for broad changes in government policy, farming and consumer behavior.

Thurow and Kilman's "Enough" is an expansion of their decades of reporting in the United States and Africa. Readers hear from parents, farmers and business owners, high-ranking political figures and small-community activists. There are heartbreaking stories of how failed policies and misguided approaches led to scenarios where African children died of starvation while surplus food rotted in warehouses only miles away.

Readers see how Irish rock star Bono, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and even a couple of housewives have helped call attention to this intractable and tragic issue.

"The truth is that natural disasters will occur and unconscionable dictators will ruin their countries," the authors write. "But so much of the chronic, everyday hunger in the world is now a man-made catastrophe, caused one anonymous decision at a time, one day at a time, by people, institutions and governments doing what they thought was best for themselves or sometimes even what they thought at the time was best for Africa."

The reporters argue that a global futures market is needed to protect farmers in undeveloped regions from price swings, just as U.S. farmers are. Rural loans must be more readily accessible. And they call for Congress to rewrite laws that hamstring aid agencies from getting food quickly and cheaply to the hungry by allowing only U.S.-grown food to be shipped.

The message in both "Enough" and "Waste" is devastating yet hopeful. Hunger, they argue, is a solvable problem.

Jackie Crosby is a Star Tribune business reporter.