166
ronmental rehabilitation and the distribution of food.
THE SAHEL FAMINE: A SOCIAL
DISASTER
Barbara H. Chasin
Professor of Sociology
Montclair State College
Upper Montclair, New Jersey 07042
With famine in Africa still in the news and even on
the minds of popular music fans, it is important to
consider once again the underlying causes of wide-
spread hunger. Famines are not "natural" disasters;
their causes are social. Schusky and Heinricher's
article is a useful reminder that political and social
changes are needed if famine in the Sahel region of
West Africa is to be overcome.
Schusky and Heinricher stress the importance of
combining sound social science research with re-
search in other fields in order to deal successfully
with the problem of hunger in the Sahel. Their work
is especially valuable in the emphasis it places on
the traditional knowledge of the Sahel's indigenous
peoples. African societies, prior to colonialism, had
numerous mechanisms to protect the environment;
long-term solutions to the Sahel's problems need to
build on this traditional knowledge, supplementing it
with modern scientific methods (Franke, 1986).
There are nongovernmental organizations with rela-
tively small projects who do attempt to combine the
traditional and the modern with good results, but it
is more common to find development agencies
promoting large scale technology combined with the
alleged virtues of the market as a cure for West
Africa's ills. The reason for this unscientific approach
is partially explained by the authors: political and
economic considerations become barriers to the
most rational use of empirical information. The
needs of the poorest Africans frequently take a back
seat to the interests of their own elites, who are in
turn supported by even more powerful Western
elites who provide the bulk of development aid.
Schusky and Heinricher, however, fail to mention
the importance of indigenous stratification systems.
In our own study, Seeds of Famine: Ecological
Destruction and the Development Dilemma in the
West African Sahel (Franke and Chasin, 1980:167-
227), we document several instances in which the
coincidence of interests between local elites and
Western advisors actually interferes with both envi-
The relationship between Western development "ex-
perts" and African elites is a subject that deserves
much greater attention from researchers.
Urban Africa is filled with displaced peasants
whose holdings can no longer support them. In an
effort to prevent urban unrest, national governments,
often following the Western expert's advice, try to
keep down the prices of basic food stuffs. The
producers, mostly small farmers, find their own
economic situation deteriorating. For example, the
Malian government, in 1980-81, was paying farmers
60 Malian francs per kilo for rice that cost 83 Malian
francs per kilo to produce. Smuggling rice into
Burkina-Faso, Niger, and Senegal, where the price
was higher, was one way the farmers dealt with this
situation, but that, of course, lessened the amount of
food available in Mali (Eicher, 1982:160).
In another effort to alleviate shortages, food is
imported, and it too is sold at subsidized prices on
the urban markets. Imported foodstuffs, such as
wheat, help change local tastes and undercut the
markets for the countries' own small producers.
Furthermore, loans from international agencies such
as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are often
used to pay for these imports. The loans have to be
paid back and, in several African countries, servic-
ing national debts is taking up to one-half of their
export earnings (Jackson, 1985).
There is an acute need for ecological reconstruc-
tion in the drought-stricken countries of Africa. I
disagree here with Schusky and Heinricher's discus-
sion. Some reforestation projects may indeed be
poorly executed, but on the whole this crucial
aspect of reversing environmental degradation is
being neglected in favor of more costly and dramatic
projects using expensive Western technology which,
as the authors note, end by exacerbating the very
problems they were supposed to solve. Reforesta-
tion would help to preserve the soil, trees could
provide firewood and cattle fodder, and even possi-
bly help increase the rainfall. Yet, as of 1980, the
Club du Sahel, an organization of donors to Sahelian
nations, was allocating only 1.4 percent of its devel-
opment assistance to ecology/forestry projects
(Grainger, 1982:46).
Very little money is going to research on the
traditional rainfed subsistence crops. For example,
there could be more support for research on
drought-resistant varieties of grain, and on inte-
grated systems which link farmers and herders
together in a way that proved so beneficial in the
past (see Grainger, p. 58; Wijkman and Timberlake,
1984:40).
The authors correctly point out that U.S. aid to
Africa is shaped by the political and economic
interests of this country's policy makers and not by

the needs of African peasants, herders, and work-
ers, who have no input into the decisions that will so
affect their lives.
Current U.S. development policies stress the
workings of the misnamed "free market." Low crop
yields in Africa's drought-stricken countries are
blamed on government regulations in such countries
as Mali, Niger, and Sudan. For Mali to receive $18
million in assistance, for example, it must make
changes in its agricultural pricing policies which are
acceptable to the Reagan Administration (New York
Times, 1985).
The poorest countries are not even the ones that
necessarily get the most aid (Sewell et aI.,
1985:208). In Africa, the top five recipients of U.S.
Development Aid for 1985 are Sudan, Kenya, Soma-
lia, Liberia, and Zaire (Shepard, 1985). While these
five countries will receive' over 50 percent of the
economic aid given to all African nations, only
Somalia is one of the five poorest African nations. In
1984, $715 million was allotted to forty African
countries; by contrast, Israel received $910 million in
aid and Egypt $868 million. This year, Israel will
receive over a billion dollars from the United States.
Weapons seem to have a higher priority than
other forms of aid. Arms sales and assistance from
the U.S. increased by 150 percent in the last three
years, compared to an overall aid increase of only 40
percent. The Reagan Administration has opposed
fifty loans to Africa from the World Bank or smaller
agencies, including six to Ethiopia, and there have
been reductions to the U.S. contribution to the
International Fund for Agricultural Development
(IFAD) (Shepard, 1985), and to the International
Development Association (IDA). IFAD was created
as a result of a 1977 UN-sponsored conference on
hunger and its projects have been oriented to small
farmers, women, and agricultural research. IDA was
created in 1960 to offer interest-free loans to coun-
tries which cannot afford to pay the interest on
World Bank loans. The consequence of these cuts
will be an increase in the debt burden for countries
like Senegal which did not receive its expected loan
in 1984 (Twose, n.d.:17).
These are some of the issues which need to be
considered when analyzing hunger in the Sahel.
Schusky and Heinricher do a valuable service in
reminding us of the political and social origins of the
Sahel's problems. They also warn us of the dangers
of assuming that descriptions of catastrophes are
accurate ones. However, even if less people and
animals died than was originally predicted in the
1968-73 famine, there is chronic malnutrition in the
Sahel and serious inequities in access to food, clean
water, etc. There is serious ecological degradation
and if steps are not taken now to reverse this, future
catastrophes are sure to occur.
167
COMMENTARYONSCHUSKYAND
HEINRICHER, "TECHNOLOGY AND
POLITICS IN THE ECOLOGY OF THE
SAHEL"
Don F. Hadwiger
DepartmentofPoljljcalSc~nce
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa 50010
According to Schusky and Heinricher, food aid to
the Sahel should have built upon the success of
traditional agricultural practices, rather than assum-
ing that these practices had failed. Reports exagger-
ated the effects of the Sahelian famine, spurring
reforms which usually relied upon applications of
inappropriate technology. Intervention, however
well-intentioned, became the main problem: "Politi-
cal relations rather than nature were responsible for
the Sahel famine."
So what is to be the remedy, if any? The authors
presumably intend that their insights may guide
future planners, yet they provide no evidence that
political relations are, any more than nature, subject
to human control. Rather, they note that the inter-
venors are following hidden agendas, and the "ex-
perts" are carried away by the prospects offered by
new technology.
So this article is a lament, an old lament voiced,
for example, by chiefs of Indian tribes on the North
American Great Plains. Many traditional cultures like
those in the Sahel have adapted well to a sparse
and uncertain physical ecology, only to be swept
away by "political relations." For traditional agricul-
ture, and modern agriculture as well, the greatest
challenge has been to accommodate to changing
social, political, and economic relationships. Tradi-
tional cultures have often succumbed, but modern
farmers have succumbed too, faced with changes
which they themselves may have helped to acceler-
ate.
To use the example of the Great Plains, of which
this writer has some knowledge, a succession of
farmer societies adapted reasonably well to that
region, once considered so marginal as to be called
the "Great American Desert." A succession of farm-
ing systems produced abundance more often than
scarcity, and indeed the passing of each agricultural