Barbara Schreiner

Stella Bellamy is contemporary, middle-aged, chubby, grumpy, single and very funny. She has learned that when life gives you lemons, forget making lemonade: drink gin and tonic. Clutching a gin in one hand and an acerbic and hilarious sense of humour in the other, she travels to fascinating places, experiencing the modern world and learning about ancient history, while exploring her own emotional journey through life. Whether in foreign airports or hotels, aeroplanes, tuk-tuks or crumbling taxis, or the comfort of her own home, Stella provides a poignant yet funny view of a diverse and colourful world. Stella revisits her complex emotional past and present, from her teenage relationship with a friend of her father's, her fear of intimacy, to her relationship with her dying mother from hell. Stella takes the reader on a funny, fascinating and fabulous journry.

The Travels and Travails of Stella Bellamy

Lyla Mehta

Theib Oweis

Claudia Ringler

Shiney Varghese

This book is the first comprehensive effort to bring together Water, Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) in a way that goes beyond the traditional focus on irrigated agriculture. Apart from looking at the role of water and sanitation for human well-being, it proposes alternative and more locally appropriate ways to address complex water management and governance challenges from the local to global levels against a backdrop of growing uncertainties. The authors challenge mainstream supply-oriented and neo-Malthusian visions that argue for the need to increase the land area under irrigation in order to feed the world’s growing population. Instead, they argue for a reframing of the debate concerning production processes, waste, food consumption and dietary patterns whilst proposing alternative strategies to improve water and land productivity, putting the interests of marginalized and disenfranchized groups upfront. The book highlights how accessing water for FSN can be challenging for small-holders, vulnerable and marginalized women and men, and how water allocation systems and reform processes can negatively affect local people’s informal rights. The book argues for the need to improve policy coherence across water, land and food and is original in making a case for strengthening the relationship between the human rights to water and food, especially for marginalized women and men. It will be of great interest to practitioners, students and researchers working on water and food issues.

Water for Food Security, Nutrition and Social Justice

Rashid M. Hassan

One of the early set of reforms that South Africa embarked on after emerging from apartheid was in the water sector, following a remarkable, consultative process. The policy and legal reforms were comprehensive and covered almost all aspects of water management including revolutionary changes in defining and allocating rights to water, radical reforms in water management and supply institutions, the introduction of the protection of environmental flows, and major shifts in charging for water use and in the provision of free basic water. Over ten years of implementation of these policy and legislative changes mean that valu­able lessons have already been learned and useful experiences gained in the challenge of effective water resources management and water services provision in a middle income country.

Barbara Schreiner

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