FAMINE IN AFRICA

In the second half of the twentieth century, sub-Saharan Africa stood out as the region of the world with the slowest growth in agricultural production and the highest rate of population growth. Its population also suffers from the highest rates of undernutrition worldwide. The combination of a poorly nourished but rapidly growing population increases the region's vulnerability to food crises, both natural and man-made. Other factors, however, are needed to explain why periodic famines have struck Africa south of the Sahara in the twentieth century more frequently than other regions. Table 1 summarizes the recent African experience.

Context

Famines figure prominently in African history. John Iliffe has described famine conditions during the colonial period in eastern and southern Africa and Michael Watts has discussed the complex relationships between colonial policies and household production that produced food crises in northern Nigeria continuing into the 1970s. Many food crises in the past were unlikely to have been noticed by outsiders. An exception may have been the francophone countries of the Sahel, where routine reporting of food prices and epidemics were part of the centralized administrative system of the colonial period. In the twenty-first century, the chances of food shortages being noticed are much greater thanks to networks such as the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) organized by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Many recent famines in Africa, as Joachim von Braun and others have documented, stem from wars that disrupted food production, distribution, and consumption systems. The food crises of the early 1970s that affected the whole Sahel region, however, seem to have been triggered by a series of exceptionally dry years in a period of longer-term reduction in annual rainfall amounts. Interannual rainfall variability increases as total amounts decline. Additional physical challenges to African food producers include tropical soils that are not conducive to high levels of perennial productivity. In the Sahel, cereals such as sorghum and millet contain much lower energy per unit of weight than maize, wheat, and other temperate climate cereals.

The challenges of the physical environment are compounded by under-capitalization of the agricultural sector and by institutional barriers such as land

TABLE 1

tenure and sharecropping arrangements that do not compensate individual farmers for productive improvements. Most Sahelian farmers rely heavily on manual labor and have very limited access to machinery even for plowing, seeding, or harvesting. In West Africa much of the cereal cultivation, especially rice, is in the hands of women, whose access to capital and loans is limited. Further, land is generally owned communally and variants of the open-field system still operate. Where available, land that is not in communal cultivation may be allocated to enterprising individuals by local leaders, but only for the time those individuals cultivate the field. In some communities, ethnicity and class restrict access to land, water, and the labor needed to farm. Probably most significant is the low level of development of commercial agriculture except in a few more favored areas. The small external market for millet and sorghum, and for the roots and tuber crops common in the forest belt, discourages the development of capital investments, ports, and communications to the interior.

Causes

The most common explanation of the causes of famine used to be ecological: The consumption needs of a growing population outstrip the capacity of local farming systems to produce food. The famine of the western Sahel in the early 1970s is a clear example of famine initiated by drought. The scholars von Braun, Tesfaye Teklu, and Patrick Webb have proposed a more complex model in which population growth and environmental changes contribute only to a small extent to food shortages. An important if understudied factor is the growth of the population of animals, particularly sheep and goats instead of cattle, that has contributed to rangeland deterioration and the relocation of pastoralists to increasingly marginal areas. In more recent case studies, including work by Alexander de Waal in Sudan, more emphasis is laid on institutional, organizational, and policy failures. Other precipitating causes of famine include civil wars and ethnic disputes. The low investment in roads and railways, which has been shown to prevent famine by allowing the speedy movement of food between markets, increases poor families' vulnerability to famine. Trade barriers (the constraints on some agricultural imports by the European Union, for example) and the penetration of North American agricultural exporters into African grain markets are additional factors contributing to inadequacies of domestic food production.

The economist Amartya Sen has mounted a strong challenge to the notion that famines are the result of absolute shortages of food. He argued that in most famines there is generally sufficient food, but some people lose the capacity to acquire food due to the collapse of the demand for their labor or the goods and services they produce. They thus lose their "entitlements" to purchase food, while others manage to retain control over dwindling food stocks. The people who are most affected are not the food producers themselves but those in the service trades in towns and cities whose customers, when times are hard, manage without the personal and professional services they offer.

Policy Responses

Sen's work has greatly influenced policies on food aid generally and on famine relief in particular. Although food is still sent to relieve famine in Africa, many donors now focus on restoring people's entitlements through food-for-work schemes or other forms of public works support. This response is based on the successful famine relief measures adopted in the Indian subcontinent, where massive government intervention has prevented a major famine since the Bangladesh famine of 1973. Jean

FIGURE 1

Drèze and Sen have written extensively on the differing origins and policy responses in the Indian sub-continent and in Africa. The notion of food security is now well established and a variety of policies have been implemented to ensure that food is accessible to the poor and to vulnerable subpopulations through micro-credit enterprises and local food reserves. But many of the underlying causes of famine, including poor transport facilities and the undercapitalization of agriculture, have yet to be addressed. Bodies such as the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya and Ethiopia, the West African Rice Development Association, and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture as well as other members of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) have made significant contributions to increasing the productivity of some important tropical food crops.

Effects

Disastrous mortality is the effect popularly associated with famine. Detailed studies such as Sen's work on the Bengal famine of 1943, however, show that most of the excess deaths attributable to famine occur not at the time of most acute food shortage but in the ensuing period. The general conclusion, stemming from work by de Waal on Darfur, Sudan from 1984 and 1985, is that famine is just one among many symptoms of social and economic disruption. The excess death rates are then seen largely as the result of a subsequent "health crisis" in which infectious and parasitic diseases cause the excess deaths. This and the entitlements idea has led to extensive criticism of the food aid "industry" as an inappropriate means to relieve both short-and long-term hunger in poor countries. Rather than focusing on inadequacies of food availability, public attention is now directed more to the distributional effects of economic crises and their consequences–including famine.

Famines have periodically driven people off the land or have forced some reorganization of agriculture, generally away from pastoralism and into both subsistence and commercial agriculture. The urban bias in development has worked against attracting well-educated people and their capital into the agriculture sector. Westernization of the urban diet has reduced the demand for locally produced foodstuffs among those people able to pay the highest prices for food. Sub-Saharan Africa is thus now highly dependent on imported food.

The full implications of widespread undernutrition in Africa are impossible to gauge, but the effects of undernutrition in pregnancy are well known and contribute to the generally low birth weights and poor growth curves of African children. Large proportions of both women and their children are seriously undernourished in the Sahelian countries, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, and indicators of undernutrition also signal serious deficiencies in other African countries, as shown in Figure 1. Undernutrition and periodic starvation adversely affect both the physical and the mental development of children. Fecundity is not affected: even among poorly nourished women, total fertility rates as high as eight children have been recorded.

See also: Food Supply and Population; Nomads; Nutrition and Calorie Consumption.

bibliography

De Waal, Alexander. 1989. Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan 1984–1985. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Drèze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. 1989. Hunger and Public Action. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Iliffe, John. 1990. Famine in Zimbabwe, 1890–1960. Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press.

Mortimore, Michael. 1989. Adapting to Drought: Farmers, Famines and Desertification in West Africa. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

Sen, Amartya. 1981. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

von Braun, Joachim, Tesfaye Teklu, and Patrick Webb. 1999. Famine in Africa: Causes, Responses and Prevention. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press for the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Watts, Michael. 1983. Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Allan G. Hill