Summary of obligatory articles - Food Crises: The Big Picture
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Course
Food Crises: The Big Picture (SDC51806)
Institution
Wageningen University (WUR)
I have summarized all the obligatory reading articles for the course Food Crises: The Big Picture. These articles are ESSENTIAL for the exam, as the exam will be based on almost all of these articles. It should be noted that the article of the Green Revolution is lacking in this summary.
Article 1, session 1. Alex de Waal (2018): Mass Starvation: Malthus’ Zombie.
Over the past years, the world population has grown, while the number and lethalities of famines have
reduced.
Malthus’s Prophecy states that population growth inevitably results in gigantic famine, which reduces
the population number to a number that corresponds with food availability (nature’s own correction).
- Zombie concept, (according to Beck): the concept of a gigantic famine reducing a human
population to the available food (so, the concept of nature’s own correction).
- It’s an idea that cannot be killed by normal means, and with limitless endurance keeps coming
back to torment and infect the living.
Malthus’s natural law was that the population increased geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.), whereas
food production could only increase arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.). Population must thus be
somehow limited by war, epidemic disease or famine.
Later on, Malthus adjusted his theory: “If famine is only a temporary setback to population growth, it
logically follows that it cannot serve as the fundamental limiter.”
Attenborough stated that modern developments have made sure that we can prevent children from
dying from diseases by medicines, but on the other hand this has resulted in the fact that we, humans,
have taken away the natural limiters (dying from a disease) that keep animal populations in check. As
a result, the population must either be controlled consensually, or populations will face things like
famine or epidemics. There can’t be indefinite growth.
There cannot be more people on this earth than that can be fed.
It’s remarkable that the famines in Ethiopia have started to disappear, even though the population size
has quadrupled. This is because food is only a small part of the natural resource consumption of any
human population.
Malthus’s Prophecy states that population growth inevitably results in gigantic famine, which reduces
the population number to a number that corresponds with food availability (nature’s own correction).
However, As repeatedly shown by fact and theory, famines can occur without food shortage and
indeed without causing population loss at all.
Amartya Sen: famine is not a shortage of food per se, but the inability of some people – invariably the
poorest – to obtain food.
‘Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It
is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.’
Cause of famine was in his eyes a “failure to entitlements”.
Sen states that famine is defined by mass starvation (not completely true, see below).
Famine mortality is not equivalent to mass death by starvation. In fact, major causes of excess death
were epidemics of communicable diseases (malaria, measles, etc.). Also stress from migration or
poor hygiene in relief camps.
It is remarkable that in famines, women and girls are less likely to die than men and boys. In general
women have a longer life expectancy than men, a phenomenon that is rather exaggerated during a
famine.
“The survival of a group depends on the survival of females far more than on males because
female fertility is the constraining factor in the reproduction of small
populations, such as hunter-gatherers”.
,Women are most vulnerable when pregnant or feeding. During famines fertility rates decline, so also
female vulnerability declines.
Article 2, session 1. Rocheleau, D. E., et al. (1995): ‘Environment, Development,
Crisis and Crusade: Ukambani, Kenya, 1890-1990’: World Development
Outsiders from Ukambani state that the region is the cause of many bad things, like: epidemics, soil
erosion, underdevelopment, etc. By outsiders this was blamed on overpopulation and poor agricultural
practices.
People from Ukambani themselves see it differently: they blame the bad things were caused by land
alienation, land hunger and limits on mobility. These causes have changed the ecological and spatial
order of their homeland.
In the 20th century there were multiple crises in Kenya, all with a different cause (see bad things).
Often the solution to one crisis, led to the making of a new crisis.
Our statement is that the series of crises experienced, documented, and “named” in the
Ukambani region of Kenya have revolved around an ongoing and multi-faceted encounter with the
global restructuring of economies, ecologies, and cultures”. Crises were caused by outsiders.
In Ukambani, during the colonial period, there was lots of deforestation, and other downgrading of
nature to obtain a grazing landscape. Desirable agricultural land has thus gone to waste in that period
of time. Now the landscape is extremely dry and infertile. Before this colonial period, agriculture was
properly working.
, Article 1, session 2. Scott-Smith, T. (2020): “Introduction: Humanitarian
Approaches to Hunger”, in On an Empty Stomach. 2000 years of hunger relief.
Alexis Soyer was a famous cook who surrounded himself in the upper class of the society. He would
transform the organization of the kitchens for the rich, including all kinds of new technology. Later he
also wanted to do this for the poor people. He developed new recipes that could be prepared at soup
kitchens.
The aim, he explained, was to “take every possible advantage of every kind of nutritious substance”
and “convert them, by study and judgment, into a wholesome and cheap aliment for the millions”.
His hard work was positively accepted in the media.
At this time Ireland was going through “Black 47”, its most terrible year of famine.
Soyer had opened a “model soup kitchen” in 1847 in Ireland, next to the Royal Barracks by the sea.
It seemed that his elaborate contraptions and technological wizardry enabled him
to feed more people on fewer supplies than had ever been attempted before.
According to most narratives, international humanitarianism was born in the middle of the nineteenth
century, with the Crimean relief of Florence Nightingale, the memoirs of Henri Dunant after the Battle
of Solferino, and the foundation of the Red Cross in 1863.
Soyer’s model soup kitchen in Ireland, therefore, demonstrates how hunger was being tackled in the
middle of the nineteenth century, at the very birth of modern humanitarianism.
Relief = hulpverlening
Soyer’s soup kitchen worked around 5 basic principles that have been completely turned upside down
in the present (from local relief to international relief, for example).
“A century and a half ago, the dominant response to starvation was to set up a soup kitchen rooted in
local patronage. Today, however, we are more likely to see a medicalized, individualized, and
rationalized procedure, with anthropometry as the basis of admission.”
The Sphere Handbook contains (2000) guidelines for the approach of relief workers.
MUAC-measurement: mid-upper arm circumference.
Big difference between the former soup kitchen and the present: The soup kitchen distributed foods
with tangible material qualities, whereas the present relief focuses on the invisible nutrients that food
contained, which could not be sensed directly.
Central argument: “the way one conceives of the empty stomach is a crucial determinant of how one
actually treats it”.
Switch from collective to individual feeding.
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