FAMINE

Famine

Famine

Introduction

Hunger and famine dominate contemporary international images of Africa. The “famine story” is part of the repertoire of every foreign correspondent and is avidly promoted by many voluntary relief agencies. Official statistics also amount to a litany of woe. African hunger is framed in a powerful narrative that implies that only outsiders can save the continent's people. The realities of famine are more complex. However, the basic agenda of research on hunger is set by these powerful representations, and almost every writer at one time or another makes use of the emotive language of helpless starving Africans and their foreign saviors. This paper discusses famine and discuss its cause.

Discussion

The extent of media coverage obscures a remarkable and enduring absence of reliable information about the prevalence of death through famine in Africa. Demographic information concerning famine mortality in Africa is scanty in the extreme; no study approaches European or South Asian standards in terms of sample size or statistical rigor. Only a small number of general conclusions can therefore be forwarded.[1]

One is that most famine deaths in Africa are concentrated among children. A second is that the paramount cause of death is epidemic disease, principally measles (though less so than in past years), malaria, and diarrheal infections. A third is that the decrease in births due to lower fertility as a result of famine is as numerically significant as the rise in deaths. A fourth is that, reflecting their greater biological resilience, women are in general less likely to die than men. Fifth, the most important demographic response to famine is mass migration. Finally, famine deaths are many fewer than are commonly assumed: predictions forwarded by international organizations are invariably exaggerations, and often gross ones. In purely statistical terms, Africans are far less likely to die for famine-related reasons than from one of the range of endemic diseases in the continent. Some famines have even occurred without any excess mortality at all: the Sahelian famine of the early 1970s is arguably a case in point. In the largest famine of the late twentieth century, 1982 to 1985 in Ethiopia, perhaps 400,000 to 600,000 people died. [2]

Overall food production figures such as those produced regularly by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the United States Department of Agriculture are subject to a similar critique. In particular, the importance of many of the foodstuffs that poor people depend upon is minimized, or they are omitted altogether. Wild foods that sustain millions of Africans after every poor harvest are neglected completely. However, it is incontrovertible that African food production has stagnated since the 1970s and malnutrition remains a serious and widespread problem.

The Millennium Development Goals, adopted by Heads of State at the United Nations in 2000, include a commitment to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger. The Millennium Project, headed by Jeffrey Sachs, envisions an increase in food production through applying Green Revolution technologies as the principal mechanism for achieving this. Critics contend that such approaches have been tried before ...