Most scholars attribute systemic causes of food insecurity to poverty, human overpopulation, lack of farmland, and expansion of biofuel programs. However, as Chen argues here, another significant factor has been overlooked. The current food insecurity is not absolute food shortage, since global food production still exceeds the need of the entire world population, but a problem of how to secure access to resources. Distorted agricultural trade undermines world food distribution, and uneven distribution impedes people’s access to food, particularly in poor developing countries. Examining EU and US agricultural policies and World Trade Organization negotiations in agriculture, the author argues how they affect the international agricultural trade, claiming that current food insecurity is the result of inequitable food distribution and trade practices. The international trade regime is advised to reconcile trade rules with the consideration of food security issues. Several other enforceable solutions to reduce world hunger and malnutrition are also advanced, including national capacity building, the improvement of governance, and strategic development of biofuel programs. This book will be of great interest to agricultural trade professionals and consultant policy makers in the EU, US and developing countries. Students and researchers with a concentration on international trade, agriculture economics, global governance and international law will benefit greatly from this study.

Trade, Food Security, and Human Rights

Business & Money

陈英

Economics

Routledge

Amazon.com Review\nPerhaps one has to come from an intensely traditional society such as the one Chinese author Ying Chen describes in her third novel, Ingratitude, in order to fully empathize with the protagonist's desire to commit suicide solely to condemn her mother to a life of suffering: "I was burning with the desire to see Mother suffer at the sight of my corpse. Suffer to the point of vomiting up her own blood. An inconsolable pain." What, one wonders, has the mother done to deserve such a fate? Her worst sin, it appears, is to never have smiled at her daughter. Yan-Zi, the narrator of this slim volume, speaks to us from beyond the grave. As she witnesses her own funeral preparations and the grief of her family and friends, she looks back over the 25 years that she lived. A critical mother, a distant, unloving father--admittedly, Yan-Zi's childhood was not an especially happy one, but Ying Chen's minimal prose and sparse characterization make it difficult to see just what it was that drove this young woman to such extremes of hatred and revenge she would throw herself under a truck just to get back at her mother. 
If Yan-Zi's motives for taking such drastic action remain murky, Ying Chen evokes the particulars of her life with laserlike precision. There are the boyfriends, Hong-qi, Chun, and Bi, the bitter relationship between Yan-Zi's mother and her grandmother, and just a subtle hint of the changing political climate in China: "Your father was such an alert man," Yan-Zi's mother says, discussing the car accident that destroyed her husband's mind; "Who knows whether this accident wasn't an attempted murder! You have to keep your eye on these kids, they're crazy today...." It may be that, in China, Yan-Zi's act of self-annihilation would be viewed as the purest form of rebellion against the traditional expectations placed on women in that country; to a Western reader, however, her complaint that "because of Mother, my life would always be flawed" comes off as adolescent whining. Ingratitude is an apt title for this novel, and one that invites several different interpretations.\nDesperate to escape her domineering mother, Yan-Zi decides to commit suicide to remove the bonds of her mother's love, and, in the moments after her death, she recounts with a detached and keen eye the story of her last days\nFrom Publishers Weekly\nNominated for Canada's Governor General's Award and Prix Femina, the third novel (the first to be published in English) by Chinese-Qu?becois Chen is a first-person narrative from beyond the grave: the tale of a 25-year-old woman from a family of traditional Chinese immigrants who plans to stage her own death in order to make her mother suffer. The daughter loathes her mother for giving her a life she never wanted, then robbing her of the freedom to live it for herself. "The day I was born was already the day I was defeated," Yan-Zi explains. After tormenting Yan-Zi through her childhood by competing with her for the attention of her aloof, ineffectual father, Yan-Zi's mother tries desperately to find her a husband but rejects the man Yan-Zi falls for. Yan-Zi responds to these tyrannies, petty and large, by being "faultless," outwardly worthy of the mother whom she knows she can never please. What redeems this long J'accuse from adolescent fantasy is Yan-Zi's death (which she had planned with sleeping pills but achieves accidentally by running into the path of a truck), and the peculiar afterlife where she learns that "You can't turn away from your mother without turning away from yourself.... Fallen leaves return to their roots... traitors to their mothers will continue to be vagabonds, whether dead or alive." With sure-footed prose and a constant movement toward wisdom, no matter how bitter, Chen restrains her material and lends the work an oddly quiet dignity. 
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.\nFrom Booklist\nAs if we needed more proof that we live in a global villa

Ingratitude

Literature & Fiction

Volk, Carol

Literary

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

"I was dying to see Mother suffer at the sight of my corpse," announces the young woman at the heart of this powerful and disquieting novel, which has won acclaim in France and in Canada upon original publication in French. In Ingratitude,Ying Chen tells the story of Yan-Zi, who decides to commit suicide in order to escape the yoke of her dominating mother. The narrator's account of her final days recalls the chilling detachment of Camus's The Stranger.

Ingratitude: A Novel

University of California Press

Trade, Food Security, and Human Rights: The Rules for International Trade in Agricultural Products and the Evolving World Food Crisis

Ingratitude.

Douglas & McIntyre, 1998

Ying Chen's Impressions of Summer

Poetry

Finishing Line Press

Une jeune femme, dont l'enfant a disparu l'année précédente, est devenue une chatte. Elle observe son mari, sous sa forme nouvelle. La pleure-t-il? Lui sera-t-il fidèle? La reconnaîtra-t-il? Que devient le monde sous le regard d'un chat qui dispose d'un cerveau humain? Avec humour et avec émotion, l'auteur, qui nous a habitués à des récits décalés, entre le fantastique et la méditation philosophique, dresse un tableau critique du mariage, de la vie sociale et amoureuse, des préjugés. Une fable poétique.

Espèces

SEUIL

Les lettres chinoises [Paperback] Chen, Ying

Les Lettres chinoises

Contemporary

Actes-sud

Les Lettres Chinoises

Lemeac Editeur, Incorporated

Genre Fiction

LEMEAC

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