Starved of democracy and then starved to death

Three Famines. Starvation and Politics

IN LATE 1984, 400,000 bottles of whisky were imported to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the ‘revolution’ that had brought Mengistu Haile Mariam to power in Ethiopia.

This could have been one more story of political self-indulgence, but Ethiopia in late 1984 was not another impoverished state with selfish leaders. It was in a major famine that scourged the country, killing one million people and leaving millions impoverished and displaced. Mengistu was drinking Scotch while his people died.

The history of famine is littered with perverse stories: famine is the cruellest of the horsemen of the apocalypse. War can be ‘just,’ when fought against a clear evil. Disease is unfortunate, frequently horrible, but natural.

Famine has no redeeming features. Communities are destroyed as they fragment and flee to escape hunger. Families are torn apart and morality is debased by the choices made to survive. Who in your family gets fed and who not? Do you abandon the elderly, the very young? Sell your daughter’s body, or your own, to earn money for food? Do you break the ultimate taboo and become a cannibal? A starving body consumes itself leaving the victim helpless before death. Weakened bodies succumb to disease for several years after a famine has ended.

The ultimate cruelty of famine is that it need not happen. It is within the power of governments to prevent famine. The proof of this, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has said, and as Thomas Keneally says in Three Famines, is that there has never been a famine in a functioning democracy.

Democracies suffer the same natural disasters as non-democratic states that can lead to famine, but functioning democratic governments act to head famine off. A free press alerts them to the inconvenient truth that hunger is becoming a problem. A free civil society ratchets up the pressure for action. Politicians take note out of self-interest: you are not likely to vote for the party in power in the next election if they have stood idly by while your family starved to death.

If democratic governments can stop famine, so can others, but those others do not believe that they have to act or they do not want to act. This means that famine is not a natural phenomenon, or at least not entirely. Mass hunger starts because of a natural disaster, but turning the hardships that natural disaster creates into famine requires governmental inaction.

Generally, there is enough food available for the hungry but they cannot access it. Often, they cannot afford it because the natural disaster has pushed prices up. Without government action, famine begins.

Keneally tells the story of how governments failed to stop famine in Ireland, India and Ethiopia. Both Ireland’s ‘Great Hunger’ and the tragedy of 1980s Ethiopia are well-known to us. The 1943-1944 famine in Bengal, which killed four million people, is less so, hidden as it was by the events of World War II. Keneally’s book will ensure that it is remembered alongside the better-known Irish and Ethiopian disasters.

Keneally describes the onset of famine — potato blight in Ireland, flooding and rice fungus in India, crop failure caused by climate and disease in Ethiopia — but concentrates on the human stories that transformed these disasters into famine. At first, rural populations tried to cope by raising money to buy food to replace their lost crop. Scarcity pushed prices beyond popular reach; paid work was not available to the extent needed, and the sale of family possessions could not raise much money because everyone was selling and prices were low. Hunger spread and the “villains,” as Keneally labels the officials who did not act, turned hardship into tragedy.

Why did government not act? Sometimes, failure to avert famine is a product of ignorance and prejudice; sometimes, it is a product of evil political design. In Ireland and India, ignorance and prejudice made the government response inadequate. In both cases, British officials were convinced that famine was not as bad as claimed and was, anyway, a ‘natural’ response to overpopulation. It would thin out feckless and lazy natives. Moreover, there was a prevalent orthodoxy that governments should not interfere in the free market (always a good excuse to do nothing). In both Ireland and India, democracy was too weak to avert disaster because of colonialism.

In Ethiopia — which could not even pretend to be a democracy — more sinister forces were at work. In the famine of 1972-3, Ethiopia’s ‘divine’ emperor, Haile Selassie, disdained the starving and was “willfully ignorant” of their plight. This helped prompt his overthrow, but his successor was even worse. Mengistu used hunger as a weapon against his enemies in Eritrea and other rebel districts, starved the countryside to feed the cities, and used the chaos to begin social engineering an Ethiopian communist state.

Whether government inaction is by ignorance or design, the end result is much the same and equally bad: mass starvation, disease, eviction, and emigration. There are some heroes, people who try to bring the famine to wider notice to force relief, and a few officials who break ranks. But relief is patchy. It came slowly and late to Ireland and India, and came from abroad to Ethiopia.

The human story of famine is told very well and passionately by Keneally, as one might expect from the author of Schindler’s Ark. The problem of famine has not gone away and Keneally ends with a run-through of other recent (and ongoing) famines, all of which were enabled by government design or negligence.

This contemporary chronicle of famine begs questions that Keneally does not raise. If democracy averts famine, as he and Sen argue, is the solution to famine more democracy? If it is, then how do we create such democracy? Can we create democracy? The history of the last 20 years says not, or at least not often and not well. The West has helped make a lot of democracies recently, but not many of them function well enough to avert famine. So are we just left with emergency aid as a solution? The very governments that helped famine into being in the first place often misuse aid. As a result, they survive to preside over future famines.

These questions are at the heart of international aid politics and they summarise its dilemmas and failures. Keneally can no more answer them than anyone else, but until we do better at working toward answers to these questions famine will endure, and all we can do is mourn its victims as Keneally eloquently does.

*Neil Robinson teaches in the department of politics and public administration, University of Limerick.