Once upon a time Africans lived in a land of milk and honey. Then came
the slavers, the colonialists and, finally, the aid officials. Each one
took away part of the feast, and eventually Africa was reduced to a famine.

So, glibly, runs the argument of Bill Rau’s book. But is he right? His
case seems plausible until you reach the last page before the index and
discover a list of African famines going back to 1543, long before any of
these interventions. Some of the worst famines seemed to have occurred around
the turn of this century in countries that had not been victims of the slave
trade or, in the case of Ethiopia, external colonisation. Something clearly
is wrong with the argument.

But there is also a great deal of truth in it. Rau’s overall plea is
that Africa is a victim of external forces. Colonial history and international
aid policies have combined to squeeze cash out of the rural areas in the
form of taxation, low food prices and forced cultivation of cash crops.

Men from rural areas have been taken away as slaves, cannon fodder and
migrant workers. The women farmers of Africa have taken on all the extra
work. Children receive less attention and family life itself is under pressure.
The crisis in Africa is as profound as it could be.

In recent postcolonial days, the African elite has become increasingly
desperate to maintain its standard of living. More cash crops and more taxes
are squeezed from the rural poor. The poverty gap has widened further. Ethnic
tension is transposed into open conflict. Conflict breaks down the means
of production. The process becomes a vicious circle.

So far the argument is a good one. All these pressures produce untold
misery and hunger, but famine – where large numbers die of starvation –
is a different thing. Why does it occur in some places and not in others,
extending back through recorded history? Recent events in Ethiopia throw
some light on this.

Ethiopia’s 30-year civil war was an attempt to break the circle that
Rau describes. The forces were not professional soldiers but mainly young
sons and daughters of the soil who decided that it was better to fight than
face oppression, starvation and misery.

Many had been children in the death camps of the famine in 1972 and
1973, when Haile Selassie tried to pretend that nothing untoward was happening.
They had watched sisters, brothers, mothers and fathers die, and vowed to
change it all.

In 1990 the rains failed almost completely in the war-torn north of
Ethiopia and in Eritrea. Famine was predicted, but has not yet occurred
despite a dismal response from the international donors. The US government
held back food aid to drive the rebels to the negotiating table, but its
plan backfired. The response of the rebels was to step up the war and eventually
overrun the Ethiopian government forces, defeating famine (as they would
see it), not just for this year but for years to come.

The people left in those areas meanwhile engaged in a massive self-help
operation. Thousands of women borrowed money and traded grain to those who
could afford it. People migrated to find work in other areas. They gathered
fruits and wild foods. Incredibly, they built miles of water conservation
channels in a staggering self-help development programme conducted in the
midst of threatened famine.

All this happened because no government interfered. There was freedom
to trade, or move around, and no taxation.

By contrast, Ethiopians died in the previous famine of 1984 to 1985
because they were caught in the middle of a war zone. The government army
pillaged their stores. They could not move for fear of arrest. They were
even forced to pay taxes and to sell their crops at nominal prices.

This time their resistance has created a zone of calm, as in the eye
of the storm, where they could cope with what cruel nature threw at them.
Despite the US’s policies, they have so far pulled themselves through.

Famines occur not so much because the rain fails, or even because history
weighs heavily on the rural farmer, but because of a breakdown of human
systems at a particular place and time.

Incredibly, people seem able to cope with the steady pressure of impoverishment
that spreads from imported Western economic ideas, failed aid programmes
and urban bias. They cope if their social responses remain intact. But,
when patterns of trade, migration and sharing break down, most typically
in war, famine can occur. And, as Rau’s chart shows, that has happened throughout
recorded history.

That chart reads to me as a memorial of man’s inhumanity to man. The
West’s inhumanity to Africa is a sad aspect of this, but not the only one.

Tony Vaux is Oxfam’s Emergencies Coordinator.

‘IT MUST not happen again,’ said everyone after people died in their
thousands of famine in 1973. Yet even as you read this, people are dying
of hunger. The purpose of Famine Early Warning Systems is to advise how
to prevent famine. Its publication is timely for, once again, we are faced
with starvation in Ethiopia.

Peter Walker, my former colleague in Oxfam, has worked extensively in
Sudan and Ethiopia. In this book, he takes a careful look at the possibilities
for giving early warning of impending famine and of taking appropriate action.
It is a solid piece of work, not very original but all the better for giving
due credit to the work already done in the area.

Walker stresses that failure of crops does not necessarily lead to famine.
Referring to the work of economists such as Amartya Sen of Oxford, he reminds
us that many people have died within walking distance of shops selling food.
They simply had no money. This also happened in Ethiopia in 1973. In the
past few years the US has experien ced a much more serious drought than
Ethiopia – in terms of an unusual lack of rain – yet no one has died of
starvation. People in the US have money or other ‘survival strategies’.

In the case of nomadic pastoralists, these strategies may be incredibly
complex, and so any attempt to find out whether people can cope becomes
a massive and long-term under taking in itself.

But can we wait for such detailed studies before we respond? Famine
Early Warning Systems provides no clear guidance on such crucial practical
issues.

Walker rightly points out that local people are likely to have the best
idea how serious a situation is. But how can they make their views credible?
If people know that they have only to ask and they will get food, what is
to prevent them calling for help even when it is not really needed? The
longest recorded experience of the problems of famine has been in India.
How is it that India no longer suffers devastating famines as it did throughout
the colonial period up to the appalling Bengal Famine in 1942? Mainly it
seems because of the emergence of democratic political structures since
colonial times, so that when there is famine, politicians (for their own
survival) force the government to take action.

At the opposite extreme, the worst famines of the 20th century, and
probably of all time, have been politically imposed, or to put it more bluntly,
man-made. It is said that 7 million Ukrainians died when Stalin extracted
all foods from the area ‘in an effort to break the will of a nationally
conscious Ukrainian peasantry and to finance rapid industrialisation’.

Worse still, statistical research indicates that in China between 1958
and 1961 ‘there were some 30 million premature deaths and 33 million lost
or postponed births’ as a result of policies concerned with the collectivisation
of agriculture and restrictions on the movement of food. This makes it the
worst famine ever recorded.

How do early warning systems fit into scenarios such as that of China
in 1958? Moreover, in Oxfam’s recent experience most famines have occurred
in areas of intense conflict, for example, in Mozambique, Sudan and Ethiopia.
War may not cause famine but it makes analysis of the problem and response
to it almost impossible.

It becomes clear in the course of the book that prediction of famine
is an extremely complex business, and even if accurate analysis is made,
the response may be limited, not only by local politics and war, but also
by international politics. This seems to have been the case in Bangladesh
when the American government decided to use the lever of supplying emergency
food aid to prevent an export agreement with Cuba in 1975.

As Walker records, after two years’ research into the options of comprehensive
early warning systems in the Sahel region of Africa, Oxfam decided not to
proceed with anything but an informal collection of easily available data.
To an extent it was a question of priority. The system would have cost as
much as some substantial relief operations but, above all, its chance of
success would still have been very uncertain.

The book glosses over some of the practical difficulties but at least
it gives a clear picture. It provides an excellent review of the issues
and in particular of the analytical systems and physical techniques, such
as satellite imagery. And surely no one would expect such a small paperback
to solve the great mystery of recurring starvation in a world that seems
equally preoccupied with the dangers of obesity and disposal of surpluses?

Tony Vaux is Oxfam’s emergencies officer.