Last week there was a flurry of excitement as commentators compared the R1 million pledged by the South African government to aid the victims of the famine in the Horn of Africa, and the potential billion rand loan which it is currently considering for Swaziland. Not only could Africa’s economic powerhouse donate considerably more than a million rand (about £90,000 or US$150,000) to Somalia, but granting a conditions-free loan to King Mswati III’s dysfunctional kingdom would serve only to prop up the continent’s last absolute monarch.
Although I was as outraged by my government’s apparent indifference to the plight of Somalis, I did begin to wonder if that money could be used more wisely. Of course, South Africa must – and can – contribute to the international effort to distribute food in Somalia. Given the scrutiny of aid agencies working in the region, as well as the awareness of how aid money has been channelled to elites over the past few decades, it’s likely that South Africa’s donation will go to those who need it. But giving money to alleviate the famine is a short-term fix.
Possibly because of the way it echoes Africa’s other best-known famine, the Live Aid-engendering Ethiopian famine of 1984-1985, the famine in the Horn of Africa has generated an enormous amount of coverage in the international press. More information and analysis can only ever be a good thing, but much of the discussion around the famine suggests that it’s a crisis which emerged suddenly and without any warning. As the Guardian’s John Vidal put it, ‘A massive drought, as if out of nowhere, has settled over the Horn of Africa’. Moreover, some commentators, like Vidal, have blamed the famine on only one or two factors, usually climate change or Western indifference to African suffering.
The causes of famines are complex, but they are never entirely unpredictable. Counterintuitively, they are not necessarily caused by a lack of food, but are, rather, the result of long-term systemic failure: in agriculture, trade, and, most importantly, in government. By suggesting that South Africa’s paltry million rand donation would be better spent, my point is that South Africa’s involvement in the Somali crisis should go beyond giving money for food. It needs to stop famines from happening in the first place, and that is not impossible.
We have managed largely to eradicate famine in the twentieth century. Before then, food shortages and famines were part of the rhythms of everyday life. In societies where food production was inefficient both in terms of labour and technology – and until the eighteenth century, eighty per cent of the population of Europe was engaged in agriculture – frequent crop failures meant that famine occurred often. But during the 1700s, an agricultural revolution allowed greater, more regular, and, crucially, more reliable yields to be produced by smaller numbers of people. International trade also meant that countries could buy food to supplement local shortfalls. For example, during the 1870s, the failure of the European grain crop boosted Canadian and American wheat exports, as these two countries fed Europe for almost a decade.
Although initially developed in the Netherlands and Britain (and there is a strong link between the development of capitalist economies and efficient food systems), the methods pioneered during this green revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries spread around the globe. By the early 1900s, famine was caused increasingly by people, rather than only by nature. That said, the Great Famine in Ireland (1845-1852) was certainly the product of the potato blight, but it also occurred at a time when Ireland was an exporter of wheat: there was enough food to go around, it was just that those who were starving couldn’t afford to buy bread. The Cattle Killing Movement in South Africa (1856-1857) caused widespread famine among the Xhosa. Around 40,000 people died of starvation, 33,000 moved away from the eastern Cape to seek work, and the authority of the Xhosa polity was fatally undermined. But this was caused by a decision to slaughter cattle and destroy crops on a mass scale.
Equally, some twentieth-century famines were caused partly by crop failure, but were also the product of bad governance and ineffective systems of food distribution. As Cormac Ó Gráda explains:
Wars, blockades, poor governance, and civil unrest can also lead to famines; panics about the food supply and poorly performing markets can exacerbate them. In such cases…factors other than crop shortfalls reduce the purchasing power or ‘entitlements’ of vulnerable sections of the population: the size of the loaf matters less than its distribution.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argued in Poverty and Famines (1981) that – contra Thomas Malthus who suggested that exponential population growth would result inevitably in famine – famines can occur in times of peak food production. Why? I think it’s worth quoting Sen in full:
In every society that exists, the amount of food that a person or a family can command is governed by one set of rules or another, combined with the contingent circumstances in which that person or that family happens to be placed vis-à-vis those rules. For example, in a private ownership market economy, how much food a person can command will depend on (1) what he owns, and (2) what he can get in exchange for what he owns either through trade, or through production, or some combination of the two. Obviously, in such an economy a person may suddenly face starvation either because his ownership bundle collapses (e.g., through alienation of land to the money lenders), or because the ‘exchange entitlement’ of his ownership (i.e., the command of what he owns) collapses (e.g., through his becoming unemployed and not being able to sell his labour power, or through a decline in his terms of trade vis-à-vis food).
In other words, people starve when they can’t buy food – either because they no longer have the money to exchange for food (as a result of unemployment, for example) or because food prices become prohibitively high. Peaks in food prices could be due to droughts and other ecological factors, conflict, and speculation.
The crisis in Somalia demonstrates particularly well how state intervention can prevent or cause famine. In 1960, British Somaliland and Italian Somalia became the independent Republic of Somalia. Nine years later, Major-General Mohamed Siad Barre seized power in a bloodless coup and ruled Somalia through a military dictatorship until the collapse of his government in 1991. Somalia’s experience of food shortages and famine must be understood in this context of Barre’s government (or lack thereof) and economic policies. In 1970, he announced the implementation of ‘scientific socialism’, introduced strict central planning, and viciously stamped out all forms of opposition. Peter T. Leeson writes:
The government slaughtered civilians who posed threats to the government’s plans or political power, used coercive intimidation to create artificial support for its activities, and forcibly relocated others to further the political or economic ends of Barre and his cronies. ‘Both the urban population and nomads living in the countryside [were] subjected to summary killings, arbitrary arrest, detention in squalid conditions, torture, rape, crippling constraints on freedom of movement and expression and a pattern of psychological intimidation’. The state ruthlessly suppressed free speech and controlled all forms of information reaching Somalis. Newspapers (only one was officially permitted by the government), radio, and television were fully censored and dissent in any form squelched with force. Under Somalia’s National Security Law No. 54, ‘gossip’ became a capital offense. Twenty other basic civil freedoms involving speech, association and organisation also carried the death penalty.
Funds were diverted from public works, education, healthcare, and infrastructure to the military, on whose support and ability to terrify and brutalise the Somali population Barre depended. The nationalisation of land and industry in 1975 was, predictably, a disaster. The abandonment of socialism at the end of the 1970s in order to attract assistance from the International Monetary Fund made very little difference either. Somalia was heavily dependent on international food aid during the 1970s and 1980s. The Horn of Africa is prone to drought, but it’s worth noting that despite catastrophic droughts in the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, Somalia managed to avoid famine – unlike its war-torn neighbour, Ethiopia, whose government ignored the plight of its population.
As Abdi Ismail Samatar notes,
Somalia’s last major famine was in 1992 and was not caused by drought. Nearly 300,000 innocent people starved to death because of sectarian politics. The epicentre of that famine was in Bay, one of the country’s most productive agricultural regions, and starvation was induced by warlords who used food as a weapon against farmers and pastoralists.
Barre’s government collapsed in 1991, plunging Somalia into civil war and a chaos from which it has yet to emerge. It’s telling that a country which had managed to avoid famine for over half a century, despite drought, food shortages, and incredible food insecurity, saw widespread famine only after food supplies were disrupted by war.
So why famine now? Over the course of sixteen years, Somalia has been the subject of fourteen reconciliation conferences, none of which managed to produce a stable government. In 2004, the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), an anti-Islamist, pro-Ethiopian political grouping, was put into power in Somalia under the leadership of Abdullahi Yusuf and with the support of the United Nations. However, the TGF was neither popular nor effective as a government. In the absence of effective leadership, a number of attempts were made by Islamic groups, war lords, civil society organisations, and others to create some sort of order in Somalia, and particularly in Mogadishu. One of these, the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, was formed by a group of war lords in February 2006. They were backed by the United States who saw them as allies against Islamic groups in the region.
Armed clashes between the Alliance and Islamist groups soon broke out and developed into a war which the Islamists won decisively. By the middle of 2006, they had taken control of Mogadishu as well as central and southern Somalia. Not only was this an embarrassment to the United States and its ally Ethiopia, but for the first time it seemed that Somalia was offered the possibility of a relatively popular and effective government in the hands of the Islamists, who quickly organised themselves into the Council of Islamic Courts (CIC). However, an invasion by Ethiopia at the end of 2006 caused the collapse of the CIC, the reinstallment of the almost entirely ineffective TFG, and the beginning of a new civil war between the Government and opposition groups. The most successful of these was Al-Shabab. Originally the CIC’s youth wing and affiliated with al-Qaeda, Al-Shabab is an Islamist group which now controls most of southern Somalia.
Years of political uncertainty, conflict, and chaos (best exemplified by the way piracy has flourished along the Somali coast) have left Somalis particularly vulnerable to drought and the less predictable effects of climate change. A combination of a US- and UN-backed blockade of the parts of Somalia controlled by Al-Shabab, as well as this organisation’s unwillingness to allow the World Food Programme to deliver food to southern Somalis has caused the famine. Samatar explains:
Normally, societies have three lines of defence against mass starvation: local capacity, national government and the international community. When a disaster hits a region, the first help comes from local administrations and the communities themselves. If events overwhelm the first responders, then the national government takes charge of operations; and when the crisis exceeds the wherewithal of the nation, international actors come to the rescue.
It is clear that all three levels of livelihood protections have failed in Somalia. Al-Shabab has prohibited the local population from organising their municipal governments and charities to fend off the disaster. Similarly, Somalia’s national government, which is beholden to sectarian leadership and international patrons, has been oblivious to the emerging calamity, and has thwarted the international community from coming to its aid
This was a famine which could have been avoided had order been established in Somalia. Here, Somali politicians and war lords are as much to blame as the international community, East Africa’s Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the UN, and, crucially in my view, the African Union. This famine is not the result solely of dastardly foreign countries plundering Africa, nor can blame be laid entirely on Somalis themselves. But after the effort to feed Somalis has ended, reconstruction needs to begin. And it’s here where South Africa must – and I think is obliged to – take a leading role.
Somalia also demonstrates the extent to which food security is linked to strong, functioning governments. Countries which are badly run, have weak economies, and, most importantly, are authoritarian, are the most strongly disposed towards famine. Last year’s narrowly-avoided famine in West Africa was due largely to the incompetence of Niger and Chad’s malfunctioning, undemocratic political dispensations. Only the spread of democratic and open government, with, crucially, a free flow of information, will prevent famines from happening in Africa. As Sen remarked, ‘There is, indeed, no such thing as an apolitical food problem.’
Note: I try to use sources which are easily available, but for this post I’ve relied on articles from academic journals. Unfortunately, these are securely behind paywalls. If you’d like copies of them, let me know.
Further Reading
Texts cited here:
Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York and London: W.W. Norton, [2010] 2011).
Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Making Famine History,’ Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 45, no. 1 (Mar., 2007), pp. 5-38.
Peter T. Leeson, ‘Better off stateless: Somalia before and after government collapse,’ Journal of Comparative Economics, vol. 35 (2007), pp. 689-710.
Ken Menkhaus, ‘The Crisis in Somalia: Tragedy in Five Acts,’ African Affairs, vol. 106/204 (2007), pp. 357-390.
Amartya Sen, ‘The Food Problem: Theory and Policy,’ Third World Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 3 (Jul., 1982), pp. 447-459.
Other sources:
L.A. Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford, Feast and Famine: Food and Nutrition in Ireland 1500-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (eds.), The Political Economy of Hunger, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond: the Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Revisiting the Bengal Famine of 1943-4,’ History Ireland, vol. 18, no. 4, The Elephant and Partition: Ireland and India (July/August 2010), pp. 36-39.
Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘The Ripple that Drowns? Twentieth-Century Famines in China and India as Economic History,’ Economic History Review, vol. 61, (2008), pp. 5-37.
C.P. Melville, ‘The Persian Famine of 1870-72: Prices and Politics,’ in Food, Diet, and Economic Change Past and Present (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), pp. 133-150.
Amartya Sen, ‘Famines as Failures of Exchange Entitlements,’ Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 11, no. 31/33, Special Number: Population and Poverty (Aug., 1976), pp. 1273-1280.
Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
Anne M. Thompson, ‘Somalia: Food Aid in a Long-Term Emergency,’ Food Policy (Aug. 1983), pp. 209-219.
C. Paul Vincent, The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915-1919 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985).
Christian Webersik, ‘Mogadishu: An Economy without a State,’ Third World Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 8 (2006), pp. 1463-1480.
S.G. Wheatcroft, ‘Famine and Food Consumption Records in Early Soviet History, 1917-25,’ in Food, Diet, and Economic Change Past and Present (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), pp. 151-174.
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Tangerine and Cinnamon 
Jul 3
Gourmet Traveller
One of the perks of academia is being able to travel for research, study, and conferences. The odd side-effect of this is that academics become unwitting experts in the quality of travel food – by which I mean the meals available in airports and railway stations and on planes and trains.
I’ve never really understood the griping about airline meals: they’re certainly not the most inspired dinners and, particularly, breakfasts I’ve ever eaten – and I’ve probably drunk the worst coffee in the world while on long-haul flights between Cape Town and London – but I haven’t ever had anything that was actively offensive.
In fact, I rather liked the lamb biryani with cashew nuts and caramelised bits of onion I ate on a flight from Qatar to Joburg, and the macadamia and honey ice cream I had while flying from Perth to Melbourne. I’ve had considerably worse food on trains. On a nine-hour journey between Montrose in northern Scotland and London, the dining car was closed because the tea urn was broken. Which, although an interesting commentary on the centrality of tea to the British diet, was nevertheless unpleasant. A woman can subsist on crisps for only so long.
I wonder why there’s so much complaining about airline food. I think it has something to do with the overall unpleasantness of economy-class flying – the cramped seats, the mucky loos, and the dismaying misfortune of being stuck beside fellow passengers with strange personal habits – but it’s also connected, to some extent, with the ways in which we understand travel.
I’ve just returned from a month in Australia – it was amazing – and became particularly aware of how much I spend on food when I travel because it’s probably the most expensive country I’ve ever visited. But I still went out of my way to eat friands and Anzac cookies and to drink fantastic coffee to try to understand the cities I visited in Australia.
There are few non-fiction genres which blur so easily into each other as food and travel writing – as attested by the continuing popularity of magazines like the Australian Gourmet Traveller, and the legion of food-and-travel cookery books and blogs. The best food writing is a kind of inadvertent travel writing. Claudia Roden’s writing on the Middle East and North Africa, Fuchsia Dunlop on China, Madhur Jaffrey on India, and, to a lesser extent, Elizabeth David’s writing on France, are as much introductions to these countries and regions at particular moments in time, as they are recipe books.
And it’s striking how much travel writing focusses on food. One of the most memorable sections of Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937) – by far my favourite travel narrative ever – features a blue porcelain bowl of chicken mayonnaise.
Later, stranded in the middle of the night and in the freezing cold on the road between Herat and Murghab, Byron and his travelling companions take refuge in a makeshift tent after their car breaks down:
Byron uses food to suggest his and his companions’ feelings at particular moments of the journey. Relieved to have reached Maimana – now on the Afghan border with Turkmenistan – he and Christopher Sykes are treated to a feast:
Byron is less interested in what the people around him are eating, than in how food reflects his experiences of his journey through the Middle East and Central Asia. Writing in 1980, in an essay included in the collection What am I doing here, Bruce Chatwin uses food to emphasise his sense of what was lost – culturally, socially – during the communist revolution in Afghanistan:
His elegy for Afghanistan is problematic on so many levels – his deliberate misunderstanding of Afghan politics, his romanticising of pre-1960s Afghanistan, and Chatwin’s own dubious reputation for factual accuracy – but it’s an evocative piece of writing which conjures up what feels like a realistic and layered portrayal of the regions of Afghanistan which Chatwin visited.
Describing food is absolutely integral to this: unlike foreign religious ceremonies or social customs, we can all sample – or imagine sampling – the cuisines of other societies. Food allows us some purchase on ways of living which are unfamiliar to us: we can use food to try to understand a different society, and also to judge it.
In her account of a journey through parts of West Africa in the mid-1890s, Mary Kingsley used food – this time cannibalism – to explain the what she perceived to be the ‘backwardness’ of Fang society:
Uncivilised – in this case, taboo-breaking – food and eating habits suggest an uncivilised society.
When I was in Perth, I dropped into the fantastic New Edition bookshop in William Street. Having taken photographs of the incredible mural which covers the shop’s back wall, I was afflicted with guilt – and also the same desperate desire that I feel in most independent bookshops for it to survive and flourish (which makes visiting independent bookshops needlessly stressful) – so I bought a book: a small, light collection of Italo Calvino’s essays, Under the Jaguar Sun (1983).
The three essays which comprise the collection are the germ of a longer book which Calvino had planned to write on the five senses. He completed only these three before his death, and the titular essay, happily, focuses on the sensation of taste. It’s about a couple who visit Oaxaca in Mexico. Their interest in the country’s cuisine becomes, gradually, the purpose of the holiday itself:
This obsession with the country’s food coincides, unexpectedly, with their shared enthusiasm for Mexico’s Pre-Columbian past. After a visit to a ‘complex of ruins’ in Monte Albán, where their guide implies that the losers of a ballgame played at one of the ruined temples were not only ritually slaughtered, but also eaten by the temple’s priests and the victorious team, Olivia, the narrator’s partner, becomes preoccupied with discovering how these human remains were prepared. The story implies that her desire to eat ever-more exotic Mexican dishes stems from her belief – never articulated – that some remnant of these cannibalistic feasts must exist within contemporary Mexican cooking.
The narrator reflects:
For Olivia, eating becomes a way, literally, to imbibe the culture, politics, and history of Mexico. If she can’t be Mexican, then she can, physically, become closer to Mexico – its land and people – itself.
I don’t, obviously, advocate cannibalism as part of the average tourist itinerary – it’s illegal in most countries, for one thing – but I think that this idea of ‘eating’ a country is a useful way of exploring how we use food to construct national identities.
In some ways, food stands in for a society: we eat piles of pancakes with bacon and maple syrup in the United States as a way of engaging with what many believe to be an excessive, consumerist society. Travellers who think of themselves as being in pursuit of the ‘real’ – unpredictable, utterly unfamiliar, occasionally dangerous – India eat the delicious, yet potentially diarrhoea-inducing, street food of country: eating the more familiar offerings at hotels signifies a failure to leave the tourist bubble. Since the 1940s and 1950s, France has promoted its cuisine as a symbol of its national culture. (Something which Charles de Gaulle may have been thinking about when he wondered how he would govern nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese.) French food is sophisticated, so French society is sophisticated.
There are grains of truth in all these stereotypes, but they remain that – simplified and often clichéd understandings of complex societies. They are also, largely, not a real reflection of how most people eat: they exclude the ingredients bought at supermarkets, and the meals eaten at fast food joints. So if we want, truly, to understand countries and societies through their food, we have to be willing to eat that which is, potentially, less interesting and, perhaps, less enticing, than the exotic meals described in travel books.
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.