Revised Research Paper Assignment Due In Class May 5, 2004 No Electronic Submissions The objective of the research paper is to allow you to learn about hunger and poverty in ONE DEVELOPING COUNTRY. By focusing on just one country, you will be able to go into greater depth and detail than possible in class or in the texts. You do NOT need to get my approval for your choice of country or topic, but I will be glad to talk with you (or e-mail with you) about them at any time, the sooner the better. The paper is worth 20 points. The paper should have two main parts: (1) An overview of hunger and poverty; (2) Topic of your choice to cover in greater detail. The first part should be one page of bullets. The second part should be 5 - 6 pages of text. PART 1. AN OVERVIEW OF HUNGER AND POVERTY in the country selected, following, as closely as possible, the main topics of the course. Your outline might look like this: a. biology of malnutrition (e.g., what are the main nutritional problems in the country you've chosen?); b. national (and maybe internal regional) data on dimensions of hunger and poverty - past trends, current situation, prospects; c. food production -- history, recent changes, prospects, problems, constraints, etc.; d. natural resource/environmental constraints, problems, opportunities; e. population growth -- history, recent changes, prospects, etc.; f. economic policies, other policies; g. programs for feeding, for food production, for disease control, for development, etc. PART 2. TOPIC OF YOUR CHOICE IN YOUR CHOSEN COUNTRY The topic must, of course relate to hunger or poverty. You may want to delve more deeply into one of the topic areas covered in part one above; or you may select another topic; or focus on one specific program to alleviate hunger/poverty or a specific problem regarding poverty and hunger. The choice is yours. REFERENCES Seek guidance from "our" Steenbock librarians, Bev Phillips and Bob Sessions, who came to class last month. You need to use at least five refereed print publications — journal articles and/or books — in addition to internet references. The print references must contribute, not just be window dressing.Your internet references must show who has posted the information AND provide your evaluation of the source's objectivity and reliability. Anything and everything goes up on the net by all sorts of organizations and people. If you use net resources, you must know enough about the site to be able to evaluate the information — reliable? objective? reflecting a point of view? advocacy? — and you need to supplement your citation with a note about this. It is sufficient to simply say that it is an official government or UN site or the site of a well known organization such as IFPRI. If not, then explain more about the site and your evaluation of it. Here are some sites to get you started on the net. Some of these have good search engines through which you may find useful papers to download. IFPRI -- http://www.ifpri.org/ FAO -- http://www.fao.org/ FAO data - use FAOSTAT through the Reference page on the library website UNDP - http://www.undp.org/ World Bank -- http://www.worldbank.org/ World Resources Institute -- http://www.wri.org/wri/ World Watch (Lester Brown) -- http://www.worldwatch.org/ The electronic reserves on the our library page have examples of good papers from past years. They are on Brazil, China, Mexico, Philippines, and Chad. Get started soon. If you have trouble getting started or get stuck, let me know so I can try to help. Ken