Book Reviews 83 
emancipation and the wider political context, and how Chinese women's demands were often 
subordinated to considerations of party interest. 
Several times in the book the author seems to get carried away by concentrating on the 
background political context, to a point of de Quincy type digression, an illustration of this is her 
lengthy comparison of the Societ GP and CCP. Secondly, given the size of China geographically 
and in population terms, there is not enough indication of disparities between regions, ruralurban 
and even strata within the society. Thirdly, it is difficult at times to disentangle the very 
strongly expressed opinions of the author and the real situation. For example, with regard to 
abortion and sexuality, Curtin says "of utmost importance to the Chinese women is the question 
of distribution and knowledge of birth control". Whose sentiment is being expressed here, 
Curtin's western feminist sentiment or that of Chinese women? 
Notwithstanding these weaknesses, the book provides factual information about women in 
China from a historical perspective. The reader needs to always keep in mind the date of 
publication, and the reliance on secondary data. Curtin's book also provides a stimulus for 
comparing women in China and women in the aspiring socialist state of Zimbabwe. 
Reviewed by Mrs O N Muchena, Lecturer, Dept of Adult Education, University of Zimbabwe. 
Food, Poverty and Consumption Patterns in Kenya, Joel Greer and Erik Thorbecke, 
International Labour Office, World Employment Programme Geneva, (1986 pp 170, 20 Swiss 
Francs). 
North-Western European Democracy as a positive academic social movement is presently 
entering very deep and unsafe waters over the whole issue of describing and measuring African 
poverty and suffering. At least that is the impression that can be gleaned from the latest 
culturally plurastic offering from the International Labour Organisation's World Employment 
Programme. Joel Greer and Erik Thorbecke are informing us in this monograph that it is 
possible to measure food poverty. It is indeed a great puzzle why they think that this should 
indeed be translated into the fancy equations that constitute their statistical smorgasbord, if, to 
begin with, they themselves are not quite sure what this food poverty means in terms of its basic 
causative factors. Greer and Thorbecke are just a drop in the ocean of European social scientists 
who have fished in the terra incognito that constitutes the African continent. It is, therefore, hardly 
surprising that in the year that Band-Aid hit celluloid screens, and many band-aid solutions were 
thought up in Washington DC, that the clearest definition of food poverty the reader can glean from 
this beautifully packaged book is: 
"Food poverty is a normative, arbitrary and inexact concept. It is an attempt to measure 
whether individuals consume enough food or have the means to consume enough food to 
enjoy a minimum desirable level of physical health. The casual links from food 
consumption and mental well being are only imperfectly understood by nutritionists and 
the medical profession and, in any case, are subject to inter-personal variability - even 
within a relatively homogenous population. Further compounding the problem is the 
difficulty of measuring actual food consumption", (p 1-2). 
Despite the humble confession of ignorance, the conclusion in this very elegant statistical 
smorgasbord is: 
"Maize is grown more efficiently by small farmers than large farmers, and if the 
government does not actively promote land reform, it should recognise and facilitate the 
effective parcelisation of large farms which occurred. Increasing the price of maize 
combined with appropriate complementary measures could be an important first step in 
revitalising Kenya's agricultural sector", (p 139-140).
84 Book Reviews 
We have heard of how the technical efficiency of North American mid-Western agriculture 
came through careful manipulation of the corn/hog ratio. It would be very interesting for a social 
researcher one day to discover what is really behind the corn/human, or maize/people ratio, that 
is supposed to cure Kenya of food poverty. Should we be at this stage phrase mongering about food 
poverty, or should we be talking about the poverty of ideas emanating from world-class labour 
economists advising social workers in Africa on how best to socially organise labour power. This 
poverty of strategic thought is constantly displayed in the social democratic naivety that 
capitalism is not essentially bad, and that if the price is right, then everything else will work out 
just fine. 
The basic social ignorance of the forces that have historically decomposed African labour 
power, even in Kenya, to force households to grow maize in the first place totally escapes the very 
otherwise ordered framework of the joint essay. Let it not be misunderstood that we are quibbling 
about the use of the English concepts, food and the more abstract term poverty or even 
decomposition, for as David Knight (1981) has written concerning the use of words in science: 
"Vocabularies are only a part of a language, as we all know if we have ever tried to write 
French or German, or even to translate them; with nothing but a dictionary, or if we have 
ever received a letter written this way. And yet French and German are very close to 
English in structure and vocabulary; the problems are much greater when one is faced by 
the complication of the verb 'to go' in Athabascan languages, or the inclusive and 
exclusive 'we' of Malay language. It is these characteristics and not the coincidences of 
vocabulary, that establish relationships between languages, just as if is homologies in 
structure and not external similarities, that establish classes in biology. It is, therefore, 
necessary to understand the grammer and syntax of the language, and not enough to 
collect words - only if as with Gomish, one knows the affinities of the language one can get 
anywhere with a vocabulary alone.'' 
We will not attempt to decompose the coincidences of vocabulary from the natural (hard) sciences 
and that from the social (soft) sciences, but one certainly comes across many quirks and oddities 
in this piece de resistcnce from Messrs Greer and Thorbecke: 
"A simple conclusion which can be drawn from the decomposition of total poverty is that 
even though the bulk of the food, poor households and individuals are found in Eastern, 
Nyanza and Western Provinces, Central and Eastern Provinces are relatively much better 
off m terms of food deprivation than are the other four provinces. This is because the 
amount of poverty in a province depends not only on its severity of poverty, but also on its 
share of total population." (p 41) 
But surely, what has to be decomposed? Is it the biological, physical regional 'manifestations of 
poverty'? Or is it more crucial that effort be directed at decomposing the basic casual factors, 
embodied in the market relationship. 
The six point matrix that underpins the inquiry into food patterns, and 'food poverty' seems to 
rest on the suspended cognition that in Kenya the following social phenomena were observed: 
1. The average Kenyan family is large and numbers seven. Large families in Kenya have lower 
farm operating surpluses, total consumption and food consumption per adult equivalent. 
Poor households have more children than 'non-poor households'; 
2. Most Kenyan small-holders don't have much money a3 they spend more on food and "there 
is little difference between poor and non-poor households.''; 
3. 'Non-poor households' have on average more land; 
4. Small-holders of all categories planted roughly equal acreages of maize and marketed the 
same. (Our two professors unanimously agree that the "shares of total crop production and of 
maize sold and the rate of adoption of hybrid maize is in a partial way a measure of 
•modernisation' or 'transition' to farming for the market.'')
Book Reviews 85 
5. Small holders who are educated do better than those who have not had formal education, but 
the Kenyan educational system, because of high drop-out rates, is socially producing enough 
'small farmers', 
6. Only twenty per cent of household heads could find employment off the farm, so that there 
exists a 'large unsatisfied demand for employment,' etc. (p 11-14). 
There is, therefore, nothing that exceptional about such happenings under the African sun as 
far as socio-economic descriptive trajectories go, so that the recommendations concerning the 
increased production of maize are hardly surprising. It is also never clear how high employment 
in Kenya affects nutrition, and other facets of social reproduction. 
What would have been of more value in a study of this nature would have been a careful 
examination of the structural changes in the domestic economies of Kenya, without imposing a 
priori categories. If ifaste' is such an important variable, clear theroretical statements on the 
origins of such 'individual preferences' is required, not only with respect to food, but also with 
respect to collective economic action, and the non-market allocation mechanisms that operate 
through the territorial social economy. 
What is the best unit of analysis for studying changes in African social economy? Can the 
analyst use the household as a unit of analysis and at the same time articulate the complex interrelationship 
between non-capitalist modes of production and the more hegemonic capitalist mode 
of production and consumption that permeates African social realities. What does the scientist 
have to do to contribute to territorial efforts to recompose labour power? These ae only some of 
the questions that are raised by the mensuration techniques used in social science in Africa, but 
which are taken for granted in this ILO publication. 
Reviewed by Thomas D Shopo, Senior Research Fellow, Zimbabwe Institute of Development 
Studies, Harare. 
References 
David Knight, (1981) Ordering the World: A History of Classifying Man, Burnett Books 
in association with Andre Deutsch, London, p 149. 
Communities in Crisis, Albert Cherns and Moshe Shelhav (eds), Gower Publishing Company, 
Aldershot, 1985 (pp 291 US$37) 
The various contributors to this book have presented some of the problems and concerns that 
plague communities in the late '80s. With their focus on 'communities in crisis', the authors 
examine both the problems faced by recently established 'designed' communities (such as the 
kibbutzim of Israel), as well as the malaise of post- industrial urban communities elsewhere. Part 
1 of the book is devoted to an analysis of community changes that have taken place in Israel; Part 
2 concerns itself with contrasting cases of communities struggling to survive: two examples 
feature urban situations, one an industrial city in New York State and the other an industrial 
suburb in Edinburgh in Scotland, and there is a rural example from Norway. Part 3 presents a 
methodological study of workplace participatory research, the quality of working life in 
kibbutzim, the relationship of the mentally handicapped to the wider community and finally the 
problems faced by Bedouin nomads in Israel-. Interspaced throughout the book are chapters of 
discussion and interviews which provide some further insight into the articles.