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African Famine Relief

Date: 2021
From: Gale Global Issues Online Collection
Publisher: Gale, part of Cengage Group
Document Type: Topic overview
Length: 1,922 words
Content Level: (Level 5)
Lexile Measure: 1480L

Full Text:
Famine is a widespread and severe shortage of food that leads to malnutrition, disease, starvation, and high rates of death within a
population. It generally arises as a result of acute or long-term food insecurity, which is defined as a persistent pattern of inconsistent
access to nutritious food. Aid agencies further differentiate food insecurity from hunger, classifying the former as a household-level
economic issue and the latter as the uncomfortable physical sensation experienced by an individual who cannot find or afford enough
to eat.

Africa has suffered several food crises in the twenty-first century, prompting the international community to respond with humanitarian
aid and relief programs. These programs have delivered life-saving food aid to millions of needy recipients while facing an array of
challenges. However, observers have expressed concern that such aid has made some populations dependent on international food
assistance.

Policy makers and activists continue to seek sustainable solutions to famine in Africa and its accompanying problems, which have
taken on new urgency because of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. According to a report published by the Africa
Center for Strategic Studies in February 2021, acute food insecurity in the African continent rose by 60 percent since the beginning of
the COVID-19 crisis in early 2020.

Main Ideas
Food insecurity, hunger, and famine have been persistent issues in Africa during the continent's colonial and postcolonial
eras. Experts identify a complex web of related factors including agricultural production patterns, economic forces, corruption
and resource mismanagement, war and instability, and climate change among the issue's root causes.
A devastating famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s brought international attention to the issue of hunger in Africa.
Developed countries routinely provide African countries with food aid to relieve hunger and famine, but the standard
international aid model has been criticized for creating dependence upon donated food.
The Africa Center for Strategic Studies reported a 60 percent spike in the number of Africans facing acute food insecurity as
a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As of 2021, multiple regions of Africa are facing major food security issues, including East Africa, Madagascar, Sudan, the
Sahel, and Zimbabwe.

Background
Food insecurity in Africa has a complex, interrelated set of causes that include historical, cultural, economic, political, and geographic
elements. For example, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European imperialists disrupted local agricultural
economies by incentivizing certain crops and, in some cases, coercing African agriculturalists to focus their efforts on producing cash
crops for international markets. As a result, large expanses of fertile farmland were dedicated to growing profit-oriented exports at the
expense of meeting domestic food needs. The effects of this continue to be observed in the twenty-first century, with economic
globalization opening up greater markets. Global food prices have gradually but steadily risen since 2000, affecting the availability
and affordability of the inexpensive, nutritious grains many African people have historically relied upon for sustenance.

Cultural, economic, and political factors also contribute to African food insecurity. Economic necessity often forces farming
communities to focus their efforts solely on the current growing season, sacrificing long-term planning and development that could
vastly improve overall food security. Many African countries lack the economic resources to build effective social safety nets. Further,
ethnic and intercultural tensions tend to intensify during periods of acute food insecurity, which often worsens existing problems. In
some countries, political corruption and mismanagement of resources have directly led to food insecurity and widespread hunger,
and war has similarly strong causal links to food insecurity and famine. During periods of military conflict, combatants often target
their opponents' food supplies, destroying crops and livestock herds and the infrastructure needed to distribute food. Such events are
so routine and devastating to the targeted populations that the United Nations (UN) Security Council formally condemned such tactics
in a unanimous 2018 vote.

Geographic factors including extreme weather, floods, and droughts have also negatively affected food production in Africa on a
mass scale. Such developments can quickly escalate to a crisis, particularly in the presence of other contributing factors like
government corruption and mismanagement. Climate change threatens to intensify these problems, as foreshadowed by 2020 events
including severe droughts in southern Africa, flooding in Sudan and South Sudan, and locust swarms in East Africa.

International Relief Efforts

According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), food aid from developed to developing countries began in the
1950s. During this early stage and into the 1980s, food aid programs were generally structured around shipping surpluses of stable
products such as grains and cereals to impoverished regions experiencing food shortages.

Africa experienced several famines during the second half of the twentieth century, including a drought-induced event that killed an
estimated one million people in the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Not until the Ethiopian
famine of the mid-1980s, however, did the issue of hunger in Africa gain significant attention from the international community. The
famine resulted from a combination of drought and civil war, which caused severe economic disruptions while leaving many people in
conflict zones beyond the reach of aid agencies. An outpouring of public support followed, with high-profile musicians from the United
States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Ireland staging concerts and recording hit songs to generate money for relief efforts.
International food aid poured into Ethiopia, which relieved the acute phase of the famine by 1986.

Since that time, African food insecurity has become a high-profile issue among members of the international aid community. During
the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s, the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) delivered two million tons of food aid to people impacted
by hunger and food insecurity. The Ethiopian aid program was the WFP's most visible intervention to that point in the organization's
history, but the WFP had earlier worked to provide relief during the Sahel famine of the 1960s–1980s. The UN established the WFP
in 1961, and the organization operated its first food aid program in 1963 when it delivered food to needy Nubian populations in
Sudan.

The WFP continues to rank among the leading international agencies providing food aid and famine relief to Africa. It partners with
the national governments of UN member states, along with approximately one thousand nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and
a long list private-sector participants that includes many major multinational corporations. As of 2021, the WFP maintains active food
aid programs in multiple regions of Africa experiencing acute food insecurity crises, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
northeastern Nigeria, the Sahel, and South Sudan. These parts of Africa are currently classified with Level 3 (L3) food aid needs,
representing the WFP's highest alert level.

The United States is the world's largest provider of food aid by a wide margin. According to the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID), the United States has provided more than half of all the food donated to needy populations almost every year
since the 1950s. Global Policy Forum is an international NGO with headquarters in the United States and Germany. Its archives
tracking the world's leading national WFP donors from 1974 to 2014 note that the United States placed in the top ten almost every
year. Other countries routinely appearing among the top ten WFP benefactors include Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway,
Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Germany, Italy, France, Finland, and Japan.

Critical Thinking Questions

What factors have contributed to ongoing struggles with food insecurity and famine in different parts of Africa?
In your opinion, what type of reforms to the international food aid model would help aid-dependent nations become more
self-sufficient? Explain your answer.
Do you think international aid organizations should suspend assistance to countries with governments identified as corrupt or
oppressive? Why or why not?

Challenges and Criticisms

Critics of standard approaches to international food aid have warned that legacy programs tend to create dependence on external
assistance. This phenomenon, which has been a noted issue since at least the 1980s, was extensively reviewed in a 2015 article
published in This Week in Global Health. The paper identified food aid as particularly prone to the cycle of dependence generated by
many international aid programs, in which the delivery of direct aid acts as a disincentive to policy reform and long-term development
in recipient countries. When dependence on external food aid increases, as it has in Africa on many occasions, economic forces tend
to activate, aggravating the underlying cycle of need: incoming food aid tends to slow down local agricultural production and reduce
market demand for local foods, which results in further food shortages when donated food supplies dwindle. This, in turn, triggers
another cycle of aid delivery, resulting in lasting reliance on international donations.

Critics have long encouraged reforms to the international food aid model. These include calls for increased resources for agricultural
development at the local level in Africa, encouraging entrepreneurship and giving farmers an incentive to produce higher-quality
products for local consumption. However, many major obstacles remain, including a lack of political will and the continued effects of
export-oriented cash crop production.
Climate change continues to present a growing threat to food security in Africa. Authored by respected British economist Nicholas
Stern (1946–) and published in October 2006, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, also known as the Stern
Report, has come to be regarded as the seminal analysis of how climate change stands to impact global economics. The review
predicts that climate change will have taken the strongest negative toll on the world's most impoverished countries, which Stern
believes will be impacted early and hard. Stern identified several regions of Africa as particularly high risk, including East Africa, the
Sahel, and the dry zones of the continent's southern reaches. Africa could face more frequent and more intense famines in the future
if the international community does not take prompt and decisive action to mitigate the effects of climate change and prevent its worst
possible consequences from becoming reality.

As of August 2021, several regions of Africa are in the throes of acute food shortages and famines. The Africa Center for Strategic
Studies stresses that the COVID-19 pandemic has severely hampered the delivery of international food aid, resulting in major
increases in the number of Africans facing food insecurity. Comparing the number of people at risk in 2019 to those at risk in 2020,
the center noted an increase of 15.6 million to 21.8 million in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 7 million to 9.6 million in Sudan,
3.6 million to 6 million in Zimbabwe, and 3.2 million to 12.7 million in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The report cited COVID-19,
ongoing conflict, government corruption and mismanagement, and adverse climate events as primary causes.

Also in 2021, news agencies extensively reported on a mounting food crisis in Madagascar, which suffered its most severe drought in
four decades. The situation put an estimated 1.14 million people at what a WFP official described as "the very edge of starvation."
Observers blamed the event on the adverse effects of climate change, with some news agencies characterizing it as the first famine
in world history caused solely by global warming. In November 2020, Ethiopia began to descend into another severe food shortage
as a consequence of the Tigray conflict pitting the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) against the Ethiopian government. The
ongoing strife has displaced more than 322,000 people, including those experiencing displacement prior to November 2020, and has
caused acute food insecurity. World Vision reported that 33.8 million people in Ethiopia and elsewhere in East Africa were facing food
insecurity in 2021, including at least 12.8 million severely malnourished children.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2022 Gale, a Cengage Company

Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
"African Famine Relief." Gale Global Issues Online Collection, Gale, 2021. Gale In Context: Global Issues,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/CP3208520192/GIC?u=hklsc&sid=bookmark-GIC&xid=58ce1ffa. Accessed 3 Oct. 2022.
Gale Document Number: GALE|CP3208520192