This book is situated at the cross-roads of environmental, agricultural and economic history and climate science. It investigates the climatic background for the two most significant risk factors for life in the crisis-prone England of the Later Middle Ages: subsistence crisis and plague. Based on documentary data from eastern England, the late medieval growing season temperature is reconstructed and the late summer precipitation of that period indexed. Using these data, and drawing together various other regional (proxy) data and a wide variety of contemporary documentary sources, the impact of climatic variability and extremes on agriculture, society and health are assessed. Vulnerability and resilience changed over time: before the population loss in the Great Pestilence in the mid-fourteenth century meteorological factors contributing to subsistence crises were the main threat to the English people, after the arrival of Yersinia pestis it was the weather conditions that faciliated the formation of recurrent major plague outbreaks. Agriculture and harvest success in late medieval England were inextricably linked to both short term weather extremes and longer term climatic fluctuations. In this respect the climatic transition period in the Late Middle Ages (c. 1250-1450) is particularly important since the broadly favourable conditions for grain cultivation during the Medieval Climate Optimum gave way to the Little Ice Age, when agriculture was faced with many more challenges; the fourteenth century in particular was marked by high levels of climatic variability.

Historians and scholars of Ethiopia have long struggled to understand the "Ethiopian Paradox": that is, how could Africa's most productive food production system, which sustained an extraordinary imperial culture over two millennia, also be home to periodic, gut-wrenching famine and rural poverty? Ethiopia in the late twentieth century has surpassed earlier icons of famine: China, India, Armenia, and Biafra. And yet, ironically, Ethiopia's highland culture also generated, and eventually exported, the iconic cuisine served in Ethiopian restaurants throughout the developed world, and in large cities in Africa itself. Donald Crummey argues that in the face of increasing environmental stress, Ethiopian farmers have innovated and adapted. In the process they have developed effective strategies for managing their environment--strategies too often ignored by conservation projects.

Some urgent new thinking is needed if any lessons are to be learnt from the recent disasters. This book brings together the experience of a number of writers who have worked on, or studied, poverty alleviation programmes in Asia and Africa.

Lays out a picture of impending planetary crisis - a global food shortage that threatens to hit by mid-century - that would dwarf any in our previous experience. This book describes a dangerous confluence of shortages - of water, land, energy, technology, and knowledge - combined with the increased demand created by population and economic growth

This book examines the Soviet agricultural crisis of 1931-1933 which culminated in the major famine of 1933. It is the first volume in English to make extensive use of Russian and Ukrainian central and local archives to assess the extent and causes of the famine. It reaches new conclusions on how far the famine was 'organized' or 'artificial', and compares it with other Russian and Soviet famines and with major twentieth century famines elsewhere. Against this background, it discusses the emergence of collective farming as an economic and social system.

Lays out a picture of impending planetary crisis - a global food shortage that threatens to hit by mid-century - that would dwarf any in our previous experience. This book describes a dangerous confluence of shortages - of water, land, energy, technology, and knowledge - combined with the increased demand created by population and economic growth