HUNGER, MARTIN CAPARROS

There are books that change the way of understanding the world. Books that open your eyes, or, if one was already open, make the eyes focus. Especially at certain stages of life. In my case it was Open Veins of Latin America , Eduardo Galeano, during college. I was impressed, I was dazzled, it seeped into my conversations and had a hole in my dreams. Eventually I finished admitting their faults, you have them , but never erased me the impression left.

Hunger , of Martin Caparros , may perhaps be one of those books. It has not reached me at that time when, as if the mind were photographic paper, one is so sensitive to light that lets lightning so marked forever. But I have at least scratched it out, and I know that others will do me did Galeano. And I celebrate, what fool. Hunger is a tendentious book, where it is easy tosee a difficult angle on the left, radical Caparrós, fighting on the counter all the time. But italso seems to me a fundamental document, full of irrefutable truths as numbers and, above all, full of the lives behind those numbers.
Only two for the record: in its current state, world agriculture could feed 12,000 million people.And yet, every five seconds dies from hunger-related a boy of less than ten years causes.That's Hunger capitalized.
Hunger as the book is, very personal, personal tour of Martin Caparros by a word so big and yet so ignored. It is structured around the stories of those who overlook the abyss of lack of food. One learns with pages that is not nothing to eat, strictly speaking. It is rather not know whether to eat tomorrow, and after tomorrow. Imagine what life is if one spends thinking about whether to have something to take to the stomach the next day.
Caparrós roams the daily lives of the hungry in various parts of the world and ask them questions, it asks questions himself and makes readers. The book opens in Niger, a woman carrying on her back with the body of her child. A very strong image, which will only be repeated if the scenario changes by India, Sudan, Madagascar or Argentina. Between fate and destiny we discover a story Hunger, a policy Hunger Hunger sociology. And while the author is telling us all this, people are still starving. The result is an undeniable point of Jordi Évole, Michael Moore, and can be written to test what these television documentaries are we swallow every day. Come on, a good slap.
Although, as I say, to carry an ideological (anti-capitalist, anti-market) that does not hide, Martin Caparros draws a multifaceted reality and runs away from the only explanations. In most cases it offers, but does not impose his view every problem, something that is appreciated. Because hunger is a problem and there are many problems. It is the shortage of arable land in Niger and mismanagement while a huge amount of crop in India. Caparrós charge against the international bodies responsible for the forced exposure to markets, but also has his pen ready to stoke their own local communities. Covered in depth, for example, the issue of transgenic seeds, and control them make corporations like Monsanto, with the damage suffered by rural communities. But while he faces the "ecololós" activists, as he calls them, and argues that we can not turn our back on technological advances, because they have been present for centuries in agriculture.
In short, The Hunger is a book that assails all certainties, who carefully read makes you raise very seriously what we are doing here, how far we have come so few have so much and so many have so little that even them power to eat. Martin Caparros speaks of hunger in seven hundred pages of paperback and it seems that does not end, not ends. I am also unable to summarize in seven hundred words and end the feeling of having done a little justice.

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