Toward a Politics of Hope: Lessons from a Hungry World

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.

According to Frances Moore Lappé, economic rules taken as dogma have allowed an increasing concentration of decision-making power over wide-scale food production and distribution: that power has come to reside largely with land-owning minorities, with "governments beholden to self-serving elites," and with the international corporations that dominate world trade. The roots of hunger, she says, are not to be found in the scarcity of resources but in the scarcity of democracy. A "politics of hope" working toward food for all must encourage trust in our deepest moral sensibilities.