Africa, with the most rapid population increase in the world, has experienced almost constant famines since 1973. Have these famines been inevitable, according to Malthus’ theory; have they been induced by human mismanagement of resources; or have they been the result of natural disasters beyond human control and prediction?

Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Congo, Angola.

Most people in the West are convinced that the basic cause of a famine is a failure of food supply relative to the population. A localized famine is commonly thought of as resulting from a local failure of crops that is not mitigated by importing food, as happened in the Sahel region of Africa in the late 1960s. Indeed, countries where hunger is widespread are frequently blamed for allowing excessive population growth. The oversimplification of Malthusian ideas leads to advocates of ‘lifeboat ethics’ by which countries should be abandoned to their fates.

Yes, Africa has a poor climate. The Sahel is one of the world’s most vulnerable drought hazard regions. Yes, overgrazing, poor cropping methods and improper soil conservation techniques amplify these problems, but to blame famines on these physical factors exclusively is shortsighted.

Research by, among others, Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen brings up some interesting statistics about famines. Sen says that famines usually affect less than 5% of a population, are easy to prevent and usually happen in countries without a democratic form of government. He sees famine as a divisive phenomenon, whereby some people fall behind and ‘the devil takes the hindmost’.

It is obvious that all Africa’s misfortunes cannot be attributed to any one cause. However, there is a common theme that recurs again and again. What two things link the eight countries listed at the top of this page? All are currently facing major food shortages. All are currently in, or have recently had, a state of major civil war. The vast majority of recent famines have occurred within a context of open and extremely violent civil war and this cannot be overlooked.

Conflict can exacerbate the problems associated with the ‘physical factors’ of drought and crop failure for several reasons. People working on the land are forced to fight. Fields can be burned and destroyed, animals killed. The price of food becomes much higher as the land goes to waste.

Even more worrying are governments who use food as a weapon of war. The recent petrol crisis in the UK showed how easy it is to bring a country to its knees by denying them supplies; think how much worse it would be if food was in short supply. High food prices undercut real wages and shift income from workers to businesses. In a macabre way, governments of LEDCs may use famines deliberately to shift money from poorer rural areas to the growing cities.

In the Sudanese famines of 1988 and 1994 for example, although the initial impetus could be blamed on a major drought, the civil war between government forces and the ‘Sudan People’s Liberation Army’ made the situation far worse. Thousands of acres of farmland were destroyed in the fighting. In addition, since Sudan’s support for Iraq in the Gulf War, relations with the West have been almost non-existent, with IMF funding ceasing in 1990. This shows that differences in political ideology can also contribute to famines.

It is not the case that countries with famines are necessarily short of valuable resources. Sudan has large oil and gas reserves in the South, but the civil war has prevented their exploitation. The diamond deposits in Sierra Leone are fought over by different rebel groups. Ethiopia has extensive oil, gold, platinum, copper and potash deposits. In fact resources that ought to make a country rich are at best not exploited and at worst fought over.

As I mentioned previously, Amartya Sen claims most famines can be prevented easily. This is a contentious statement, but one with which I tend to agree. The Earth has the potential to feed all the people currently living on it. Indeed, enough food is already produced to feed its inhabitants. Advances in agriculture and technology have prevented the Doomsday scenario proposed by Malthus.

Yet barriers prevent this food being fairly distributed. It is simply not in the interests of MEDCs, or indeed the governments of LEDCs to prevent widespread hunger. MEDCs benefit from keeping the developing world poor, so they have a cheap source of raw materials and labour to exploit (the international division of labour). In LEDCs, where governments are often not democratically elected, a corrupt rich elite dominates. They do not want the poor majority to become more powerful. If this means keeping the rest of the country hungry, so be it.

The role of the Western media is open to criticism. Lappe and Collins, two geographers, remarked, “while chronic hunger doesn’t make the evening news, it takes more lives than famine”. Hunger is not a problem in Africa, it is the normal condition. The sight of starving Africans no longer appals us. Because the problem is so ongoing it tends to be forgotten about.

News runs on major events, like natural disasters. Events like the recent floods in North Korea or the earthquakes in Afghanistan often produce a huge surge in charity donations. But the day-to-day hunger in places like Kenya and Eritrea goes unreported. Recently, the World Food Programme head said of the Kenyan food shortages “We don't have enough food, we don't have enough water and sanitation equipment and we don't have enough seeds”. Most people are not even aware there is a famine in Kenya.

In conclusion, I do not believe that the famines in Africa are inevitable Malthusian population culls. In my opinion they are a combination of physical factors, civil war, and corruption and selfish attitudes in the governments of both LEDCs and MEDCs.