ABSTRACT
Although the emerging science of nutrition at the time might have relegated hunger to that of a purely technical matter, experts’ inference that such mal-nutrition might be avoided through proper planning essentially concreted hungers political trajectory. Instead and in large part due to a collective social awakening and in part thanks to a growing body of sensationalist journalism, hunger issues were now receiving a great deal of attention. This effectively helped fully politicise the notion of hunger and starvation and spurred interventionism at the government level in many countries (Aronson 1982; Vernon 2007). However, interventionism itself was not new, and it has already been shown that governments, particularly Western governments, had for a long time been involved in agricultural markets with the Corn Laws in the United Kingdom and elsewhere through the exercising of political and economic strategies of tariffs and protectionism (Barnes 2006; Vaidya 2006). Thus, although agricultural trade, hunger and humanitarianism descended onto the political arena, at that time adequate food was still largely seen as an issue of production and supply rather than of equitable access.
