Hunger: The Biology and Politics of Starvation

Prologue “Peasants Always Starve”

Prologue “Peasants Always Starve” In the middle of February 1973, a tattered band of about 1500 Ethiopian peasants appeared on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, the country’s capital. Police halted them there and demanded an explanation. The peasant-farmers described drought and poor harvests around their villages in Wollo Province, some 200 miles north of Addis. They told of the repeated failure of seasonal rains; how they couldn’t plant seeds for the harvests; how their plow oxen weakened and starved; and how, in desperation, they ate their seed grains instead of planting them. Those who owned land sold it for a few Ethiopian dollars. Others bartered their animals, their tools, the wood from their huts, even their clothes. And when the hunger continued sweeping through whole villages and districts, those men still able to walk left their women and children and began the desperate search for food. Word of their arrival filtered up to the minister of the interior, who asked the governor-general of Wollo to explain the presence of these threadbare peasants outside their capital city. The governor-general, Solomon Abraham, an elderly aristocrat and political appointee, assured the Imperial Government of Ethiopia that, while there was some “problem of drought” in Wollo, there was little cause for concern. And when the Imperial Government sent an official inspection team to Wollo and Tigre provinces to investigate, the team returned to reassure everyone that only these 1500 peasants were “affected by a shortage of food.” The word starvation was not mentioned. After all, the Imperial Government reasoned, hadn’t Ethiopia’s peasants always starved? In 1958–1959, for example, perhaps 100,000 of them had quietly died in the northern and central provinces from lack of food. Few Imperial Government officials or international relief workers had worried about them. According to tradition, Ethiopian peasants bowed before their Orthodox Church, their Imperial Government, and their venerated Emperor Haile Selassie I, revered speaker at the League of Nations, defender of their land against an invading Italian army, His Imperial Majesty, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings of Ethiopia, and Elect of God. In Ethiopia, before the harvests, peasants always quietly starved.1 In 1973, however, these Ethiopian peasants signaled a warning: 2000 years of Ethiopia’s empire were ending; a feudal society was collapsing. Their small 4 [] platform of understanding protest, unnoticed beyond the capital at the time, also marked the beginning of what historians call “a gateway event.” Their march set in motion a new paradigm at a pivotal moment in starvation’s dark global history: it came more than 125 years after the Great Irish Famine, fifty years from the time when starvation swept across the new Soviet Union, forty years since Stalin starved millions of landed peasants in Ukraine, thirty years following the Bengali Famine of 1943, and just fifteen years beyond the Great Leap Forward famine that may have killedasmanyas25millioninChina.In1973–1974,thehungerthatscythedacross the dry savannah of West Africa’s Sahel to the mountains of Ethiopia triggered a series of events that fundamentally altered our understanding of starvation, how it is defined, who suffers, when and where it occurs, and how we respond. Out of Ethiopia’s peril emerged new ways of measuring and replying to starvation that shifted international policies. From that moment in hunger’s history came a new paradigm of the biology and politics of starvation. The peasants’ simple protest shattered our innocence: no longer could we say we didn’t know when others were hurt, diseased, or starving. It aroused humanitarian concern globally for the plight of people in developing states. It shifted the accepted theories about the causes of starvation and famine and thus reformed policies and reshaped responses. It heightened international alarm over global food availability and starvation, and it brought together donors , un and government officials at the first World Food Conference. This in turn initiated significant global schemes to anticipate human suffering and to respond to it: for example, new and modern satellite measurements of agricultural production along with the time-honored stockpiling of food reserves against hard times. Chapter 1 discusses this paradigm shift and its important historic record and connects it to the current debate about poverty reduction and human rights—especially the right to food. But most important, from this peasant march on, we knew. The Problem We have chosen hunger as the focus of this book. But the ultimate problem that underlies hunger and other unacceptable social inequities is...