-
[1] The Silent Emergency
- Dartmouth College Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
[1] The Silent Emergency The march of starving Ethiopian peasants on their capital in 1973 set off a series of connected events. What emerged was a new paradigm of the biology and politics of starvation. Five core characteristics of those events help to define that paradigm; they continue to reverberate today. Five Central Events First, Ethiopia’s famine of 1973–1974 shattered our innocence. It marked the end of a time when we could honestly say we did not know starvation was occurring in some distant place, among some unknown people. Ethiopia in the mid-1970s became synonymous with “starvation.” Its plight was quickly and widely shown to the well-fed, largely because television journalists like bbc-tv’s Jonathan Dimbleby hiked into the mountains of Wollo and Tigre provinces and filmed the starving peasants. (Television had a small initiatory part in publicizing the Biafran starvation in eastern Nigeria, 1967–1969.) The result was a delayed but, finally, robust response: by the end of 1974 more than forty relief organizations including the United Nations Children’s Fund (unicef), Lutheran World Relief, and Catholic Relief Services were active in the country, along with Ethiopia’s own humanitarian services; some 80,000 starving peasants were in emergency camps in Wollo alone.1 After the peasants marched that February, therefore, we knew. A decade later television again played a central role in Ethiopia during the famine of 1983–1986. Telecasts from the relief camps brought images of emaciated Ethiopian babies into our homes. Although television may not have directly comforted the afflicted, it certainly afflicted the comfortable. Emergency responses included simultaneous “Live Aid” rock concerts in more than fifteen locations around the world that raised the largest amount of money in the history of emergency relief funding to that time. Once it started, the outpouring of emergency aid was unprecedented. (The two Ethiopian famines are further discussed in chapters 6 and 7.) Second, two off-continent events were later identified that may have exacerbated conditions in the Sahel and Ethiopia during 1973–1974. One was the possibility that pollutants from the industrial North may have been a factor in causing the drought that swept from West Africa to the Horn, resulting in 12 [] platform of understanding the starvation of more than 500,000 Africans. The other was the significant impact on global grain prices and their availability by a large-scale purchaser (the Soviet Union) that entered the international grain market precisely as the number of starving Africans was rapidly increasing. The Soviet purchase overlapped with relief agency demands for emergency grain supplies for Africa. For the first time donors saw supplies of emergency grains falling far short of demand. Declines in food production and rises in food prices—and the Soviet purchases—“had a dramatic effect on food aid levels.” U.S. emergency food aid exports, for example, fell from 19 million metric tons in 1962 to 3.3 million metric tons in late 1974.2 (Both events are detailed and analyzed in chapter 9.) Third, Ethiopia in 1973–1974 also marked the beginning of a fundamental shift away from the theories, popular at the time, of starvation’s causes and effects. This shift continues today. In 1798 Thomas Malthus had published An Essay on the Principle of Population in which he argued that population growth increases exponentially and soon overtakes food production, which grows arithmetically, thus resulting in starvation. And starvation and famine, he suggested, were (and are) “positive checks” on human overbreeding. Malthus revised his thinking and later wrote Principles of Political Economy in which he sought to tie population growth not only to food supplies but also to opportunities for employment. Thus, he argued, economic growth could also benefit the poor, as long as they were not lazy and wasteful. Despite his revised writings Malthus and his principal theory have been widely used to define starvation and our responses to it: if starvation is caused by overpopulation and subsequent food availability deficits, then our response should be to provide the means to decrease population and increase food availability . This theory was readily applied to the condition of the Irish peasant in 1845–1850, where Malthus (and laissez-faire or free-market economics) had a strong influence. Thus, Malthus is remembered primarily for the perception that his theories blamed the victim: starvation is the fault of the poor. The “positive check” theory remains today an important component of discussions about the causes of and responses to starvation and poverty. With...