Last Thursday (February 2) I wrote an overview of the Great Decision lecture series created by the Foreign Policy Association and sponsored locally by the League of Women Voters of Williamsburg. The first lecture was on Tuesday of this week, and I want to give you some information about the topic. But first, I want to tell you a little about the resources the program provides.
By registering for this program, attendees are given a briefing book that provides a great deal of information about the topic. For each week, the briefing book contains a 10-12 page essay about the topic written by a globally recognized expert. At the end of the essay, the book provides a series of discussion questions and suggestions for additional readings. On the website, the FPA provides a glossary of terms, a list of acronyms and abbreviations used in the essay, and a set of visuals (graphs, maps, and charts) that illustrate the points made in the essay.
The briefing book is interesting this year because the very first visual you see is a map of Ukraine. The people who run this program at the Foreign Policy Associations felt that the war in Ukraine had an impact on several of this year’s topics, so they wanted to put this map up front for context. The relevant topics this year are war crimes, energy, famine (food shortages), economic warfare (sanctions), and the rise of China as Russia deteriorates. The ongoing crisis in Ukraine has made all of these problems more difficult to deal with.
Now, to Tuesday’s topic.
Global Famine – the dynamics of food system risk
The essay on this topic is Daniel Maxwell from Tufts University, where he is the Henry J. Leir Professor in Food Security at the Freidman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and is also the Research Director of the Feinstein International Center. In the essay, he first describes the decline of famine after the 1960s – due to a combination of technological advances in food production and distribution, economic growth, and an expanded global humanitarian response capacity.
The 2011 famine in Somalia was a rude awakening, and by 2017 subsequent famines in Nigerian and South Sudan (and several other near misses in Somalia and Yemen) had proven that this was not a one-off occurrence. Famine was back as a global threat – and the interruptions created by COVID-19 led the World Food Program to warn of “biblical famine.” As it turned out, nothing that could be defined as a famine occurred, but by 2022 the list of famine-risk countries had grown to six – Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Nigeria.
Against this introduction, Dr. Maxwell provides some useful definitions. Famines are extreme events in which a large number of people in a given population or geographic area suffer inadequate access to food, usually because their livelihoods have been damaged or destroyed. This leads to widespread malnutrition, ill health, and death. In most famines, deaths are frequently caused by infectious diseases rather than outright starvation. Young children account for the majority of famine deaths.
Researchers recognize the vagueness of this definition, so they developed the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), an index that demonstrates graphically the more measurable indicators of famine – including food insecurity, malnutrition, and mortality.
He next goes into a deeper explanation of the history of famine – from the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, Asian famines of the 1870s, and the Holodomor – the Ukrainian famine brought about by Stalin’s policies of collectivization and attempts to erase Ukrainian identity. The most serious famine of the 20th century was in China; this came about because of Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” effort that began in the late 1950s. Maxwell says that the incidence of famine declined in the last decades of the 20th century because of the decline in totalitarian government in that period – although a final major famine did occur in North Korea in the 1990s.
He then lays out the causes of famine:
Population growth has been the go-to explanation for food insecurity – but research done in the last decade shows that the assumed relation between these two variables falls apart over the past 60 years. Malthus was on to something, but he didn’t have it exactly right.
Entitlement failures, which Maxwell explains as the issue of inadequate access to food and not food shortages themselves. The literature defines entitlement to food as primarily the ability to buy, grow, or otherwise access adequate food.
Behavioral responses, more commonly called “coping strategies.” This suggests that famine is a process rather than an event, which suggests that early interventions could avert catastrophe.
Conflict is the most common causal factor in almost all modern famines or near misses. Sometimes starvation is used as a weapon in these conflicts.
Multi-hazard causation can be identified for famines – frequently coupling a natural disaster with violent conflict to create what we might call a “perfect storm.”
Response failure as a cause of famine, developed early in this century, is a fairly new insight into the phenomenon. This idea gave rise to the notion of identifying the early warning signs of famine and thus the prospect of early intervention to prevent famine rather than clean up after the fact.
The Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) was funded by the US and developed in 1985. The intent of this was to analyze market trends, seasonal climatic forecasting, and other causal factors predicting food security status and trends. This has been reasonably accurate in its forecasts, although the policy response to these warnings has not worked as well. By looking ahead, the US was minimizing the likelihood that it would be blindsided by a famine.
The rationale for the US funding of FEWS NET was the fact that the US is the major humanitarian donor in the world and its main tool was food aid
Limited understanding of famine dynamics undermines all efforts to predict and deal with famines.
Maxwell follows this theoretical piece by describing the current situation. This map illustrates the 2022 global food crisis.
His explanation for the categories of food insecurity on this map is complicated, but he says that the common factor is that nearly all countries facing a severe food security crisis are dependent on imports. In addition, the areas that are most food insecure generally get most of their food imports (particularly wheat) from Black Sea ports in Ukraine and Russia. The Ukraine war has disrupted this supply chain, and other sources of wheat are more distant, in North America, Argentina, or Australia. In addition, economic sanctions against Russia drove the price of shipping higher.
All of this has increased the pressure on the organizations that exist to provide relief. The World Food Program estimated last year that the cost of its operations had increased by 44% since the Russian invasion or Ukraine, and the Global Humanitarian Response Plan (which includes more than just food and nutritional support) was only 30% funded as of last July
Maxwell provides information about ways to address this problem. He writes about the policy options for famine prevention and response, and he concludes with a discussion of how to avert famine in the future.
The suggested discussion questions are provocative:
FEWS NET has been successful at predicting coming famines; however, policymakers have often failed to act on this information to prevent these famines. How can policymakers be convinced to act?
Should the West step in and aid countries in the Middle East and Africa that are no longer receiving food shipments from Ukraine and Russia? Why or why not?
Is the sending of cash as a humanitarian response a step forward from the use of food aid? Why or why not?
Should the use of hunger as a weapon be considered a war crime? Why or why not?
Maxwell’s essay ends with a list of suggested readings. Here are a few of them.
Applebaum, Anne, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. London: First United States edition, New York: Doubleday, October 10, 2017.
Buchanan Smith, M., and S. Davies, Famine Early Warning and Response – the Missing Link. London: IT Publications, 1995.
Maxwell, Daniel, and Kirsten Gelsdorf, Understanding the Humanitarian World. London: Routledge, May 8, 2019.
Waal, Alex de., Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, January 13, 2005.
The last item on the website is a link to the “latest news.” For this topic, the link is to a New York Times article “How Russia’s War on Ukraine is Worsening Global Starvation. This link will let you read this article with no paywall; subscribers to the NYT can share 10 articles a month with anyone who has the link. So Happy Thursday.
Thank you. This is important and I appreciate your writing about it.