Political and Economic Origins of African Hunger

Abstract

Drought and famine have become so inextricably linked in both popular and academic analyses of Africa's food problems in the 1970s that the relationship between the two is now taken almost axiomatically as cause and effect. The logic is simple and persuasive. Drought produces crop failure and crop failure, just as inevitably, leads to human starvation. This reasoning and the colour photography of starving children in the world press have proved so irresistible that social scientists have had surprisingly little rôle in scholarly discussions of the causes of the recent African famine. The subject has been left almost entirely to climatologists, physical geographers, water experts, and agronomists. Social scientists have so taken it for granted that the causes of African famine are natural and climatic that most of their literature on the subject falls into the genre of‘impact’ studies which omit the issue of causality and deal almost entirely with the social and political after effects.

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“…As a result, the traditional subsistence economy in the west has been replaced by a form of a market economy (Ibrahim 1991) and the peasant cultivators transformed into rural proletarians (Lofchie 1975) whose household economics depends greatly on wage labour. As a result, the traditional subsistence economy in the west has been replaced by a form of a market economy (Ibrahim 1991) and the peasant cultivators transformed into rural proletarians (Lofchie 1975) whose household economics depends greatly on wage labour.…”

Nomadic pastoralism and irrigated agriculture in Somalia

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