Blain's Farm & Fleet is a regional chain of 38 retail stores in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa.
Even so, work by Yang and others has proved that senior leaders in Beijing knew of the famine as early as 1958. To distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward, Mao warned colleagues a year later. When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death.
China pulled 680m people out of misery in 1981-2010, and reduced its extreme-poverty rate from 84% in 1980 to 10% now. That is one reason why (as the briefing explains) it will be harder to take a billion more people out of extreme poverty in the next 20 years than it was to take almost a billion out in the past 20.