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African Journal of Food and Nutritional Security
Quest and Insight Publishers and Friends-of-the Book Foundation
ISSN: 1608-1366
Vol. 1, Num. 1, 2001, pp. 71-73
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Untitled Document
The African Journal of Food and Nutritional Security Vol. 1, No. 1, 2001,
pages 71 - 73
Book Review
Who's Hungry? and How do we Know? Food Shortage, Poverty
and Deprivation, by Laurie Derose, Ellen Messer and Sara Millman, United
Nations University Press, Tokyo, New York and Paris (1998)
A Review By Oanda Ogachi
Educational Foundations, Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya
Code Number: fn01008
The issue of hunger and the hungry has been part of the development problematique
in developing countries, particularly in Africa. There tends to be in some literature
an association between a country's level of socio-economic and political development
and its ability to resist the vagaries of nature such as drought, which consequently
leads to hunger. Part of this literature points to Africa's inability to successfully
embrace modernization modern farming, harvesting and storage techniques,
an inability that then becomes part of the build up of hunger-prone situations.
A second set of literature explains the frequent incidence of hunger in Africa
as a consequence of the colonial interlude, the institution of Western capitalism
and the continued persistence of neo-colonial institutions, which continue to
breed poverty and underdevelopment in Africa. Africa before the colonial interlude,
this literature argues, had well-coordinated farming systems which produced
enough food for consumption at home and for the market. The disorganization
that was associated with colonial agriculture is then seen as the genesis of
the present agrarian crisis.
Whatever the arguments, the question of hunger in Africa and most of the developing
world, is no longer just a socio-economic, political, regional or national issue,
it has become a global moral question. Thanks to the process of globalization
and advances made in technology. there have been remarkable improvements, not
only of the systems of producing food, but also in the manner in which the food
is stored to last, up to the time of need. Globalization however, has also occasioned
the exclusion of many more people from their means of livelihoods, making them
more and more vulnerable to hunger and disease in a world that has the technological
capacity to produce food in plenty and to deliver it to starving populations,
spread across national and regional borders. This is what raises the issue of
hunger to a moral dimension.
The book under review, Who's Hungry? and How do we Know? is an earnest
attempt to confront this moral dilemma by presenting an analytical picture of
who the hungry are and how they can be identified at regional, household and
individual levels. The book is divided into seven chapters, each chapter complementing
information from the previous one hence, establishing an encouraging continuity
in reading.
Chapter one attempts to provide a framework for analyzing hunger which manifests
itself at three levels. First, is the level of food shortage occasioned
by production shortfalls on a regional level. Second, is the situation of food
poverty, which is due to inadequate food availability within the household;
and lastly, food deprivation, which is a consequence of production difficulties
and distribution inequities, and which at an individual level leads to malnutrition.
The linkages between these different levels of hunger and their effects
at regional, household, and individual levels are explained. The causal structure
of hunger provided on page three does not however, delve into the wider macro-determinants
of hunger in Africa. National disasters, wars and social disruption are historically
presented as the root causes of hunger at a micro-level. A political economy
explanation of hunger, which goes beyond identifying the hungry and where they
are and which then goes on to explain why they are hungry, is critically necessary.
Yet, this is lacking.
Chapter two provides a detailed review and discussion on methods of measuring
hunger. Input measures are discussed showing what people are eating and how
much at national, household, and individual levels. Household surveys showing
expenditure for food and food consumption are shown as important direct input
measures of hunger or its absence. Indirect input measures discussed include
national nutritional output measures and the measurement of nutritional status
through anthropometric indicators.
Chapters three, four and five form the critical part of this text. They discuss
in detail the three levels of identifying the hungry - food shortage,
food poverty, and food deprivation, in that order. In chapter three, global,
regional and country level aspects of food shortages, their causes, and the
relationship between drought and famine are contextually analyzed. Although
there is a frank discussion of the importance of aid to underwrite the effects
of drought and thereby avoid hunger, the ideological conditionalities that underlie
food aid and which in most cases lead to hunger and deaths in situations of
plenty, have not been delved into. At least, this is one lesson learnt from
the 1983-1986 famine in Ethiopia, where the United States used food aid to dismantle
the socialist regime. The admission by the authors of the primacy of politics
more than weather in inducing hunger is limited to the nation-state, which excludes
international politics from taking its share of moral responsibility. Both Chapters
four and five share in the same tune of arguments, focusing on second-degree
causes of food poverty and food deprivation, such as social displacement, and
macro-economic policies, such as the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs),
entitlement failure of households (i.e., failure to access land and other productive
resources) and flawed government policies. This presentation is well articulated
but not critically conceptualized within the historical circumstances. Macro-economic
policies did not just spontaneously appear on the scene. How, then, does one
explain the fact that the implementation of SAPs in the agricultural sector
has accentuated the number of people prone to hunger and hunger situations?
There is also a bit of generalization in the presentation of hunger without
clear demarcations of its occurrence along the lines of class, geography and
gender, save for a few dichotomizations in Chapter five.
A critical reflection on the situation of hunger in Africa and the rest of
the developing world may need to deal with the changes in agricultural policy
during the colonial and immediate post-independence periods which had a bias
towards cash crops. The argument then was that food crops, such as millet and
cassava, cannot provide foreign exchange earnings that a country needs for development.
The over-concentration on cash crop farming entailed changes in the demographic
structure, with more labour force in cash-crop farming, but without the adequate
cash compensation for buying food. These changes led to a reduction in the acreage
under food crop cultivation, and high dependence on starchy foods which subject
the population to malnutrition. Indeed, the African agrarian crisis of the 1980s
and 1990s is a cumulative outcome of these agricultural policies of the 1960s
to 1980s. Part of the reason why hunger was persisted in the 1990s was the collapse
of the traditional export crop markets (tea and coffee), such that farmers were
forced to sell their food crops to offset the reduction of their purchasing
power. Thus, insufficient food is retained for consumption. Farmers then have
to purchase food at higher prices, which most of them cannot afford. Even after
the collapse of the market in cash crops, multinationals and foreign agribusiness
consortiums have encouraged African farmers to move into fruit, vegetable and
flower farming for the European leisure industry, while keeping hunger in Africa
a growing business for international NGOs and businessmen.
The discussion on food shortages related to conflicts in Chapter six, is afflicted
with the same lack of broad analysis inherent in the previous chapters. Whereas
it is true that local conflicts over entitlements to land, food, and water are
commonplace, the most persistent conflicts in Africa have an international dimension,
which has been responsible for large-scale hunger and deaths in Africa. The
conflicts are often ignited by international arms dealers interested in exploiting
African resources, such as minerals. The conflicts in Sierra Leone, Angola,
and The Congo attest to this. The same conflicts, once they cause displacement
and hunger, create business for "Western humanitarian" operators.
It is not, therefore, realistic to localize hunger and hungerrelated causes
simplistically, as the authors have done in this book.
Another glaring omission by the authors is in the manner they have scantily
discussed the politics of food aid. International instruments that bind countries
to give food to the needy. The practice of giving food aid unequally has not
been examined, yet it is a real contemporary concern. Increasingly, the West's
response to alleviate food shortages in other parts of the world is being dictated
to by geography, biased media coverage, and political interests, not actual
need. New statistics given by Oxfam, in a recent report, show that Africa and
ACP countries have always been discriminated against in food aid. According
to the statistics, when the UN made a food appeal for the people of Yugoslavia
in 1999, the response from the West represented US$207 for every person in need,
for Sierra Leone, the response equalled US$16 and for the Democratic Republic
of Congo, the response equalled US$8 for every person in need. The authors have
not made any attempt to critically analyze these injustices in the distribution
of food aid. on the contrary, they create a perception that Africans do not
try to overcome their adversity.
The authors should, however, be commended for bringing under one cover all
the information about who the hungry are and how to identify them. As a matter
of fact, this information is not new. The hungry have been brought right into
our sitting rooms through the television screens. Our interest and concern should
instead be, why the phenomenon of hunger persists in an age when the world boasts
of the knowledge economy. This is the challenge.
Copyright © Quest and Insight Publishers and Friends-of-the Book Foundation,
2001
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