Geography Of Hunger Research Articles

Discussões acerca do valor da natureza na perspectiva da ecologia política: a lógica Castriana como potencial sócio-metabólico Latino-Americano e a produtividade neguentrópica como territorização pela vida

The proposed text synthesizes the urgency, challenges, and alternatives for the ecological turn in terms of Political Ecology. Thus, drawing support from the recent works of Enrique Leff (2021), we investigate the theoretical-political conditions for the consolidation of environmental rationality. With this purpose, we turn to Josué de Castro’s tragic work, “Geography of Hunger,” to witness the potentialities of the re-existence of Latin American peasantry as an alternative socio-metabolic ‘sentipensante’ to the object-world proposed by the matrix of economic rationality. We highlight the category of Social Metabolism as a socio-environmental cartographic practice of communities that enables the analytical denaturalization of technical power relations. Viewed as a process of territorialization for life, negentropic productivity, also known as negative entropy or syntropy, complexifies the notion of socio-metabolism, promotes the re-valorization of nature, and enables its social re-appropriation. In this way, we hope to highlight the necessity of social and cultural emancipation of territorial insurgencies by peasants as fundamental precepts for addressing contemporary environmental challenges.

Josué de Castro e as metamorfoses da fome no Brasil, 1932-1946

The term hunger, despite also meaning a biological sensation, is a multifaceted, historically specific concept. Like others, it transforms along with changes in society. This article examines, through the discussions proposed by Josué de Castro and its social context, the representations of hunger between 1932 and 1946, the year in which Castro published his book The Geography of Hunger. The objective is to observe the literate public space - literature, mainstream press and scientific discussions - to analyze how hunger was understood during this period and how Josué de Castro took part in this debate.

Cassava Food balanced in Protein and Free of HCN

In his classic, Geography of Hunger (1951), the eminent Agronomist and sociologist Pernambucano, Josué de Castro clearly pointed out the poor protein content of cassava, which is the main food in the entire northern east and north of Brazil

The Geography of Hunger: 75 years

The Geography of Hunger: 75 years

Geography of Hunger: Demographic and Socioeconomic Determinates of Large-scale Severe Hunger Rates in Fresno, California

ABSTRACT Very low food security (VLFS) is a public health concern requiring identification of social risk characteristics within communities. This study used spatial regression to identify social vulnerability characteristics that distinguish VLFS households at the census tract-level in Fresno, California. Hunger rate came from a 2014 survey of 74 census tracts. Demographic, social vulnerability, and food access variables were assessed for fitness. VLFS was associated with income, ethnicity, household sizes, group living situations, and spatial clustering. This study documents that appropriate surveys and spatial statistics using appropriate risk characteristics should be used to inform urban planning and local food insecurity programs.

EM TEMPOS DE GUERRA: Josué de Castro e as políticas públicas de alimentação no Estado Novo

The objective of this article is to problematize the trajectory of Josue de Castro in research institutions focused on the field of food during the Estado Novo. The work of Josue de Castro in these institutions collaborated to publish one of his best known works, Geography of Hunger. In that historical moment Josue de Castro transcended the frontiers of the academic world, not only in his role as a technician of food institutions, but as a public man who, through his writings, sought to link the problem of hunger to the competence of the State.

The "Geography of Hunger" legacy

The "Geography of Hunger" legacy

Josué de Castro e a agricultura de sustentação em Geografia da fome

Neste artigo, destacam-se as análises de Josué de Castro sobre a agricultura de sustentação presentes em um de seus principais livros: Geografia da Fome (1946), articulando-as ao contexto histórico e intelectual da época. O autor concebe o termo agricultura de sustentação ao se referir aos cultivos de sustento, especialmente aqueles existentes nos quilombos e no Sertão, que possibilitam a ampliação das possibilidades alimentares de uma região e que resultam diretamente no atendimento das necessidades da população. As influências para o desvendamento da importância da agricultura de sustentação no pensamento de Josué de Castro advêm tanto da sua trajetória de vida, das influências teóricas, bem como do contexto, dos espaços e grupos nos quais o autor circulou. Destacam-se aspectos considerados primordiais na consolidação de seu projeto político ancorado no combate à fome por meio do incentivo à agricultura de sustentação e do combate ao latifúndio e à monocultura como seus pilares essenciais.

Integrar sociedade e natureza na luta contra a fome no século XXI

Understanding the contemporary world requires a naturalist view, wherein the work of Josué de Castro is one of the most important expressions: taking a comprehensive approach to social life and reproduction of the natural environment that supports it - including the nature of humans themselves, their bodies - is the cornerstone of the geographic method practiced in Geografia da Fome [The Geography of Hunger]. This method is important for studying regions where hunger severely afflicts the populations, and also offers an important key for interpreting the food problems that are forecast for the 21st century, when the world population is expected to increase by nearly 50%. The food production challenges in the coming years--and which this article discusses briefly--cannot be solved with the techniques that characterized the so-called Green Revolution. Rather, they require a more refined understanding of the links between the social and ecological systems, an interface in which the work of Josué de Castro provides fundamental inspiration.

Josué de Castro e a Geografia da Fome no Brasil

The aim of this article is to reinterpret the classic work Geografia da Fome [The Geography of Hunger], first published in 1946. The article provides a summary of the five food area maps and the main nutritional deficiencies in Brazil, based on Josué de Castro's original conception. Currently, the nutritional epidemiological profile identified by Josué de Castro, characterized by nutritional deficiencies (malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies, endemic goiter, iron deficiency anemia, etc.), overlap with chronic non-communicable diseases (obesity, diabetes, dyslipidemias, etc.). However, the complex and paradoxical issue of hunger is a persistently recurrent theme in Brazil. Given a series of current dilemmas, including the planet's ecological sustainability and the need to guarantee the human right to adequate, healthy nutrition, it is urgent to reawaken the struggle led by Josué de Castro for the adoption of a sustainable economic development model and a society free of poverty and hunger.

Geografia da Fome: clínica de paisagens ou epidemiologia crítica?

This article provides a new interpretation of Geografia da Fome [The Geography of Hunger], by Josué de Castro, focusing on the convergence of three fields of knowledge: geography, clinical science, and epidemiology. Although there is a certain commonality in the methodological procedures, the book offers multiple configurations of objects and a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework for explaining the phenomenon of hunger.

Epidemia de beribéri no Maranhão, Brasil

This Editorial addresses the scientific community to report on a beriberi outbreak affecting part of the population in the Tocantins Region in the State of Maranhao, Brazil, with 466 and 543 reported cases and 33 and zero deaths in 2006 and 2007, respectively, predominating among males from 15 to 50 years of age, mainly with the dry beriberi clinical form (data from the Non-Communicable Diseases Division of the Superintendency for Epidemiology and Disease Control, Maranhao State Health Secretariat). During the same period, 30 cases and three deaths were recorded in the neighboring State of Tocantins, according to information provided by its respective State Health Secretariat. Importantly, the last previously recorded beriberi epidemic in Brazil occurred from 1870 to 1910, during the rubber boom in the Amazon Region, as extensively documented by Josue de Castro in Geography of Hunger (1946; English translation, 1952). After numerous patients were hospitalized in Imperatriz, Maranhao, with edema, paresthesia of the lower and upper limbs, difficulty walking, and death from cardio-respiratory failure, an investigation was launched in May 2006 by the Maranhao State Health Secretariat, with participation by the Health Surveillance Secretariat of the Brazilian Ministry of Health. The initial diagnostic hypotheses were: disease of unknown etiology, pesticide poisoning, alcohol intoxication, and Guillain-Barre syndrome. News on the disease had great national repercussion, and the investigation changed directions when a physician from the State of Ceara with experience in the Amazon Region telephoned the head of the regional health department in Imperatriz, suggesting the diagnosis of beriberi. The diagnosis was confirmed by a therapeutic test with thiamine administration. The investigation then focused on identifying the determinant factors, and confirmed the prevalence of alcohol abuse and heavy physical labor among the patients. Current studies are concentrating on the population’s food consumption, pesticide exposure, and possible contamination of rice with fungal microtoxins. Among the actions to quell the beriberi outbreak, emergency measures have been taken such as the purchase and supply of thiamine, as well as short and medium term measures like: distribution of basic food baskets; specific training for health workers; epidemiological, food, and nutritional surveillance; installation of Psychosocial Care Centers for Alcohol and Drug Abuse; investigation of rice processing by local mills; food enrichment; intensification in the inspection of marketing and use of pesticides; and systematization of studies under way on beriberi in the region. The Ministry of Health coordinated the creation of an Inter-Ministerial Task Force aimed at planning and implementing these measures, with representatives from: Office of the Chief of Cabinet; Ministry of Social Development and the Fight Against Hunger; Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Supply; Ministry of Agrarian Development; National Council on Food and Nutritional Safety; National Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA); and the Government of the State of Maranhao (as reported by the Coordinating Division for Food and Nutritional Policy, Ministry of Health, in 2007). The Task Force allowed greater institutional integration and a more holistic understanding of the problem. Despite difficulties in implementing some measures, the experience has been successful. Some issues in the health sector still need to be defined, like the ideal treatment time, criteria for cure and discharge, thiamine supplementation for patients’ family members, and investigation of other risk groups (children and pregnant women). Another relevant issue is the origin of the epidemic in its ecological, social, and economic dimensions. In recent decades, development in the affected area has focused on extensive deforestation and planting of eucalyptus groves to serve the mining and logging companies operating there, in addition to extensive cattle-raising, to the detriment of production of basic food crops, especially rice, beans, corn, cassava, and native foods like Brazil nuts, babacu, and buriti. The result has been the disorganization of the local economy, thus aggravating the prevailing social inequality and further jeopardizing the population’s access to food and quality of life.

Reading "The Geography of Hunger" in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions: From Frantz Fanon to Charlotte Brontë

Reading "The Geography of Hunger" in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions: From Frantz Fanon to Charlotte Brontë

"The Geography of Hunger": from regional logic to universality

The Geography of Hunger, now the target of reflective reading 50 years after it was first published, shows the author' elegant combination of argumentative skill and scientific confidence. Josué de Castro's provocative focus is both a new way of thinking and acting towards the food and nutritional situation in Brazil and a pioneering approach to the issue of collective hunger as a geographically universal phenomenon. Based on regional specificities, the book admits that partial contributions may help establish a characteristic map of the problem's universal nature, thus helping build a different image of Brazil and the world and opening up the possibility of constructing a universal plan to combat hunger and new perspectives for those seeking to correct regional differences and overcome underdevelopment. In this book, which is also a manifesto, Josué de Castro reinterprets the role of classical geography, taking into account one of the most important explanatory dimensions, i.e., political analysis, to unveil the significance and consequences of uneven spatial development. The concepts and proposals raised by The Geography of Hunger are alive and provide essential tools for critically rethinking Brazilian reality, particularly that of the Northeast. On its fiftieth anniversary, The Geography of Hunger is more current than ever because of stimulating and disturbing message.

Disease ecology: an introduction

Part I One world or three to a pathogen?. Part II Western Diseases: Health in industrial and post-industrial countries Mainly cartographic: the cancers Mainly cartographic - some other atlas-based studies Beyond cartographic - some geographical models I - the idea of surfaces Geographical Models II - spatial diffusion of disease Some further geographical contributions Between two worlds - the historical geography of disease. PART III The Third World : Jacques May's classification and some tropical diseases Malaria and some other mosquito-born diseases Some geographical contributions on the schistosomiases Onchocerciasis or river blindness Some Third World cancers Is there a geography of hunger? Approaches to regional synthesis Ecological medical geography and other health geography, in retrospect and prospect.

The World Bank and Accelerated Development: The Internationalization of Supply-Side Economics

Some events and settings stand out as important symbols of a historical period. Versailles, in my opinion, is such a symbol. Constructed at great cost by order of Louis XIV, Versailles symbolizes the isolation of the court of Louis XVI and the insensitivity of Marie Antoinette as expressed in the unforgettable lines: “The poor have no bread? Then let them eat cake.” More recently, in June of 1982, Versailles was the setting for the summit gathering of the heads-of-state of seven major industrialized countries. The response of these “guardians” of the present world order (or disorder) to the cries of the world's poor was an echo of Marie Antoinette: “The poor countries have no foreign exchange? Then let them eat monetarism.” I could not escape this reflection and this symbolism as I re-read the World Bank Report, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (1981), and its recent follow-up, Sub-Saharan Africa: Progress Report on Development Prospects and Programs (1983, hereafter Progress Report ). Scapegoating the victims seems to be a popular pastime in the drawing rooms of the wealthy. These World Bank reports, supported by country and sectoral studies of many African nations, manifest this same tendency of “blaming the victims.” They are classical expositions of “horse and sparrow economics,” patronizingly instructing the sparrows to improve their techniques so that they might more completely pick out the oats in the horses' droppings. But they are deadly serious, as the geography of hunger and hunger-related deaths again expands.

Population, Food and Land Inequality in India 1971: A Geography of Hunger and Insecurity.

Population, Food and Land Inequality in India 1971: A Geography of Hunger and Insecurity.

Controversial Views on the Geography of Nutrition

T F oHIS article deals with certain of the views expressed in J. De Castro's Geography of Hunger, 1952; M. K. Bennett's The World's Food, 1954; and the FAO Second World Food Survey, 1952. The effects of nutrition, or food intake, on the body may be divided between two aspects, its energy-yielding aspect, as measured by calories, and its health-protecting aspects, such as measured by vitamins and minerals. When the former aspect is deficient the condition may be called undernourishment; when the latter aspect is deficient the appropriate term is malnourishment. In place of such drab terms the emotion-quickening term, hunger, which combines, or confuses, both undernourishment and malnourishment, has come to be used in some recent literature in this field. Thus when De Castro speaks of the geography of hunger he is not always, in fact he is not usually, referring to starvation in the sense of people with empty bellies. If he were, then perhaps his self-avowed revolutionary boldness, ranking himself with Freud, in bringing taboos out in the open, would be deserved. What De Castro calls hunger may in fact either be undernourishment, inadequate intake of calories, or malnourishment, which may be the absence of any of about forty food constituents needed to maintain health. Others connected with FAO, as is De Castro, also use the term hunger in this manner. Bennett on the other hand reserves the use of the term hunger for the sensation which most people associate with it, and defines it, as it had been used in the League of Nations, as a condition in which calorie food intake is less than that required to maintain normal body weight when activity is normal. This is a critical concept which would appear to merit a distinct term to describe it, whether it be undernourishment or hunger. The consequences of deficient levels of nutritional intake are far-reaching in their implications. Here De Castro's interpretations are at least interesting for their suggestiveness. It would seem, however, that at least some of the broad claims he makes for social consequences of dietary deficiencies are inextricably bound up with a variety of other forces so that proof may not be possible. Is malnourishment really the reason why the starving LatinAmerican allows his fields to be idle while he goes hungry? Is sex-play really the national sport of India, and is it because hunger-induced lack of energy, and scanty resources, have left them no alternative? Is the Chinese peasant hungry because he lacks the energy to make his fields more productive, rather than because of overpopulation? Other supposedly significant aspects

Book Reviews : The Geography of Hunger. By JOSUÉ DE CASTRO. Foreword by LORD BOYD- ORR. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1952. Pp. xii, 337. $4.50.)

Book Reviews : The Geography of Hunger. By JOSUÉ DE CASTRO. Foreword by LORD BOYD- ORR. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1952. Pp. xii, 337. $4.50.)

The Geography of Hunger

The Geography of Hunger