It is now generally accepted by researchers (although not by governments) that famines are caused as much by act of man as by act of god. But our understanding of famine is still quite rudimentary, and what little we know is rarely translated into policies to prevent or control famine. Few people would argue that we clearly understand what makes people vulnerable to famine, or that we can predict that one group will be vulnerable while another will not.
It is not even clear, when different people talk about famine, that they are talking about the same thing. Those who suffer from famine have a more exact vocabulary than those who analyse it. Turkana herders in northern Kenya distinguish ‘years in which people died’ from years of less severe shortage (Swift 1985).
In Darfur, the former contingency is known as ‘famine that kills’ (de Waal 1987) and in Hausaland, northern Nigeria, as the ‘great hunger’ (Watts 1983), to distinguish it from events in which there is hardship but no large-scale mortality. Social and economic analysts on the other hand, tend to lump all major food shortages together as famine, and populists use the term for any general shortage of a desirable good, as in ‘book famine’.
