A World without Famine?

The 1995 annual conference of the Development Studies Association (DSA) was hosted by the Centre for Development Studies in University College Dublin. The theme of the conference was famine. This theme was chosen for two reasons. First, because 1995 marked the 150th anniversary of the start of what became known as the Great Irish Famine — a cataclysmic event in that country’s history and one of the last of the big famines in European experience. The second reason why the theme was chosen was because the spectre of famine continues to haunt many parts of the developing world, especially Africa. Famines are part of a wider growth in the number of complex emergencies, both natural and man-made, that are afflicting the lives of so many poor people in the late 1990s.

My dictionary tells me that the primary meaning of ‘famine’ is: ‘serious, acute shortage of foodstuffs in a given area, at a particular time’. Such definitions can vary in their usefulness, but this one makes a good start. What makes a shortage of foodstuffs acute or serious? The assumption is that many people in the area in question go hungry or suffer starvation because of the lack of food. This lack of food may be very severe in that there is literally not enough to go round everyone in the area, or it is relatively severe in that many people do not have the access they normally have to food, whilst others may still have reserves which they do not share but hoard, openly if they are powerful enough, or secretly if they are not.

In Ireland, drawing analogies between the Great Famine of the 1840s and modern ‘famines that kill’ has become commonplace. Sometimes the analogies are prescriptive, and are concerned with raising Third World consciousness in Ireland. Sometimes they are historical, linking Irish generosity towards famine relief to Irish memories of the past. In truth, the historical links are less strong than some of us might like to think; publicity and campaigning have transformed them into a kind of invented tradition. There is no harm in this — on the contrary. Yet history never quite repeats itself, and the contexts of Ireland’s famine and modern, mainly African, famines are quite different. Superficially, of course, all famines are alike. But some of the differences are worth reflecting on.

Friedrich List (1789–1846) is best known for his work on the economic development of nations under the influence of other nations, sometimes called ‘catch-up development’. He argued for the creation of the German Zollverein, a customs union of German-speaking trading cities extended by treaties to Belgium and Holland. The Zollverein was the precursor of the German nation state and arguably of the European Union. List is widely regarded as the principal architect of the Zollverein, He was also a speculator, journalist, railway and coal-mine promoter, consul, and professor. His ideas were recognisably dominant in the economic thinking of the Vorparlement, the preliminary series of assemblies in which a constitutional reform reflecting the national consciousness of modern Germany was first mooted, in 1848, shortly after List’s death. He was most influential, therefore, during what has been named the ‘age of revolution’, in which a rising nationalism was a major element. In Germany in the late 1990s, the List Society continues to enjoy a healthy academic life: ‘List’s contribution to understanding the problems of development is incredibly up to date’ writes Professor Senghaas (1989, p. 63).

The Indian Famine Codes, drafted in 1880, were the first written statements of famine policy in the modern era. They had their foundations in European philosophies regarding both the state’s role in the market and its treatment of the poor, but they were important, too, as the first formal indications of how the British were to deal with famine in the colonial context. In a sense they therefore represented the first expressions of policy ideas from a ‘developed’ nation on famine in a ‘developing’ one. These Codes have probably never been matched in their exceptional detail, and appear to have had an enduring influence. I do not wish to dwell here on the vexed question of how successful they were in application, but influential analysts such as Amartya Sen, Jean Drèze and Alex de Waal have praised — and borrowed from — their approach (Sen (1981); Drèze, (1990); de Waal (1989)). This chapter is focused less on the practical formulations of the Indian Famine Codes than on two central arguments within them that defined their basic approach, and continue to be asserted by students and practitioners of famine relief today. The first was that relief should not be so generous as to encourage dependency among its recipients. Second, the Codes were designed to provide relief without weakening the economy by intervening or participating in foodgrain markets.

It is now generally accepted that India has a good record for protecting the population against famine (Walker (1989), pp. 101–9; Drèze, 1988), but a poor record for promoting the well-being of women (Kynch and Sen 1983; Drèze and Sen (1989), pp. 204–25; World Bank, 1991). While there is not necessarily a connection between these two facets of development in India, it is striking that the core relief policy of protecting food entitlement through employment did little or nothing to improve the labour participation rates of women. It is often argued that greater labour participation at higher levels of renumeration is important if women are to improve their bargaining position within households, and their fall-back position should they cease to be members of a household (Elson (1992), pp. 37–41; Agarwal (1991), pp. 226–9; (1988), pp. 91–4; see also Kishor, 1993).

Studies on the connections between famine and poverty have usually been concerned with the causality running from long-term processes of poverty to periodic famines. But the reverse causation — from famine to endemic poverty, or more generally from ‘conjunctural’ to ‘structural’ poverty, in the words of Iliffe (1987) — has remained relatively unexplored. I shall attempt in this chapter to clarify some of the issues involved in understanding this reverse causation and to identify some of the possible channels of causation, citing along the way whatever empirical evidence there is.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been affected by very frequent and severe droughts in the form of extreme rainfall variability and almost a secularly declining precipitation in the sizeable arid and semi-arid zones of the sub-continent.² It is estimated that as much as 60 per cent of SSA is vulnerable to drought and about 30 per cent is considered to be highly vulnerable (Clay, 1995). Because of the heavy dependence on extensive resource utilisation in the context of a technologically poor agriculture and substantially disarticulated economies, the human and socioeconomic impacts of these droughts have been quite substantial. A revealing account of the impacts of recent droughts in SSA is documented by Rasheed (1993):

the 1968–1973 drought in the Sahel caused more than 100,000 deaths, the loss of twelve million cattle, large-scale migration of herders and farmers and massive degradation of rangelands … The 1984–1985 severe drought in this zone and other regions claimed over 100,000 lives, caused famine among forty million people, displaced another ten million people and had a negative impact on the economies of many countries. The drought has not spared even the normally rain-bountiful Eastern and Southern African sub-region. The failure of rain in late 1991 and early 1992 caused the food harvest to drop by about half the levels of previous years, necessitated four million tons of food aid, and imports of over $200 million worth of emergency non-food aid, and caused the death of large numbers of livestock and wildlife, power cuts and the closing down of factories.’³

From an economic perspective, drought may be viewed as an exogenous, but internal, supply-side shock which results directly in sharp reductions in agricultural production and reduced export earnings. Meteorological drought may also result in hydrological conditions that have an adverse impact on non-agricultural production, including hydroelectric power generation, human water supply and certain industrial processes. In addition, droughts have potential knock-on effects on non-productive aspects of an economy such as the budget deficit, the rate of inflation, interest rates, availability of credit, levels of savings, and external debt stocks. These direct and indirect impacts and multiplier effects together mean that the economy-wide consequences of a drought shock may be considerable. However, these impacts may be highly differentiated in terms of both their scale and character, partly depending on the economic structure of a country and the nature of intersectoral linkages and resource endowments, as well as on other factors such as the prevailing economic conditions and policy environment.

This chapter reports on a long-term study of economic and social adaptation among rural households in Zimbabwe.¹ One of the major purposes of the study was to assess the extent of stress induced in poor households by relocation to new surroundings, under the aegis of the government’s resettlement programmes, at a time of acute drought in the early 1980s. Both objective and subjective indicators of stress were utilised, but the main objective indicator employed was the extent of malnutrition in children. The study incorporated the premise that tracking the nutritional status of young children over time using anthropometric methods would provide a reasonable indicator of the stress that families were experiencing because of repeated drought. Complementary modules of the study were able to identify the social and economic changes that accompanied alterations in nutritional status.

Describing involuntary poverty as an unmitigated evil persisting in spite of decades of development efforts, Paul Streeten (1994, p. 13) makes a trenchant distinction between development and human development: ‘Yet all too often in the process of development it is the poor who shoulder the heaviest burden. It is development itself that interferes with human development.’ Poor people, women, children, vulnerable groups are the victims of processes of transition; for instance, from subsistence to commercial agriculture, or from traditional to market relationships. There is thus a need to help the victims of transition, to cushion the frictions of social and economic changes on those who would otherwise suffer unduly. This very pithy presentation of human development shows an important shortcoming of present development and aid strategies — its insufficient focus on and help to the poor. The author points out that protecting vulnerable groups is not only fully justified as an end in itself, because the ultimate purpose of development is to promote human well-being, but it also increases the productivity of the poor, and improvements in living conditions result eventually in lower population growth. Human development is thus thrice blessed. Logically, one would therefore expect development co-operation to earmark a certain amount of funds for human development purposes.

The most striking development on the current global aid scene is a dramatic increase in the number of humanitarian crises and complex emergencies, and a corresponding rise in the demand for aid funds to deal with them. Although big fluctuations can occur from year to year, there appears to be a long-term upward trend in the numbers being affected by natural disasters such as droughts, cyclones and floods. Man-made disasters, such as war and civil strife, and their frequent consequences of famine and refugees, are also placing increasing demands on aid budgets.

The concept of entitlement has become an important tool for analysing famines (Sen, 1981), but has also brought a new perspective to the discussion and analysis of poverty in general. It is mainly through the expansion of their entitlement set that poor households can escape from poverty, and from hunger. Productive employment is the most important source of entitlements. While for those who own some land or capital, such expansion can in principle take place through an increase in asset productivity, the poorest part of the labour force in all developing countries controls no or too few productive assets and has virtually only its labour power to rely upon. Barring a redistribution of ownership of assets, expansion of opportunities for paid employment is for these households the most direct escape route from poverty.

Supplies of food aid grain continue to make up a significant proportion of the grain entering many developing countries. During the four years 1991–4, developing countries are estimated to have imported an average of 131 million tonnes of grain per annum of which food aid shipments are estimated to have averaged almost 13 million tonnes per annum (FAO, 1995a). A wide range of donors, implementing agencies and NGOs are involved in the food aid emergency relief and development programmes. All these organisations have an implicit duty to deliver to the beneficiaries the most suitable type of grain in the best condition using the most cost-effective procedures.

The decade since the mid-1980s has marked an increased recognition on the part of development agencies and aid donors that democracy may represent an essential requirement for sustainable and equitable economic development. Recognising that corrupt and unaccountable authoritarian governments often lack the necessary governmental and administrative infrastructure to implement successfully the neoliberal development strategies widely advocated by the ‘Washington Consensus’,² the World Bank in particular has been a prime mover in arguing that ‘good government’ is a vital prerequisite for economic progress. A consequence of this trend has been that the World Bank has significantly increased the political content of its policy advice to borrower countries, with measures to promote political pluralism, administrative accountability and social justice (including respect for human rights, judicial independence, freedom of speech and press activity) introduced alongside more traditional concerns with economic liberalisation in its conditionality requirements (World Bank, 1992; Lancaster, 1993; Moore, 1993; Osborne, 1993).

Given that the World Bank’s ‘fundamental objective’ is the achievement ‘of sustainable poverty reduction in the developing world’, it is clear that its governance agenda is, at least in theory, framed by this commitment. Similarly, the Bank’s poverty alleviation activities predate chronologically its governance-focused programmes. Yet, at the same time, Bank interest in both poverty alleviation and governance can be defined, with apparently equal plausibility, as largely rhetorical devices, perhaps best described as bolt-on extras adopted to save the neoclassical skin of its key policy strategies, centred, in the case of SSA since the 1980s, on structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). Within these SAPs the implementation of both the governance agenda and the inauguration of a series of ‘safety net’ programmes, has concentrated Bank attention on what it now regards as the key role played by institutions, both public and private, in the development process. Accordingly, a focus on the changing institutional architecture of SAP-related anti-poverty ‘safety net’ interventions in SSA — notably the graduation away from supply-based ‘social action programmes’ towards demand-based ‘social funds’ — provides useful insights into the evolution, and the politics, of Bank thinking on appropriate mechanisms for pursuing its avowed governance objectives, namely to provide an enabling environment combining encouragement both for private-sector development and for enhanced public-sector effectiveness in programme delivery.

In a rapidly deteriorating economic and social climate, alternative food security strategies are needed, not only for subsistence in rural and coastal communities, but also for ensuring sufficient surplus production to provide affordable food for the increasing proportion of poor people who now live in cities. The pace of change has increased so much that many food producers can no longer apply their indigenous innovative capacity to maintain their own food security, let alone produce surpluses. Without increased support for diverse, productive and sustainable food production systems, universal food security will be threatened.