Commercial Policy

The End of Food

Paul Roberts, the best-selling author of The End of Oil, turns his attention to the modern food economy and finds that the system entrusted to meet our most basic need is failing.
In this carefully researched, vivid narrative, Roberts lays out the stark economic realities behind modern food and shows how our system of making, marketing, and moving what we eat is growing less and less compatible with the billions of consumers that system was built to serve.
At the heart of The End of Food is a grim paradox: the rise of large-scale food production, though it generates more food more cheaply than at any time in history, has reached a point of dangerously diminishing returns. Our high-volume factory systems are creating new risks for food-borne illness, from E. coli to avian flu. Our high-yield crops and livestock generate grain, vegetables, and meat of declining nutritional quality. While nearly one billion people worldwide are overweight or obese, the same number of people—one in every seven of us—can't get enough to eat. In some of the hardest-hit regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, the lack of a single nutrient, vitamin A, has left more than five million children permanently blind.
Meanwhile, the shift to heavily mechanized, chemically intensive farming has so compromised soil and water that it's unclear how long such output can be maintained. And just as we've begun to understand the limits of our abundance, the burgeoning economies of Asia, with their rising middle classes, are adopting Western-style, meat-heavy diets, putting new demands on global food supplies.
Comprehensive in scope and full of fresh insights, The End of Food presents a lucid, stark vision of the future. It is a call for us to make crucial decisions to help us survive the demise of food production as we know it.

Paul Roberts is the author of The End of Oil, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award in 2005. He has written about resource economics and politics for numerous publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Harper's Magazine, and Rolling Stone, and lectures frequently on business and environmental issues.

International Economics

This classic text has sold well for a half century because it covers all the conventional areas of international economics in an easy-to-understand manner.

The 13th edition continues to provide the best blend of events and analysis, so that readers can build their abilities to understand global economic developments and to evaluate proposals for changes in economic policies. The book is informed by current events and by the latest in applied international research. It combines rigorous economic analysis with attention to the issues of economic policy that are alive and important today. This concise and readable text uses economic terminology when it enhances the analysis, but avoids jargon for jargon’s sake. Like earlier editions, it also places international economics events within a historical framework. The overall treatment continues to be intuitive rather than mathematical and is strongly oriented towards policy.

China Shakes the World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future -- and the Challenge for America

"Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world." Napoleon's words seem eerily prescient today, as the shock waves from China's awakening reverberate around the globe. Award-winning journalist James Kynge takes measure of the tremors made as China's ravenous hunger for jobs, raw materials, energy, and food — and its export of goods, workers, and investments — drastically reshapes world trade and politics. Through dramatic stories of the people who are driving China's transformation — entrepreneurs and visionaries, factory workers and store clerks — Kynge describes the breakneck rise of China, the extraordinary problems the country now faces, and the consequences of both.

Planet of Slums

Celebrated urban historian's bestselling account of the global explosion of slums, with a major new introduction.

According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and influential book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly unforeseen development and asks whether the great slums are, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt.

Health Economics and Policy with Economic Applications

Health Economics and Policy is a basic introduction to the microeconomics of health, health care, and health policy. This edition demonstrates how economic principles apply to health-related issues. It explains the social, political, and economic contexts of health care delivery and explores the changing nature of health care. Students learn to analyze public policy from an economic perspective. While the text was written for non-economics majors, it includes enough economic content to challenge majors.

Sweatshop Warriors : Immigrant Women Workers Take On the Global Factory

In this up-close and personal look at the heroines who make family, community, and society tick, Miriam Ching Yoon Louie showcases immigrant women workers speaking out for themselves, in their own words. While public outrage over sweatshops builds in intensity, this book shows us who these workers really are and how they are leading campaigns to fight for their rights.

In-depth, accessible analyses of the immigration, labor, and trade policies, which together have forced these women into the most dangerous, poorly paid jobs, dovetail with vivid portraits of the women themselves. Louie, a longtime writer/activist and well-known figure in feminist, immigrant, and labor circles, is uniquely poised to make her case: that the labor of immigrant women worker-activists not only sustains families and communities, but the vibrant social activism that undergirds democracy itself.

With chapters on successful campaigns against Levi-Strauss, Donna Karan, and restaurants in Los Angeles; Koreatown, among others.

Miriam Ching Yoon Louie is a longtime writer/activist in campaigns to organize women of color. She is national campaign media director of Fuerza Unida, a board member of the Women of Color Resource Center, and former media director of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates. Her essays and articles on immigrant women and labor issues have been widely anthologized, including in the 1997 collection Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire (South End Press) and she speaks at public events internationally. She is the co-author, with Linda Burnham, of Women's Education in the Global Economy (Women of Color Resource Center, 2000).

Agricultural and Food Policy (6th Edition)

Drawing on the authors' background in education and policy development, Agricultural and Food Policy, Sixth Edition provides a comprehensive treatment of domestic and international policy setting, process, options and consequences. This book goes beyond the traditional discussion of farm programs, and gets readers thinking in broader terms, by considering the many forces—globalization, technology, food safety, environment—that influence policy change. Taking an unbiased approach, this edition includes more economic theory, a new chapter on government involvement, current policy issues, and a chapter devoted to the future of agricultural and food policy. Informs readers of the most recent policy issues, such as the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, food terrorism, and budget deficits, in an objective manner. Creates an understanding of how U.S. policy affects stakeholders in other countries. Shows the importance of current WTO negotiations to policy outcomes. Gives readers a deeper understanding of the conditions leading to government involvement, the constraints on government involvement, the role of economists and the limits of economics. Explains concepts using graphs and helps readers understand the underlying theory driving policy decisions. Examines the impact of constituency groups and encourages readers to consider the future of agriculture and food policy. Those interested or involved in agricultural and food policy.

Delivering on Doha: Farm Trade And the Poor

Innovation--The Missing Dimension

Amid mounting concern over the loss of jobs to low-wage economies, one fact is clear: America's prosperity hinges on the ability of its businesses to continually introduce new products and services. But what makes for a creative economy? How can the remarkable surge of innovation that fueled the boom of the 1990s be sustained?

For an answer, Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore examine innovation strategies in some of the economy's most dynamic sectors. Through eye-opening case studies of new product development in fields such as cell phones, medical devices, and blue jeans, two fundamental processes emerge.

One of these processes, analysis--rational problem solving--dominates management and engineering practice. The other, interpretation, is not widely understood, or even recognized--although, as the authors make clear, it is absolutely crucial to innovation. Unlike problem solving, interpretation embraces and exploits ambiguity, the wellspring of creativity in the economy. By emphasizing interpretation, and showing how these two radically different processes can be combined, Lester and Piore's book gives managers and designers the concepts and tools to keep new products flowing.

But the authors also offer an unsettling critique of national policy. By ignoring the role of interpretation, economic policymakers are drawing the wrong lessons from the 1990s boom. The current emphasis on expanding the reach of market competition will help the analytical processes needed to implement innovation. But if unchecked it risks choking off the economy's vital interpretive spaces. Unless a more balanced policy approach is adopted, warn Lester and Piore, America's capacity to innovate--its greatest economic asset--will erode.

Covering Oil: A Reporter's Guide to Energy and Development (Lifting the Resource Curse, 2)