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Focus

Famines Past, Famines Future

Cormac O Grada

ABSTRACT

Famine, like poverty, has always been with us. No region and no century hasbeen immune. Its scars economic, psychological and political can longoutlast its immediate impact on mortality and health. Famines are a hallmark

of economic backwardness, and were thus more likely to occur in the pre-industrialized past. Yet the twentieth century suffered some of the mostdevastating ever recorded. That century also saw shifts in both the causesand symptoms of famine. This new centurys famines have been small

by historical standards, and the threat of major ones seemingly confined toever-smaller pockets of the globe. Are these shifts a sign of hope for thefuture?

INTRODUCTION

Words will never fully convey the horrors of famine, although many ac-counts, such as the following excerpt from Patrick Walkers description ofScotland in the 1690s (cited in Cullen, 2010: 123), have tried hard:

Deaths and burials were so many and common that the living were wearied in the burying of

the dead. I have seen corpses drawn in sleds, many got neither coffin nor winding-sheet. . .I

have seen some walking about the sun-setting, and tomorrow about six a-clock in the summer

morning found dead in their houses, without making any stir at their death, their lead lying

upon their hand, with as great a smell as if they had been four days dead, the mice or rats

having eaten a great part of their hands and arms.

Walker, a devout Presbyterian who made a living as a pedlar, dwelt on themacabre in order to remind his compatriots of how God punished grievoussin. Other accounts of famine have sought to inspire compassion rather thanfear, as in the case of BBC reporter Michael Buerks famous television newsreport on the 198485 Ethiopian famine. In October 1984 Buerk referred towhat he had just seen in Ethiopia as a biblical famine, now, in the twentiethcentury. . .the closest thing to hell on earth. But the bibles own depictions

An earlier version of this paper was given as a Miegunyah Public Lecture, University of

Melbourne (3 June 2010). I am grateful to Stephen Wheatcroft and to three referees for helpful

comments.

Development and Change 42(1): 4969. C 2011 International Institute of Social Studies.Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA

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of famine are, if anything, more gruesome than the footage shown on theBBC or, indeed, what Buerk saw in Ethiopia. The Old Testament bookof Deuteronomy (28: 5357) describes the effects of a siege in the seventh

century BC as follows:

You will then eat your own offspring, the flesh of the sons and daughters that the Lord your

God has given you. The man among you who is by nature tender and sensitive will turn

against his brother, his beloved wife, and his remaining children. He will withhold from all

of them his childrens flesh that he is eating (since there is nothing else left). Likewise, the

most tender and delicate of your women, who would never think of putting even the sole of

her foot on the ground because of her daintiness, will turn against her beloved husband, her

sons and daughters, and will secretly eat her newborn children (since she has nothing else).

And it seems almost as if the narrator of the following account of famine

in Ukraine in 193233 had just been reading the Old Testament:

There were cases when they buried half living people. Good people, leave me alone. I am

not dead, the people used to cry. Go to hell! You want us to come tomorrow again? was the

reply. In the cemetery they took from the dead everything that had some value and then threw

them into the pit. Thus it followed every day. Every day there were cases of cannibalism.

Mothers killed their children and ate them up. In such villages as Kordyshivka, Soshenske,

[and] Pytiiv, cannibalism was very widespread. It was awfully dangerous for a person who

looked good to go there. I dont know why people change so much. Ukrainians are very

generous and very kind people, but during that hunger they looked like wolves.1

Today such graphic accounts provoke a variety of responses: disbelief,revulsion and pity. Famines symptoms vary for example, convincingevidence for cannibalism in the Scottish and Ethiopian cases cited above islacking but they are always horrific. Are they likely to recur soon? Canthe history of past famines help answer this question? In what follows, I firstoutline some key findings of recent research into the symptoms, causes andchanging nature of famine. I then discuss two long-term consequences offamine. One of these famine memory is frequently reflected in publiccommentary, while the other the long-run medical and economic impacts

of famine on the cohort born during it has attracted increasing attentionfrom scholars from several disciplines. Finally I turn to the recent history offamine and discuss what this might bode for the likelihood of more faminesduring the next decade or two.

THE CAUSES, SYMPTOMS AND CHANGING NATURE OF FAMINE

Natural Causes and Human Agency

Parodoxically, the century that witnessed the greatest famine on record alsowitnessed the virtual elimination (for now at least) of major famines. The

1. Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, Case 333, available at: http://pds.

lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/5608007?n=25 (accessed 15 April 2010).

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Famines Past, Famines Future 51

Great Leap Forward famine of 195961 was Chinas last. The era of faminesin the former Soviet Union came to an end in 194647, while Indias lastfamine was in the state of Maharashtra in 197273, and the worlds most

recent biblical famine was arguably that described by Michael Buerk inEthiopia.

Most historical famines, including that in Maharashtra, would not haveoccurred but for significant and, more than likely, repeated harvest shortfallsin a context of economic backwardness. Yet the totalitarianism of Stalin,Mao and their imitators is blamed for the Chinese and Soviet famines,and many other twentieth century famines (Ellman, 2000). The distinction

between famines from natural causes and other famines is useful, and itseems clear that human agency played a greater role in the major famines of

the twentieth century than in earlier famines. However, the distinction canbe pressed too far. In this respect Ralph Thaxtons recent compelling andmoving account of Da Fo, a village in Henan province, during the GreatLeap Forward famine of 195961 has a particular resonance.

By way of context, Thaxton notes that living standards in Da Fo todayare on par with those in rural Albania and the Philippines (Thaxton, 2008:7). A more appropriate comparison is that between living standards in thesame countries on the eve of the famine. In terms of GDP per head in themid-1950s, estimates of the Philippiness advantage over China range from

over two to one to about five to one (Table 1). Moreover, Da Fo is located inwhat was and remains one of Chinas poorest regions. According to the PennWorld Tables in 1957 China was the second poorest country in the world;in both 1952 and 1955 it was the poorest (Heston et al., 2006; Maddison,2009).

An analysis of famine in China before and after 1949 must not ignore theextreme economic backwardness that made it vulnerable to harvest short-falls, man-made and otherwise. This, after all, was the land that WalterMallory had dubbed the land of famine in the 1920s and where in the early

1930s the peasant, in the memorable simile of R.H. Tawney, was like a manstanding up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is enough to drownhim (Mallory, 1926; Tawney, 1964/1932: 77). China cannot have beenthat

Table 1. Real GDP per Head in China, Albania and the Philippines

Year Philippines Albania China

1950 1070 1001 448

1955 1358 1181 577

2005 2732 3508 5578

Source: Maddison (2009)

1950 251 n/a n/a

1955 357 n/a 67

2004 4344 5056 5772

Source: Heston et al. (2006)

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different in the 1950s: by the late Angus Maddisons reckoning ChineseGDP per head was no higher then than it had been in the late 1920s andearly 1930s (Maddison, 2009). Surely, then, Chinas underdevelopment and

consequent vulnerability to harvest shortfalls cannot be entirely excluded inaccounting for the Great Leap famine?

Ironically, Thaxtons account (2008: 26) of an earlier famine in Henanhas an exclusively traditional emphasis on natural factors: In the spring of1920, a severe drought gripped the lower part of the North China Plain, set-tling over northern Henan, western Shandong, and southern Hebei provinces.This long drought extended into the spring of 1921. As a result, several mil-lion farmers perished in what came to be called the North China Famineof 1921. Nor, of course, is it correct either to blame all earlier famines

on over-population and to exclude the role of human agency. Many werecaused or exacerbated by wars, and much or at least some of the excessmortality associated with others might have been avoided by more effectivehuman action, as in Ireland in the 1840s or India in the 1870s. The belief thatelites might have done more to avert or mitigate disaster goes back muchfurther than the nineteenth century; and so also does the sense that theirlegitimacy hinged on the insurance they offered against disaster (O Grada,2009: 1968).

Causes of Death

During the twentieth century famine also changed the way it kills. Tradi-tionally, the immediate cause of most famine deaths was infectious diseasesrather than literal starvation. The exceptions are few and recent; they relatemainly to war-time famines in relatively advanced economic settings suchas in Greece in 194243, Leningrad during the blockade, in the Warsawghetto before its destruction in AprilMay 1943, in the western Nether-lands in 194445. During those famines the main causes of death shifted

from typhus, typhoid fever, relapsing fever, dysentery and malaria to hungeroedema, muscular and alimentary dystrophy and pneumonia. The shift wasdue to a combination of improved public health and more effective medicalknowledge and technology. At the beginning of the Leningrad blockade in1941, the Germans were terrified that their soldiers would be contaminated

by epidemics if the city was occupied (Jones, 2008: 41). The spring thaw in1942 presented a grave epidemiological threat to Leningraders, but the publichealth regime was equal to the threat. By mid-March over 100,000 totteringinhabitants, mostly women, were doing several hours of street cleaning a

day, and the number continued to rise (ibid.: 244). This was not the case inBengal in 194344, or in Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s. Even in destitutecountries today, medical know-how and assistance can achieve much moreduring famines than in the past.

A conundrum here for famine specialists is the proximate causes ofdeath during the greatest famine of all, the Chinese famine of 195961. In

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pre-revolutionary China, as might be expected, famine mortality was of thetraditional kind and infectious diseases such as cholera and typhus wereendemic. But most accounts of the cause of death in 195961 imply death

by starvation rather than by disease, and Ralph Thaxton links most deathsin Da Fo in 1960 to what he dubs oedema. This is also the finding ofthe most detailed study of this issue to date, that by Yixin Chen based onan analysis of public health gazetteers from Anhui province (Chen, 2010;O Grada, 2009: 121; Thaxton, 2008: 209, 253). Does this mean that theMaoist public health campaigns of the early and mid-1950s influenced thecauses of death during the Great Leap famine, but not the death toll itself?

Markets and Famines

Human agency encompasses not just governance and culture but also insti-tutions such as markets. It is a long way from Dublin to Dacca but anyonewho studies famines is confronted almost immediately by the Great BengalFamine of 194344, a famine which, thanks to the work of Nobel laureateAmartya Sen, has become almost paradigmatic. In Poverty and Famines(1981) and elsewhere Sen proposed and made popular an interpretation offamines that placed the emphasis less on food availability per sethan on theimpact of market malfunction on what he dubbed exchange entitlements, orthe purchasing power of those who bought rather than produced food.

Sens focus on the distributional aspects of famine suffering was extremelyvaluable. He drove the point home by describing several instances whereso he claimed famine occurred despite no abnormal reduction in foodoutput. By implication those famines were zero-sum outcomes, with winnersand losers, the winners being mainly those with access to land and credit.This perspective highlighted the scope for redistribution but also helped in-tellectualize, albeit quite unintentionally, the populist conviction throughouthistory that speculators, hoarders and profiteers were responsible for turningfood shortages into famine.

However, a competing intellectual tradition, dating back to Adam Smithand the French economists, rejects such a possibility. This is from thelocusclassicus:

Without intending the interest of the people, the inland corn dealer is necessarily led, by a

regard to his own interest, to treat them, even in years of scarcity, pretty much in the same

manner as the prudent master of a vessel is sometimes obliged to treat his crew. When he

foresees that provisions are likely to run short, he puts them upon short allowance. . . The

unlimited, unrestrained freedom of the corn trade, as it is the only effectual preventative of

the miseries of a famine, so it is the best palliative of the inconveniencies of a dearth; for theinconveniencies of a real scarcity cannot be remedied; they can only be palliated. No trade

deserves more the full protection of the law, and no trade requires it so much; because no

trade is so much exposed to popular odium. (Smith, 1776: Book 4, Ch. 5)

Now, if markets move food from where it is relatively cheap to whereit is relatively expensive, they are probably saving lives. But are markets

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the effectual preventative that Smith claimed? My own research points toinstances where markets in the past did not exacerbate famine, although theevidence is by no means all one way (O Grada, 2005; for a celebrated case

study pointing in the other direction, see Ravallion, 1987a). In nineteenthcentury Ireland and India, where Smiths views held sway and governmentsdid not interfere with trade, the trouble usually was not that markets func-tioned perversely, but that they worked too slowly. In both cases, the lack offood encouraged some canny merchants to import more and export less food.But existing transport technologies meant that it took months for them torespond, and the uncertainties accompanying that very delay deterred manyother more risk-averse merchants from trying their luck (O Grada, 1999:Ch. 4; Ravallion, 1987b). So markets were no panacea either because, to

quote economist John Maynard Keynes out of context, in the long run weare all dead.

NGOs and the international media are still prone to blame famine on mar-ket malfunction, but evidence that reduced market integration or excessivestorage made famines worse in the recent past is weak. In the case of Niger in2005, for example, a study of food markets by Corni et al. (2008) rejects theclaim that the rise in consumer prices stemmed from market balkanizationduring the crisis, while another study by Jenny Aker (2008a, 2008b) findsthat grain markets in Niger were more integrated than normal during drought

years such as 2005. Thus, contrary to media claims, markets did not fail inNiger during the 2005 crisis. Today, thanks to huge reductions in the cost oftransport and information, markets have the power to move food to whereit is most needed more effectively than in the past. The policy implicationsare important: yes to transfers of food or purchasing power to those at risk,no to restrictions on the movements of foodstuffs.

LONG-RUN CONSEQUENCES

A Kashmiri proverb states that famine goes, but the stains remain. Evenwhere famines are a thing of the past, they often have an after-life. Thissection focuses briefly on two aspects of the long-run impact of famine.

The first concerns collective memory of famine. A key theme of thesesquicentennial commemorations of the Great Irish Famine in the mid-1990s was that the Irish everywhere shared a collective or common memoryof that catastrophe. The inclusive, first person plural language of so muchof the commemorative rhetoric we are a first world country with a third

world memory of famine, dislocation, and exile. . .Our own famine echoesare constantly with us, an event which traumatised this country, thiscountry, a country with a memory, our own, our memory suggestedcollective memory in spades. An event which pitted me against you wasremembered as us and we. But a divisive disaster that pitted not only the

poor against the rich, but neighbour against neighbour and young against

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old, was hardly promising material for a communal, collective memory. Itwas almost as if the famine had caused virtually all those living in Irelandduring the famine to perish or emigrate, with identical knock-on effects on

their traumatized descendants. But how could the memory of such a divisivedisaster be truly collective? Surely, only by glossing over and filtering outmuch of the history of the famine? Collective memory, of course, alwaystells us more about the present than the past. By contrast, history and thisincludes folklore and oral history is complex and multifaceted, thoughhardly value-free either (O Grada, 2006: Ch. 12).

Nowhere today is famine memory more contested than in Ukraine. For-mer president Viktor Yushchenko championed a collective memory of themassive famine of 193233 what came to be called the Holomodor in the

1980s as genocide, but his successor Viktor Yanukovich prefers to de-scribe it as a tragedy. Some bloggers were quick to note that Yanukovichsfirst act after becoming president was to remove the Holodomor dedicationon the presidential website. In Ukraine memory competes with history, and

breeds an embittered victimhood stakes that sometimes places the famineon a par with the Jewish Holocaust.

In neighbouring Moldova too, famine memory is fiercely contested. In late2006, the Moldovan legislature rejected an attempt to provide a political andlegal appreciation of the 194647 Moldovan famine. One opposition deputy

claimed that the famine was the result of the premeditated policy promotedby the Stalinist regime while another argued that the refusal of the majorityto engage on the issue was a blasphemy towards the victims of those years.A government supporter retorted that while there was no denying that therehad been a famine, it had a pragmatic explanation historically demonstrated:the difficult post-war period, the poor crops, and the drought. Stalin sharedthe blame, but only insofar as he did not react in time.2

There are times when, as the American writer and activist David Rieff(2010) has recently argued, it is better to forget:

The wars of the Yugoslav Succession were inflamed by remembrance above all the Serb

remembrance of the defeat at Kosovo Polje in 1389. In the hills of Bosnia, I learned to hate

but above all to fear collective historical memory. In its appropriation of history, which had

been my abiding passion and refuge since childhood, collective memory made history itself

seem like nothing so much as an arsenal full of the weapons needed to keep wars going or

peace tenuous and cold. What I saw after Bosnia, in Rwanda, in Kosovo, in IsraelPalestine,

and in Iraq, gave me no basis for changing my mind.

Over a century ago Irish politician and social reformer Horace Plunkett

(1904) famously urged that Anglo-Irish history is for Englishmen to re-member, for Irishmen to forget. For history read collective memory.

A second, quite different long-term result of famine is an extension of thefetal origins hypothesis, that is, the claim that malnutrition in the womb and

2. For contrasting perspectives on this famine, see Zima (1999) and Wheatcroft (2009).

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in early infancy compromises health in adulthood. The earliest famine studyto focus on this issue was an analysis of the long-term impact of the DutchHunger Winter of 194445. Inevitably most famines do not yield the kind

of data needed to test for birth-cohort effects, but subsequent studies havelooked at the Dutch Potato Famine of 184647, the Great Finnish Famine of186768, the Leningrad siege-famine of 194143, and the Chinese famineof 195961. Until very recently such studies were primarily exercises inmedical history, published in medical journals. They identified links between

being born or being young during or in the wake of a famine, on the one hand,and ailments in later life ranging from heart disease and cancer to mentalillness and obesity, on the other. A study based on evidence from Anhui

province, for example, finds that children conceived in 195961 stood twice

as high a risk of becoming schizophrenics as those conceived either beforeor after the famine (Wang et al., 2010), while evidence from St Petersburglinks malnutrition during puberty with increased incidence of heart diseaseand increased mortality from strokes (Sparen et al., 2004).

More recently, economists have made their own distinctive contributionto this literature, by drawing attention to the economic consequences of

being born in a famine cohort. Thus, a second study of the Chinese faminefinds that for those who were one year old at its onset, exposure on averagereduced adult height by 2 per cent, weight by 6 per cent, weight-for-height

and upper arm circumference by 4 per cent, labour supply by 7 per cent, andschooling by 3 per cent. A third study finds that being in the famine cohortincreased male illiteracy by 7 per cent, the probability of not working by 2.4

per cent, and the probability of being disabled by 13 per cent. Men were 3.5per cent less likely to be married, and 5 per cent more likely to have nevermarried (Almond et al., 2007; Meng and Qian, 2006). And there is evidencethat the damage extends to the third generation: yet another study of theChinese famine finds that children of a parent born during the famine weresmaller and lighter, and that the effect was greater for boys than for girls

(Fung and Ma, 2009). Such findings imply that the human cost of faminesis greater than previously thought.

FAMINE, WHERE IS THY STING?

A study published a decade ago (Devereux, 2000) claimed that famine wasresponsible for seventy million deaths during the twentieth century, or morethan either world war.3 But the previous century was probably worse, at

least relatively speaking: 30 million is a lower-bound estimate of faminemortality in India and China alone between 1870 and 1902, while a figureof fifty million dead might not be unrealistic (Davis, 2001: 7).

3. According to Wikipedia, World Wars I and II exacted tolls of 37 million and 60 million,

respectively.

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Recent famines, by contrast, have been small. Since the high-profilecrises of Malawi in 2002 and of Niger in 2005 famine has not been front-

page news. The natural disasters that make the headlines nowadays are no

longer famines, but earthquakes. The death tolls in Malawi and Niger shrinkinto insignificance compared to those of earthquakes in Turkey in August1999, in Java in May 2006, in Sichuan in May 2008, in Haiti in January2010, or of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004. Morever, sincethe 1980s the human cost of famine in Africa has been dwarfed by that ofHIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS kills about 2 million annually in Africa, more thanany African famine on record. In Malawi and in Niger in the mid-2000s, theannual death tolls from HIV/AIDS were 80,000 and 7,000, respectively.4

So has famine lost its deadly sting? Forecasting future prospects for the

eradication of famine is a mugs game. Stanford University biologist PaulEhrlichs doomsday forecasts of the 1960s are the most notorious casesin point (Ehrlich, 1968). His confident prediction of global famine in the1970s hundreds of millions of people. . .going to starve to death in spiteof any crash programs embarked on now got it almost exactly wrong. In1980 a second expert wrote of a future globe-girdling Future Famine Zone(Dando, 1980), while in 1967 a volume with the disturbing title Famine1975! Americas Decision: Who Will Survivedefined India, Egypt and Haitias beyond help and therefore not worth assisting (Paddock and Paddock,

1967). It was in this gloomy context that ecologist Garrett Hardin (1974)proposed his lifeboat ethics: the case against helping the poor whereby thereally hopeless cases should be allowed to drown (O Grada, 2009: 26061).

Less famously, perhaps, in 1963 the Indian state of Maharashtra passeda law called The Maharashtra Deletion of the Term Famine Act, whichremoved all references to famine in statutes referring to public relief. The

preamble reads:

WHEREAS the agricultural situation in the State is constantly watched by the State Gov-

ernment, and relief measures as warranted by the situation are provided as soon as signs ofscarcity conditions are apparent, so that there is no scope for famine conditions to develop:

AND WHEREAS the term famine in the Bombay State Famine Relief Fund Act, 1958

and other laws on the subject in their application to the State has now become obsolete, and

requires therefore to be deleted therefrom; It is hereby enacted in the Fourteenth Year of the

Republic of India as follows. . ..5

Less than a decade later, Maharashtra was struck by Indias last famine (sofar), in which at very least 70,000 people perished (Dyson and Maharatna,1992).

With such caveats in mind, is there any point in peering ahead? Yes,insofar as studying the past helps identify what makes famine more likely.

4. WHO data. GDP per head is a good predictor of the countries at risk from famine within

Africa, but not of the death rate from HIV/AIDS.5. http://bombayhighcourt.nic.in/libweb/acts/1963.40.html (accessed 10 April 2010).

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Table 2. Governance, GDP and Life Expectancy

A. Correlations with GDP per capita

Index World Africa Asia L America Other

Corruption 0.734 0.358 0.820 0.566 0.760Democracy +0.627 +0.096 +0.566 +0.412 +0.737

Press Freedom +0.503 0.013 +0.265 +0.196 +0.737

B. Correlations with Life Expectancy at Birth

Index World Africa Asia L America Other

Corruption 0.632 0.275 0.734 0.572 0.804

Democracy +0.716 0.151 +0.510 +0.273 +0.790

Press Freedom +0.393 0.283 +0.248 0.029 +0.748

Source: UNDP http://www.worldaudit.org/democracy.htm

What follows, accordingly, is less a forecast than a review of those fac-tors that would affect the likelihood of famine over the next decade ortwo.

First Some Bad News

It is not easy to conjure exceptions to Amartya Sens law that democ-racy and famine dont mix (Sen, 1999). Malawi in 2002 might seem to beone a Malawian member of parliament declared at the height of the crisisthat if we dont handle the food crisis well, it will be difficult to convince

people to vote for us but that would be stretching the definitions ofboth democracy and famine.6 Maharashtra in 197273 offers another par-tial exception, although accounts of that famine stress how much worseit might have been but for the relief efforts of the authorities (Dreze andSen, 1989: 12633). Recent evidence from famines last redoubts suggests

that change is in the right direction but very slow. The problem is thatwhile democracy may prevent famine, democracy is also less likely, andless likely to last, in environments where famine is a risk. Table 2 offersone admittedly crude measure of the link between the quality of gover-nance and economic development. The correlation between GDP per headand life expectancy at birth, on the one hand, and measures of good gov-ernance, on the other, is clear. Thus, for example, the correlation betweenan index of corruption and life expectancy across Asian countries is a strik-ing 0.734, while that between democracy and GDP per head globally is

+0.627.The second piece of bad news concerns climate change. The link between

adverse climate change and increased vulnerability to drought and famineis obvious and much commented on. The apparent failure of politics to

6. Cited in Nnoaham (2008). More generally, see Hall-Matthews (2007).

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deliver on this issue leaves no room for complacency. What of economics?Two centuries ago economics was known as the dismal science; today, ifanything, it leans some would say too far in the other direction. In

the spirit of the celebrated wager pitting economist Julian Simon againstPaul Ehrlich a generation ago, economists are more inclined to rely on hu-man resilience and market forces in the struggle against climate changethan are meteorologists or environmentalists. In 1980 Ehrlich predicted thatthe real price of five commodity metals selected by him would rise dur-ing the following decade, reflecting increasing pressure on resources. Helost the bet. A recent exercise replicating the original SimonEhrlich wagerfor 19902005 produces the same outcome (Fitzpatrick and Spohn, 2009).Simon attributed his win to the ability of human agents to economize on the

metals through substitutes, and their discovery of new ways of producingthem. The question is not how climate change would affect our environ-ment, other things being equal, but how well mankind can adapt to thechallenge.

Not too much should be read into one famous wager, but history also offerssome mild reassurance to Simons bias towards optimism. A noteworthy ex-ample is the research of economic historians Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhodeon how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American agronomists andfarmers adapted wheat production to the harsher climate of the midwestern

United States. Olmstead and Rhode (2002) argue that the new hard red va-rieties developed and diffused in this period coped well with temperaturechanges of 2 to 5 degrees centigrade. Now, Africa is not North America,and adapting to colder climes may be technologically easier than adapting toglobal warming. But surely the OlmsteadRhode study hints at possibilitiesthat should not be ruled out.

The third piece of bad news is war. Throughout history wars have caused orexacerbated famine, and the experience of World War II highlights the vul-nerability of even relatively wealthy economies to total war. Today famine

is a serious threat only in places seriously threatened by war or self-imposedautarky. This claim finds corroboration in an annual list of countries requiringexternal food assistance compiled by the FAO, which also provides the mainreasons why aid is required. The FAO divides countries at risk into three cat-egories: those facing exceptional shortfalls in aggregate production/supplies;those suffering widespread lack of access, and those faced by severe lo-calized food insecurity. In Table 3, which refers to 2009, reasons associatedwith human institutions rather than adverse weather or poor crops per searegiven in bold italics. The data imply that, more often than not, the main rea-

sons given for food insecurity were civil conflict, poor governance, or the bur-den placed by HIV/AIDS. For added context, recent levels of the UN HumanDevelopment Index (HDI) and the total fertility rate (TFR) in the affectedcountries are also reported when available. A drawback of the table is the lackof time frame for the main reasons given, but the broader point still surelyholds.

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Table 3. Countries in Crisis Requiring External Assistance

Nature of Food Insecurity Main Reasons HDI Ranking TFR 2009

Exceptional shortfall in aggregate food production/suppliesKenya Adverse weather,lingering effects of

civil strife

144 4.56

Lesotho Low productivity,HIV/AIDS

pandemic

155 3.06

Somalia Conflict, economic crisis, adverse

weather

6.04

Swaziland Low productivity,HIV/AIDS

pandemic

141 3.45

Zimbabwe Problems of economic transition 3.19Iraq Conflictand inadequate rainfall 4.26

Widespread lack of access

Eritrea Adverse weather,IDPs, economic

constraints

164 4.72

Liberia War related damage 176 6.77

Mauritania Several years of drought 140 4.37

Sierra Leone War related damage 179 5.00

Afghanistan Conflict and insecurity, inadequate

rainfall

181 7.07

North Korea Economic constraints 1.85

Severe localized food insecurity

Burundi Civil strife, IDPs and returnees 174 6.80CAR Refugees, insecurity in parts 179 4.58

Chad Refugees, conflict 175 5.31Congo IDPs 136 4.49

Cote dIvoire Conflict related damage 163 4.46

DR Congo Civil strife, returnees 176 6.20

Ethiopia Adverse weather,insecurity in parts 171 6.12Guinea Refugees, conflict related damage 170 5.20

Guinea-Bissau Localized insecurity 173 4.65

Sudan Civil strife (Darfur), insecurity

(southern Sudan), localized crop

failure

150 4.23

Uganda Localized crop failure,insecurity 157 6.77

Bangladesh Cyclones 146 2.74

Iran Past drought 88 2.04Myanmar Past cyclone 138 2.07

Nepal Poor market access and drought 144 2.64

Pakistan Conflict 141 3.52

Sri Lanka Conflict, IDPs 102 1.99

Timor-Leste IDPs 162 6.53

Source:http://www.fao.org/docrep/012/ai484e/ai484e02.htm; CIA; UNDP.

Malawi and Niger

The recent crises in Malawi and Niger contain some lessons about the his-tory and, hopefully, the future of famine. Malawi was the epicentre of a

broader food crisis threatening southern Africa in 200102. In April 2002Malawis president declared a state of emergency and asked for US$ 21 mil-lion to deal with a crisis that had put three-quarters of the population at risk.

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UN agencies and NGOs set about addressing Malawis worst food crisisin half a century.7 Reports followed of people resorting to substitute foodssuch as banana roots, boiled maize husks and pumpkin leaves, of an alarming

increase in the number of tuberculosis cases, and one of Malawis worstever cholera epidemics.8

Yet the resultant death toll was miniscule. In March 2002 an official sourcereported that around 100 Malawians had died from hunger-related illnessessince the beginning of the year, while NGO sources informed the BBC thatmore than 300 people ha[d] died of hunger in the previous last two months.9

In May the BBC reported that officially more than 100 people starved todeath by March in Kasungu, the worst affected district, in Malawis worst-ever famine. The higher estimates of at least 5001,000 and 1,0003,000

proposed by Stephen Devereux (2002a, 2002b) imply an increase of about1 per cent above the normal death rate.

In late 2005 Malawi was in trouble again, with aid agencies claiming thatat least five million people face starvation this winter, the World FoodProgramme declaring a funding shortfall of at least $70 million, and thegovernment warning that without outside help hundreds of thousands ofMalawians will die.10 Happily, no crisis materialized. Since 2005 a se-ries of favourable seasons and generous subsidies through cheap fertilizershave increased maize output substantially (WFP, 2009). By 2008/9 Malawi

was a net exporter of maize, and it was almost as if its food supply prob-lems were in the past. But if Malawis recent famines or near-famines have

been exaggerated, predicting the future on the basis of a few good years insuccession is equally foolhardy. Whether seed and fertilizer subsidies of-fer an enduring and sustainable cure for economic backwardness remainsmoot. The trouble is that subsidies are of least assistance to poor farm-ers dependent on marginal soils and that the long-term viability of a pro-gramme that subsidizes 2 million cultivators out of the public purse isquestionable.

Niger is a landlocked country constrained by an ecologically fragile re-source base, and with a rate of population growth that leaves the marginover subsistence worryingly tight. Robert Malthus, a technological pes-simist, would have been dumbfounded at the ability of Nigers farm sector

7. AFP/ReliefWeb, 9 April 2002.8. Malawis worst ever famine (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1985765.stm); Public

Health Services need urgent help to combat humanitarian crisis in Southern

Africa, World Health Organization tells donors (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/

releases/pr77/en/index.html, accessed 3 March 2010).9. IRI Climate Digest April 2002: Climate Impacts March (http://iri.columbia.

edu/climate/cid/Apr2002/impacts.html); South Africa threatened by famine (http://news.

bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1858880.stm, accessed 4 March 2010).10. Bill Corcoran, Five million face starvation in Malawi,Observer2 October 2005; Patrick

Barkham, Silently, Malawi begins to starve, Guardian 19 October 2005. Both reports

were filed in Nsanje district in southern Malawi. 2008).

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to keep pace with a population that was increasing at 34 per cent annually.Its ability to do so implies significant productivity gains in order to stand still

and considerable resilience in a context of threatened soil erosion and,

indeed, desertification. In semi-technical jargon, keeping food supplies perhead constant when population is growing at such a pace requires greater ef-ficiency and productivity gains than those achieved by European agriculture

before World War II (Federico, 2005: 2401).Nigers crisis was one of the biggest news stories of the summer of 2005.

Once again it was the BBC who broke the story. We are going to lose many,many thousands of lives, predicted John OShea of the Irish NGO GOALtwo days after Hilary Anderssons report from Zinder province aired on 20July 2005, on RTE. On the same day, UN spokesman Jan Egeland accused

the international community of reacting slowly to the crisis: later he declaredthat more donations were received in the week following the BBC broadcastthan in the previous six months. The same broadcast prompted the boastfrom OShea that GOAL had fed more people in its first week in Niger thanthe UN had this year (Irish Times, 15 August 2005).

Graphic and apocalyptic accounts of the disaster in Niger followed. Therewere reports of rocketing prices, poor harvests, severe drought and locustinfestations. Estimates of 3.5 or 3.6 million people at imminent risk of star-vation almost invariably including 0.8 million children were much

recycled. According to Oxfams regional director in West Africa, fami-lies [we]re feeding their children grass and leaves from the trees to keepthem alive. After a briefing from Medecins sans frontieres (MSF) HilaryAndersson reported from Zinder province, the epicentre of the crisis, on 15September: This is the only part of Niger where anyone has even tried toestimate how many people have starved to death. And the indications arethat just in this town and the villages immediately surrounding it, thousandsof people have died in the last few months.11

In reality, crisis-induced excess mortality in Niger was almost certainly

minimal. A scholarly study published in 2008 attempted to estimate mortalityon the basis of a sample survey carried out in the wake of the crisis (Rezaet al., 2008).12 The highest daily mortality rate found was 0.7 per 10,000 inZinder province; the estimate for Niger as a whole was 0.4 per 10,000. Theauthors conclude that Niger constituted a food crisis but not a famine.Indeed, had the aggregate daily rate lasted a year, it would convert to anannual rate of less than 15 per thousand, or considerably less than the

11. The original BBC clip is no longer available, but the quote is available at: http://esthergarvi.com/2008/11/27/swedish-television-criticizes-bbc-niger-2005-report/

12. Reza et al. applied a methodology proposed by Howe and Devereux (2004) to assess the

gravity of the famine. For Howe and Devereux, famine entails a crude mortality rate of

more than 1 in 10,000 per diem, a wasting rate of over 40 per cent, and the presence of

hunger oedema. Wasting is defined as weighing more than two standard deviations below

the accepted body weight for children aged 6 to 59 months.

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Table 4. Malawi and Niger: Some Demographic Indicators

Niger Malawi

1990 2000 2007 1990 2000 2007

Child mortality (

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64 Cormac O Gr ada

tsunami in late 2004 testify to their efficacy in soliciting and distributingrelief.

Some of the best-known NGOs have their origins in the relief of particular

famines. Africa Concern now Concern Worldwide and Medecins sansfrontieres were born in the wake of the Biafran secession in the late 1960swhereas Oxfam began as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, a groupcampaigning for the relief of wartime Greece. What sometimes begins asfamine relief culminates in development aid. The crisis of 2005 drew theIrish charity GOAL to Niger, just as the Ethiopian famine of 1984 had drawnit to Ethiopia and the crisis of 2002 had drawn it to Malawi. It remainedon in all three places, to embark on sustainable development programmes

paid for in large part out of public funds.14

As bureaucracies, NGOs are arguably better geared to addressing struc-tural problems such as ill-health and illiteracy than one-off disasters. But infinancial terms they require disasters in order to sustain their other activities.In Ireland, for example, GOAL and Concern used Niger in 2005 to launchcampaigns focusing on the 3.5 million who were starving (GOAL) or theover 3.6 milllion [who] need food now (Concern). Trocaire attempted adifferent tactic, using the crisis as an opportunity to launch an Africa Cri-sis Appeal in aid of up to 20 million people. . .now at risk and urgentlyrequir[ing] help.

The tension between the publics relative lack of interest in developmentprogrammes and the bureaucratic need of the NGO to survive betweendisasters is a problem for NGOs. The problem was highlighted in a recentcontroversy about the role of NGOs in Niger. The prize-winning Norwegiandocumentary,Sultblffen(The Famine Scam), attacked Hilary Anderssonand MSF, her main source of information, for misrepresenting the Nigercrisis. For MSF, all the signs were blinking red, but for its Norwegiancritics, with well-placed informantsin situ, those signs spelled malnutrition,which was endemic, not impending famine. MSF based its claims on an

increase in the number of visitors to its ongoing nutritional programmes,rather lamely arguing: This motivation has nothing to do with raising morefunds, but simply with raising awareness for a forgotten crisis that causesmany unnecessary deaths, but that has been considered to be normal becausewe got used to an under-five-mortality rate of 200 children out of every 1,000newborn.15

It would seem that MSF had, in effect, cried wolf in Niger. As Alex de Waalput it, the Niger crisis is an example of how a crisis in an African country isportrayed according to a particular script which doesnt actually necessarily

14. GOAL 2007 Annual Report, p. 20: available at http://www.goal.ie/AR07.pdf.15. Nutrition in a nutshell? Interview with Huub Verhagen of Medecins sans Frontieres, avail-

able at: http://www.divainternational.ch/spip.php?article474; Eden Foundation, When

endemic malnutrition is labeled as famine, May 2006, available at: http://www.eden-

foundation.org/project/articles_niger_crisis_2005.html.

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Table 5. GDP per Head 18202008 (in 1990 PPP-adjusted US$)

Year World W. Europe USA Africa

1820 666 1194 1257 4201900 1261 2885 4091 601

1950 2111 4569 9561 889

1975 4087 11493 16284 13952008 7614 21672 31178 1447

Source: http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/

fit the reality of that crisis.16 Both the Niger and Malawi examples should

be set against the historical lesson that even in very poor countries one-off harvest failures and attendant price spikes do not necessarily producefamine in peace-time. Such events are common enough for people to insureagainst them: to deny this is to deny the prudence and resilience of the very

poor.If the news from Niger and Malawi offers some cause for tempered op-

timism, are there other hopeful signs? One is the huge increase in globalproductivity. Angus Maddisons estimates imply that global GDP per headof population rose fivefold during the twentieth century, and has almost

quadrupled since mid-century (Table 5). And there are reasons to believethat such calculations underestimate the true increase in global living stan-dards.17 A by-product of this growth has been a vastly improved capacity tostore food and to ship it long distances at short notice.

Naturally, the growth in food output has not been commensurate. FAO datasuggest that world food output (in kcals rather than in dollars) has risen bynearly four-fifths since 1980, or considerably faster than population (whichhas increased by half). So, in global terms, the margin over subsistence isnow much wider than it was a generation ago. This also holds for former

famine zones such as India and Bangladesh, whereas China, once the landof famine, nowadays faces a growing problem of childhood obesity. InAfrica, where malnutrition and destitution are greatest, the recent record ismixed, however, and leaves no room for complacency. Figure 1 shows Africaas a whole performing better than Southern Africa, and food outstripping

population in both Niger and Malawi in the recent past. The future courseof population growth is crucial; and science writer Fred Pearce may well

be right that current UN population projections underestimate the prospectsfor softer demographic adjustment through fertility decline in the worlds

poorest regions (Pearce, 2010).

16. As cited in STV criticizes BBC Africa report, 19 November 2008: available at http://www.

thelocal.se/15798/20081119/17. For example, they do not factor in the accompanying increase in life expectancy or the role

of new goods.

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66 Cormac O Gr ada

Figure 1. Population and Food Output, 19802008

WORLD

4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4

4.5

4.6

4.7

4.8

lnQ,

lnPOP

Source: FAO

CHINA

3.5

3.7

3.9

4.1

4.3

4.5

4.7

4.9

1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

lnQ,

lnPOP

Source: FAO

BANGLADESH

4

4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4

4.5

4.6

4.7

4.8

4.9

5

lnQ,

lnPOP

Source:

INDIA

3.8

3.9

4

4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4

4.5

4.6

4.7

4.8

lnQ,

lnPOP

AFRICA

3.9

4.1

4.3

4.5

4.7

4.9

lnQ,

lnP

OP

Source: FAO

SOUTHERN AFRICA

4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4

4.5

4.6

4.7

4.8

lnQ,

lnPO

P

Source: FAO

NIGER

3.7

3.9

4.1

4.3

4.5

4.7

4.9

5.1

lnQ

,lnPOP

Source: FAO

MALAWI

3.5

3.7

3.9

4.1

4.3

4.5

4.7

4.9

lnQ,

lnPOP

1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 1 980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

Source: FAO data, available at: http://faostat.fao.org/site/612/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=612#ancor

The productivity gap between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the

world has been widening (Collier, 2008: 313). In the 1970s GDP per headin China was not much higher than in Malawi or Niger; today it is ten totwelve times as high. There are no easy solutions to bridging that gap. Yetgiven the huge productive capacity of humankind in the modern era, faminesin even the poorest economies are avoidable scandals. It is time to make themhistory.

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