I don't know if this is a quote from the book being reviewed, but this line leapt out at me: "famine is rare". I find it hard to reconcile this statement with information like this statistic from a UNICEF web site: "Every 3.6 seconds one person dies of starvation. Usually it is a child under the age of 5."
Starvation does not require famine. Quite possible for there to be plenty of food created, but withheld from those who need it. Possible, and common.
Reading further in your link, I find:
> Some 300 million children go to bed hungry every day. Of these only eight per cent are victims of famine or other emergency situations. More than 90 per cent are suffering long-term malnourishment and micronutrient deficiency.
The article appears to draw on a 2005 UNICEF report, which suggests this information may be somewhat out of date.
In the developing regions, the prevalence of undernourishment - which measures the proportion of people who are unable to consume enough food for an active and healthy life – has declined to 12.9 percent of the population, down from 23.3 percent a quarter of a century ago
Obviously it's far from eradicated, but amazing progress has been made.
Now, that said, I still wouldn't characterize 800M people with chronic undernourishment as "rare", but... it's not as common as you'd think, either, based on a statistic like that cited by UNICEF.
Between seven and nine million people dying of starvation every year is still a pretty big deal The rate stat is a slap to the face, sure--but it should be, yeah? Progress being made doesn't mean there isn't a lot further to go, and this sort of middlebrow dismissal doesn't help.
The technology we have today can feed 7bln people, it can feed even more.
Distribution is another issue, there isn't famine today that we cannot deal with.
There are cases that we choose not to, there is a huge difference between famine that is induced or maintained due to political instability than due to "natural" causes.
If you want to see famine you don't need to go back more than 150 years to the great potatoe famine, events like this simply cannot happen today.
If you take the 7bln people of today and try to feed them even with circa 1900 agro tech then you will see what famine is.
Within a century we have solved famine and we can now feed 10-15 times the population we had 100 years ago.
If you look at the explosion of the population of the planet in the 20th century you can see how much of a revolution we have underwent.
This is why you don't see or hear about wide spread famine today.
Sure there are still pockets in developing nations and even cases of malnutrition in the developed world.
But that isn't famine, it's not a natural disaster, it doesn't decimate whole countries and if we had the political will to go and fix it there would be almost no major pockets since we can resolve the few remaining parts.
Food is hard to distribute when you are being shot at.
http://www.unicef.org/mdg/poverty.html