ABSTRACT
The introduction lays out the topic of this book, the state of research, the source basis and the book’s structure. Arguing that the world hunger problem has never been solved, the study tries to explain how one important attempt to do so failed. It was adopted during the 1972–1975 world food crisis and amounted to a huge scheme. In it, equipping small agricultural producers in non-industrialized countries with technical inputs was supposed to liberate them from hunger and transform the countryside of these countries economically and socially. Pulling together the issues of famine and chronic hunger, international politics, and development concepts and their outcomes, the book needs to employ a mix of methods, including the history of ideas, foreign policy, domestic economic policies, business, and social and economic history. Country case studies are necessary, as the introduction explains, to avoid pitfalls of global history and show policy outcomes as well as variations of concepts, socioeconomic developments and effects. The case studies will also demonstrate that the small peasant approach failed on all levels: policy design, institutional structures and practices, implementation, many peasants’ unsuccessful attempts to ‘modernize’ their production and rural elites appropriating development funds.
