Food insecurity rates, which skyrocketed with the Great Recession, have yet to fall to pre-recession levels. Food pantries are stretched thin, and states are imposing new restrictions on programs like SNAP that are preventing people from getting crucial government assistance. At the same time, we see an increase in obesity that results from lack of access to healthy foods. The poor face a daily choice between paying bills and paying for food.

Poverty and Insecurity is the first book to examine the relationship between social exclusion, poverty, and the labor market. It challenges long-standing and dominant myths about the unemployed and the poor by exploring their lived realities. Work may be the best route out of poverty, but for many people employment does not solve recurrent poverty, with many individuals trapped in a low-pay, no-pay cycle between lowwage jobs and unemployment. Based on unique qualitative and longitudinal research, the book shows how poverty and insecurity have now become the defining features of working life for many.

​This volume is concerned with food poverty and action on food (in)security. The context is a global one; as the developed world faces a problem with overconsumption and chronic diseases, the developing world is addressing the double burden of hunger and over consumption. Even in the developed world, nation states are facing the rise of modern malnutrition which is over consumption, but also the re-emergence of hunger as there are growing levels of poverty and inequality due to the financial crises. Food insecurity is in many people’s minds associated with hunger, and while this is true the modern food system has introduced new complexities to food insecurity with the growth of micro-nutrient inequalities. Hunger and obesity are not being faced by two different groups but often the same group or cohort. These are features of modern malnutrition that are often not recognized. A critical examination of food poverty and food security is undertaken, with a view to clarifying taken-for-granted assumptions in present discourses. The book addresses food charity and the rise of solutions such as foodbanks as appropriate social responses. The final chapters explore the solutions from real life situations. The concluding chapter from the editors draws together the issues and locates solutions within a food policy framework of the total food system. The various definitions of food insecurity will are examined. Hunger and its modern manifestations (hunger and obesity) is another focus, with particular explorations of developed and developing countries experiences. Some of the chapters cover how food poverty/insecurity is being addressed and provide examples of work in progress.

"Investigates the complex and dynamic relationship between poverty and insecurity, exploring possible agents for change. Brings the latest lessons and intellectual framework to bear in an examination of African leadership, the private sector, and American foreign aid as vehicles for improving economic conditions and security"--Provided by publisher.

Examines debt insecurity in eighteenth-century Britain, a period of famously rapid economic growth when many people nevertheless experienced financial failure.

Two years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the health, economic, and social disruptions caused by this global crisis continue to evolve. The impacts of the pandemic are likely to endure for years to come, with poor, marginalized, and vulnerable groups the most affected. In COVID-19 & Global Food Security: Two Years Later, the editors bring together contributions from new IFPRI research, blogs, and the CGIAR COVID-19 Hub to examine the pandemic’s effects on poverty, food security, nutrition, and health around the world. This volume presents key lessons learned on food security and food system resilience in 2020 and 2021 and assesses the effectiveness of policy responses to the crisis. Looking forward, the authors consider how the pandemic experience can inform both recovery and longer-term efforts to build more resilient food systems.

The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures—the teenage “welfare mother,” the ghetto “street thug,” and the roaming “sex predator”—and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of “small government” but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship. Visit the author’s website.