Famine prevention is possible but requires, among other things, a better theoretical basis, building on comparative, interdisciplinary and historical research. Key aspects of that task concern, first, the relationship between starvation, disease and death. The historical record suggests that large scale famine mortality if often a direct consequence not so much of starvation as of disease, triggered by a collapse of everyday coping. (The evidence for this in Africa is not clear however.) A second theme is the complexity of famine causes and responses. Entitlement erosion is a key process, but so are production declines and asset management. Reduced consumption, rather than disposing of assets vital for recovery, is a well-documented and important reaction.
Local collective coping, especially through redistribution of food, is a third theme. Such customary safety nets provided a minimum of food security to vulnerable households. In this perspective, the central famine process should be seen as economic and social breakdown and the collapse of organised coping, becoming in turn the trigger to increased vulnerability to disease. As a result mainly of the extension of the market and of state power, and the growth of population, collective coping strategies have become increasingly unviable. In the ‘Indian’ model, they have been successfully replaced in part by government-sponsored anti-famine policies and safety nets. In the ‘African’ model this has not happened: customary collective coping, often severely undermined, remains in places an important resort of vulnerable households and groups, and government has been unable to provide a viable alternative. Some implications of this for antifamine policies are briefly discussed.
