MALNUTRITION: Definition of term "Famine"

JOHANNESBURG, 13 May 2010 (IRIN) - Aid agencies and donors have warned of the possibility of a famine in Niger, evoking images of the last food crisis in the Sahelian country in 2005. Some media organizations have already pronounced the current crisis a famine. So, what exactly is a famine? "There is no clear boundary or definition [of a famine]," said Christopher Barrett, a food aid expert who teaches development economics at Cornell University, in the US. "Clearly, 1984 in Ethiopia was a famine [a million people died and an estimated eight million were on food aid]; equally clearly, 2009 in the United States was not [the US Department of Agriculture said on average 33.7 million Americans received food vouchers each month in 2009, the highest number ever]. Barrett said the typical explanation of a famine was "greater than usual mortality that is caused by insufficient availability of or access to food, whether directly due to starvation or far more commonly, indirectly, due to disease or injury associated with severe under-nutrition." Stephen Devereux, author of Theories of Famine, a definitive reference book on the subject, noted that dictionary definitions such as "extreme scarcity of food" described a "few symptoms of famine" and selected some factors to "suggest causes", but failed to provide a "comprehensive and concise" definition. "A good working definition of famine must describe a subsistence crisis afflicting particular groups of people within a bounded region over a specified period of time," he wrote. Hundreds, if not thousands, of researchers, academics and humanitarian aid workers have tried defining it. Devereux quoted an academic as saying that "Famine is like insanity: hard to define, but glaring enough when recognized." Why defining it is important? Controversy has dogged the application of "famine" to several recent humanitarian emergencies: Sudan in 1998, Ethiopia in 1999/2000 and 2002/03, and Malawi in 2002. In an influential paper in 2004, Devereux and Paul Howe, both researchers at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, proposed a scale to measure famines. "Both before and during these [African] crises, observers failed to agree on how serious the situation was, or how serious it was likely to get," they commented.
The search for a definition is not merely a technocratic or instrumentalist concern - it has political significance A dire lack of food in Niger in 2005 prompted another debate: using their scale, Devereux and Howe pronounced the situation a "famine", while pointing out that the international community used "less emotive terms, like 'food crisis'." This could possibly have been under pressure from the government at the time which did not acknowledge the crisis. Defining famine is not "merely a semantic issue - these controversies have important implications for famine response and accountability", and a lack of consensus over the definition has delayed interventions and the distribution of resources during a crisis, Howe and Devereux wrote. They cited the 1999/2000 food crisis in Ethiopia as an example. "The contentious issue here was that of scale: because the emergency was confined to a single region [Somali in eastern Ethiopia]", aid agencies avoided the "F-word", saying the term should be saved for very severe situations. A retrospective mortality study suggested that aid agencies had responded late in drawing people into relief camps, "where communicable diseases such as measles spread rapidly, contributing to an estimated 19,900 deaths in Gode zone alone [in Ethiopia's Somali region]", Howe and Devereux said. The 1984/85 Ethiopian famine was another tragic example of donors responding only when people started dying. "In the light of this 'No corpses, no food aid' myopia (not to mention callousness)," Devereux said in his book, he had to agree with Alex de Waal, the British writer, author of Famine Crimes: politics & the disaster relief industry in Africa and researcher, "who concludes pessimistically that there is no good definition on which to make a diagnosis of impending famine." The search for a definition is not merely a "technocratic or instrumentalist concern - it has political significance", Howe and Devereux noted in their 2004 paper. Who do you hold accountable for the deaths from a famine? Governments and agencies [among] whose job[s] it is to prevent famines "have often exploited the ambiguities in the term to contest whether a famine has occurred, thereby evading even limited accountability for their action - or inaction." Accountability, even after [an estimated] 70,000 deaths related to a famine in Sudan in 1998, took the "'soft' form of internal agency evaluations and lesson-learning workshops". Most definitions of famine had centred on a lack of food, but in the past 25 years the thinking on food security has shifted to the link between poverty and vulnerability rather than low food production, Barrett wrote in a paper. This stemmed directly from a "pathbreaking" book by economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, published in 1982. Sen's "famous opening sentences underscore that 'starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes'."
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