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Political and Economic Origins of African Hunger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Michael F. Lofchie
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Extract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , December 1975 , pp. 551 - 567
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

Page 551 note 1 See, for example, Paden, John N., Godiksen, Lois, Smyth, Hugh H. et al. , A Framework for Evaluating Long Term Development Strategies for the Sahel-Sudan Region: socio-political factors in ecological reconstruction (Boston, 1974),Google Scholar Sahel-Sudan Project, Center for Policy Alternatives, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Page 552 note 1 Meillassoux, Claude, ‘The Sahel Famine’, in Review of African Political Economy (London), I, 1974, pp. 27–33.Google Scholar

Page 553 note 1 Rake, Alan, ‘Collapse of African Agriculture’, in African Development (London), 02 1975, pp. 17–19.Google Scholar

Page 555 note 1 U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, Survey of Economic Conditions in Africa, 1972 (New York, 1973), ch. IV,Google Scholar ‘Agriculture’, especially pp. 103–5.

Page 555 note 2 Hodgkinson, Edith, ‘Economy’ [of Maul], in Africa South of the Sahara, 1974 (London, 1974), pp. 516–17.Google Scholar

Page 555 note 3 Tanzania Sunday News (Dar es Salaam), 17 November 1974.

Page 556 note 1 Daily News of Tanzania (Dar es Salaam), 30 June 1974.

Page 556 note 2 Moore, Barrington Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, 1966), pp. 509–23.Google Scholar

Page 557 note 1 A useful analysis of economic dualism can be found in Myint, H., The Economics of the Developing Countries (London, 1973), pp. 18–66.Google Scholar For an outstanding discussion of the dual economy in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, see Seidman, Ann, Comparative Development Strategies in East Africa (Nairobi, 1972), pp. 13–32.Google Scholar

Page 557 note 2 Hodgkinson, Edith, ‘Economy’ [of Senegal], in Africa South of the Sahara, 1974, p. 68.Google Scholar

Page 558 note 1 Ian Livingstone, ‘Agriculture in African Economic Development’, ibid. pp. 30–2.

Page 561 note 1 Ibid. p. 33.

Page 561 note 2 Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, Social Classes in Agrarian Societies (Garden City, 1975).Google Scholar

Page 562 note 1 Ruthenberg, Hans, African Agricultural Production Development Policy in Kenya, 1952–1965 (Berlin, 1966), pp. 79–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Page 564 note 1 Nyerere, Julius K., Ujamaa: essays on socialism (London, 1968), pp. 106–44.Google Scholar

Page 565 note 1 The importance of pricing policy in inducing rural change is emphasised by Helleiner, G. K., ‘Agricultural Export Pricing Strategy in Tanzania’, in East African Journal of Rural Development (Nairobi), I, 1, 01 1968, pp. 1–18.Google Scholar