For our first BookNight of the year, we are delighted to welcome American non-fiction writer and policy analyst David Rieff to present his new book The Reproach of Hunger over an evening with Frontline Club members.

Rieff, who has been studying and reporting on humanitarian aid and development for thirty years, investigates the causes of the ongoing food security crisis caused by the widening poverty gap and political unrest from the Middle East to Latin America.

“Rejecting equally utopian humanitarianism and neoconservative ideology, Rieff’s collection of essays provides a compelling analysis of when military intervention is necessary and when it is doomed to fail.” – George Soros

Guests are encouraged to read the book before the event, although you are also welcome to join if you’ve just started your exploration. This will be an in-depth discussion rather than a standard format Q&A. The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, following by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. We will get to know one another over starters before the introduction of the evening’s guest author.

The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

Menu £25 per person excluding drinks.

For more information about membership and other benefits on offer, please contact our membership coordinator Sophie Kayes.

On the evening of 11 June 2013, the Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras pulled the plug on ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, after 75 years of continuous operation. Both TV and radio frequencies fell silent, making screens broadcast black and the FM to buzz.

The closure of ERT was an unheard-of political act that shocked Greek citizens, bringing back memories from the dark period of dictatorship. The silencing of public television resulted in a political conflict and provoked protests in a country already divided. It also caused a fierce international outrage from all around the world.

Directed by Yorgos Avgeropoulos
Duration: 65′
Year: 2013

“Hunger is the most heartbreaking and the most unnecessary crisis in the world” stated David Bull, executive director of UNICEF UK as he opened the session on Tuesday 26 March.

While the issue of food and hunger has long been on the development agenda, the session ‘Can we fix a broken food system?’, chaired by Paul Vallely, leading writer on development and associate editor of The Independent, is timely. This year the issue has received particular attention through the recent horse meat scandal and the launch of the The Enough Food For Everyone IF campaign. However, panelist Paul McMahon, author and advisor on sustainable food systems, highlighted that media coverage has been “full of myths, half truths and some dodgy statistics about our global food system”. The evening’s rich discussion picked apart the problems at the core of the issue and highlighted key solutions.

The first myth to unravel was the connection between food crisis and a growing population:

“The simple answer to ‘can we feed 9 billion people in 2050’ is yes. We could do that now, there is enough food. It is a question of how it is shared and how it is priced, so it is a socio-economic problem more than a bio-physical problem.” McMahon explained.

Bull and McMahon were joined on the panel by Mike Lewis, ActionAid UK’s lead for policy work on tax in the developing world and Mary Creagh, Labour MP for Wakefield and Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. There was broad consensus on the panel about what was at the heart of the problem:

“When we look at food systems there are two basic problems”, Creagh argued. “The first is inequality and the second is poverty”.

Creagh also highlighted the importance of including both the social inequality of women and inequality embedded in our food supply chain within our framing of the problem.

Some direct solutions came from Lewis:

“In terms of the IF campaign, if we are realistic about being able to pay for the publicly funded parts of what we want then we have to do two things. Firstly, we have to make sure that developing countries are raising their own revenues for public investment, and that tax has to be raised equitably. Secondly, we must make sure that those revenues are spent transparently, and that is about budget transparency as much as it is about corporate transparency.”

McMahon was similarly prescriptive about the centrality of national governments in developing countries:

“I think it all comes down to national governance in developing countries, particularly in Africa. Those governments need to take the actions to put in place integrated rural development plans. That involves advancing infrastructure, investing in research, investing in markets, and supporting smallholders and farmers to grow more food.”

The evening finished on a powerful note of optimism from Bull for the year ahead:

“This year change is possible. We can help to increase aid flows, we can get commitments of aid to helping small farmers and to address the issue of stunting, we could get that commitment to that 10 billion a year and we could end chronic under nutrition of children. This is why the IF campaign is so important…we could be the generation that ends chronic under nutrition of children.”

By Nicole Hunt

The UN Human Rights Committee session opens on Monday in Geneva, with the situation in Iran on the agenda for the first two days.

Meanwhile, Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos begins a five day visit to North Korea, which is currently suffering through a major food crisis.

A judge in Courbevoie, France is due to rule on whether L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt should be made a ward of the state following accusations by her daughter Françoise that she is mentally unfit to manage her €17bn fortune.

South African President Jacob Zuma hosts Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Pretoria on Tuesday for a trilateral summit, expected to focus mostly on trade.

The meeting comes on the same day that fellow BRICS country China releases its third quarter GDP figures. 

In London, judges reveal the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction; nominees include Julian Barnes, Carol Birch, Patrick deWitt, Esi Edugyan and Stephen Kelman.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh begin a 10-day trip to Australia on Wednesday, heading first to Canberra. During their visit, the royal couple will also take in Brisbane and Melbourne before heading to Perth for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting on 28 October.

Greek public and private sector unions hold a 24-hour strike to protest what they say are ‘barbaric’ austerity measures being introduced as part of the Government’s efforts to meet the conditions of its €110bn bailout from the IMF, the EU and the European Central Bank.

EU Commissioner for Internal Markets Michel Bernier holds a press conference in Brussels on Thursday to present the Commission’s proposals for reforms to the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive and the Market Abuse Directive. The reforms are aimed at strengthening the EU regulatory system and increasing oversight in the wake of the financial crisis.

The European Space Agency is having a more exciting day in Kourou, French Guiana, where the first two Galileo satellites are being test-launched at 12:34pm. The full satellite project is expected to be operational by 2014.

News Corporation holds its annual general meeting in Los Angeles on Friday, amid calls from some shareholder groups to vote against the re-election of CEO Rupert Murdoch’s sons James and Lachlan to the company’s board in the wake of the UK phone hacking scandal.

In Abu Dhabi, Finance Ministers from the Gulf Cooperation Council begin a two-day meeting where they discuss proposals for a single Gulf currency. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde attends on the second day.

Remember the apocalypse hysteria back in May? When the world failed to end, preacher Harold Camping revised his prediction, and is now confident that the world will in fact end on 21 October.

Assuming we’re still here, attention turns to Cairo on Saturday where the court hearing resumes for two police officers charged over the death of Khaled Said. The verdict in the case, which prompted widespread protests against police impunity last year, has been delayed twice, most recently from 24 September after new evidence emerged.

Unusually, there’s quite a lot going on on Sunday, beginning with the delayed European Council and Eurogroup meetings in Brussels. Predictably, Greece and the euro debt crisis are at the top of the agenda, with leaders focusing on economic governance and financial regulation.

Following an international uproar over five to 15 year sentences for Bahraini medical staff convicted of inciting hatred against the regime and attempting to topple the monarchy during anti-government protests earlier this year, a civil re-trial ordered by the country’s Attorney General begins in Manama.

There are also four elections taking place across the world: parliamentary polls in Tunisia, which were scheduled in the wake of President Zine al Abidine Ben Ali’s resignation back in January; a general election in Argentina, where incumbent Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is expected to win a second term; a presidential election in Bulgaria, where current President Georgi Parvanov is not eligible for a third term; and federal elections in Switzerland, where 13 parties are currently represented in parliament.

To top it off, the Rugby World Cup final takes place in Auckland.