Alumnus Addresses Worldwide Hunger

Oct 21, 2011

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
CATHERINE MCMULLEN, associate professor, English
(218) 299-3994
AMY KELLY, Media Relations director
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CONCORDIA ALUMNUS ADDRESSES TOPIC OF WORLDWIDE
HUNGER THROUGH BOOK “ENDLESS APPETITES”:
Reading and book signing to take place at Concordia

      Concordia College alumnus and journalist Alan Bjerga, class of 1995, will give a reading and sign his new book at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 3, in Jones 212. Bjerga, an agriculture journalist for Bloomberg News, has written the book “Endless Appetites: How the Commodities Casino Creates Hunger and Unrest,” which was recently published by Bloomberg News. Books will be sold at the event and Bjerga will do a book signing immediately following the reading.
    Bjerga has covered food and agricultural issues for more than a decade and although we are in the midst of an international food crisis, he says malnutrition is unnecessary today. “Each person on the planet can be fed with existing agricultural production,” writes Bjerga in his book. “With the right decisions, people threatened by famine today could even feed themselves – and help out the rest of us tomorrow, when we will need one another to thrive on a crowded planet.”
      In “Endless Appetites” Bjerga explores how crop markets are increasingly acting like an investors’ casino – with prices absorbed by rich nations taking food from the mouths of the poor. The book takes the reader inside the commodities system at the center of the rise in worldwide hunger, and considers possible solutions to the problem. Bjerga details the promise and travails of the global food system and shows how the farmers most stricken by poverty may also be the ones best able to end it.
      Bjerga won the Glenn Cunningham Award from the North American Agricultural Journalists in 2005. In 2009, he was recognized for his project covering U.S. food aid and famine in Ethiopia by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the North American Agricultural Journalists, the New York Press Club, and the Overseas Press Club. In 2010, Bjerga was the president of the National Press Club and the North American Agricultural Journalists.
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