This issue of the FAO's annual ‘SOFA’ series, authored by a very international team, focuses on the issues and controversies surrounding international food aid. The benefits of food aid are obvious when it reaches the mouths of the hungry (if uncontaminated by dirty water), but it has been criticized as a costly and often inefficient donor-driven response that creates recipient dependency, undermines local production and trade, and weakens long-term sustainability. Over 80 pages (and 8 pages of references later on) examine the economic arguments and evidence, and cover programming (timing and management), governance (organization, e.g. Food Aid Conventions and the World Food Programme), the security of food supplies, economic and political dependency, disruption of production and commerce, and emergencies (‘sudden-onset’, ‘slow-onset’, and ‘complex and protracted crises’).

The report concludes that ‘the available evidence regarding these issues is surprisingly thin’, but it appears that considerable improvements have been achieved over recent decades in the world's food aid system. Hence the numbers of undernourished have been kept at about 850 million people (mostly in Asia) since the early 1990s, after an impressive previous fall due to improved food production (again, in Asia). Nevertheless, the recurrent crises in parts of sub-Saharan Africa are well known, and natural-disaster emergencies seem to be increasing in frequency and severity. Recommendations include better targeting, untying from donor requirements, the use of local or regional purchases, and better information systems to anticipate food shortages in time, and to avoid belated arrivals. Risks remain from reduced availabilities of surpluses if world prices rise as a result of growing populations, rising incomes elsewhere and perhaps bio-energy cropping. Moreover, political will remains essential, both amongst potential donors, and in recipient countries.

Parts II and III of the volume contain the standard statistical FAO data – basic material for anyone wishing to monitor and assess the broad geographical and temporal patterns of global food and agriculture.