This small paper tries to examine the dynamics surrounding hunger and famine in a drought affected context.

1. ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
MASTER’S PROGRAM IN FOOD SECURITY STUDIES
COURSE TITTLE: THE RIGHT TO FOOD AND FOOD POLICIES ANALYSIS
ASSIGNMENT TITTLE: CAN DROUGHT CAUSE FAMINE/HUNGER?
Submitted by
Souvenir Jean Jacques BUCYANA (GSR 0674/07)
Leturer: Dr Melesse Damtie
Addis Ababa December 2015

2. INTRODUCTION
According to WFP the world produces enough to feed the entire global population of 7
billion people. And yet, one person in eight on the planet goes to bed hungry each night. In
some countries, one child in three is underweight .The main causes of hunger in the world
includes among others Poverty, Lack of investment in agriculture, Climate and weather, War
and displacement, Unstable markets and Food wastage (WFP, 2015).
Although there are no international standards for measuring hunger and yet defining the term
is fraught with difficulty, hunger is commonly recognized as a physiological need for food
that results from food deprivation. However, According to WFP, hunger is much more than
the lack of food, it is the complex interaction between food consumption, access to food, how
people cope with the lack of it and their livelihoods.
A drought is a period of below-average precipitation in a given region, resulting in prolonged
shortages in water supply, whether atmospheric, surface or ground water. It can have
substantial impact on ecosystem and agriculture of the affected region. Although droughts
can persist for several years, even a short intense drought can cause significant damage and
harm to the local economy, of vulnerable people with limited capacity to cope against it.
Drought is one of the most common causes of food shortages in the world. For example in
2011, recurrent drought caused crop failures and heavy livestock losses in parts of Ethiopia,
Somalia and Kenya (WFP 2015).However, there are other countries of the world where
drought does not cause hunger and famine. This work tries to understand the dynamics of
drought-induced hunger/famine.
DISCUSSION
Nowadays, natural disasters such as floods, tropical storms and large periods of drought are
on the increase with calamitous consequences for the hungry poor in the developing
countries. Nevertheless, disasters especially those that seem to be caused by natural hazards
are not the greatest threat to humanity. Many more lives are lost in violent conflicts and to the
preventable outcome of disease and hunger. Such is the daily and unexceptional tragedy of
those deaths are though ‘natural’ causes, but who, under different economic and political
circumstances, should have lived longer and enjoyed a better quality of life (Blaikie et
al.,2003).

3. There are many factors less obvious political and economic that underlie the impact of a
hazard such as drought. These involve the manner in which assets, income and access to
other resources, such as knowledge and information, are distributed between different social
groups, and various forms of discrimination that occur in the allocation of welfare and social
protection. These factors lead to the vulnerability of a given community to a hazard such as
drought (Blaikie et al., 2003) and furthermore to a disastrous situation like hunger and
famine.
Most of popular ideas of famine as expressed in the media still tend to blame drought and
other ‘exceptional’ natural events (e.g. floods or epidemics in human or bovine
populations).Yet, anthropogenic causes of climate change, and the social environment which
shapes vulnerability, show how disasters are linked to human action rather than capricious
nature (Blaikie et al., 2003).As Hewitt interpreted (in his book interpretations of
calamity,1983a),if disasters (particularly famines-here with reference for our case to hunger)
were attributed to natural causes (drought),then they could be explained in terms of
exceptional events and not as ‘normal’ or day-to-day social processes. In Hewitt’s view (ibid:
9-24), the explanation of disasters (famine/hunger) should rest more fully on a social analysis
of the processes which create the conditions under which ‘exceptional’ natural events can act
as the ‘trigger’ for a disaster.
Consequently, today thanks to Hewitt’s book, there is a rise in questioning with vigour the
causes of famine and hunger. Two issues need to be taken into consideration: First, natural
hazards (especially drought but also sometimes flood and other sudden-onset ‘natural
causes’) are much less capable of acting as triggers for famine/hunger: the connection has
been undermined by improved national and international humanitarian responses, better
preparedness and the political will which can enable this type of progress to be made. There
is now a growing and encouraging record of averted famines, as in Bangladesh (1970 and
1984), Botswana and Kenya (1984) and Southern Africa (1991-1993) (Devereux 2000).
Unfortunately this is not the case everywhere, especially in African countries such as Malawi,
Zimbabwe and Ethiopia, where in the past 30 years, famines have been attributed to a
combination of natural triggers (mostly drought) and civil strife and war. Most of the famines
situations crisis in the Horn has severally been blamed on drought, while there are also
political and economic factors involved in generating vulnerability of the affected population.

4. The second reason is not so much a shift in the circumstances and location of famines (and
potential famines) as changing attitudes about their causes. According to Devereux (2000)
conspiracies of silence about a famine are another cause of famine. As He argued there will
always be politically engineered silences about famine, sometimes enforced through
censorship, and at other times through carefully managed discourses where silences are
unnoticed(Devereux 1993;de Waal 1999).Also closed and totalitarian societies tend to collect
information through the eyes of party officials who have their own categories and statistical
collection techniques, leading to incorrect information about food security and food stocks,
the silencing of the voices of the hungry, and dearth of information about the true state of
disaster reaching the outside word (e.g the famine of North Korea since 1995,and the Great
Leap Forward famine in china,1958-1962).
CONCLUSION
Therefore, there is still a need to consider whether the famines of 30 or more years ago were
less complex, or any less political than they are today, or whether it is simply that the politics
and structures which shaped the famine situation were often unreported and that the voices of
the starving ( and already dead) were never heard. However the recent research revealed that
the explanation of famine matches in complexity any contemporary ‘complex emergency
(Watt 1983a; M. Davis 2000; in Late Victorian Holocausts).Henceforth, it is a must to
underline that hunger is a result of interaction between social and natural hazard hence the
explanation of disasters (famine/hunger) should rest more fully on a social analysis of the
processes which create the conditions under which ‘exceptional’ natural events can act as the
‘trigger’ for a disaster.

5. REFERENCES
www.wfp.org
www.wikipedia.org
Ben Wisner, Piers Blaikie, Terry Cannon, and Ian Davis. (2003). At risk: Natural hazards,
people vulnerability and disasters; Second edition.