Published in 1987, The Hunger Machine dismantles the notion that famine is an unfortunate natural occurrence, arguing instead that scarcity is frequently manufactured through unequal land ownership, international trade, debt, agricultural policy and the priorities of wealthy nations.

Based on the Channel Four television series The Politics of Food, Bennett and George examine the machinery of global food production through case studies in Sudan, Bangladesh, Brazil and elsewhere. Combining documentary photography, first-hand testimony and political-economic analysis, the book moves between the experiences of displaced farmers and the institutions governing international development. It even takes a hard look at foreign aid, questioning whether interventions ostensibly designed to alleviate poverty can reinforce the very arrangements that produce it.

A distinctly 1980s document of radical development criticism, but one whose central arguments remain uncomfortable: hunger persists not necessarily because the world cannot feed its population, but because the global economy has organised food around profitability rather than need.

Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, 1987. First edition, 1987 reprint. Paperback. Moderate surface rubbing, creasing and edgewear to covers, with light age-toning to pages. Illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs.