Ch. 3 Journal

'Understanding Famine and Hunger'

"Chronic hunger is rarely given international media coverage but it may kill more people globally than the acute crisis of famine does" (p.52).

My thoughts: chronic hunger is a very real problem that is still prevalent in the world today. We often hear news of famine through international media in its final stages, providing pictures of refugee camps and the needs from aid organizations. However this is only the end point of famine. It is important focus on the causes of famine to understand how to better cope, prepare for and avoid future famines as well as improve health conditions like crowding and the spread of diseases at refugee camps. Hunger is exacerbated by unstable governments and wars and this problem is usually restricted to developing countries. Chronic hunger seems irrelevant in the Western world, but other chronic diseases are emphasized like heart disease, diabetes, obesity etc. While hunger has less spotlight in the developed world, chronic diseases are still rampant worldwide. In connection to present day, the general public would not have known the plight of Haiti, or that the majority of the public live on less than $1/day unless something catastrophic happened and media covered it. There would not have been such a great response for aid in Haiti if there wasn't an earthquake.

"It has to be recognized that even when the prime mover in a famine is a natural occurrence such as a flash flood or a drought, what its impact will be on the population will depend on how society is organized" ( Dreze & Sen p.57).

My thoughts: Again, this quote reminded me of the earthquake in Haiti. The destruction was so bad not because it was a 7.0 earthquake, but it was catastrophic because Haiti did not have an established infrastructure to withstand the quake. Haiti lacked the money to respond quickly, safely and appropriately. If that earthquake were to happen in the United States, Europe or say Japan, the destruction and death toll would not have been so treat. The quake was so destructive as a result of poverty.

Trends from the text: women in South Asia are at a nutritional disadvantage because culturally, men have higher status over women, while women in Africa can be heads of their households, provide food for the family and work independently apart from their husbands. Landless wage laborers are most at risk to hunger due to changing food prices. Absolute numbers of people facing chronic hunger in sub-Saharan Africa has gone up in the past twenty years, whereas numbers in all other regions (East and South-East Asia, Latin America) have been decreasing.

Summary:

Famine in Wollo, Ethiopia from 1984-85 was caused by three factors, stagnant production, the rise in peasantry obligations for food, money and labor, and acute poverty. Production is an interaction between human and nature to transform natural products into goods for human use. Exchange involves the buying and selling of goods and enables specialization, concentration on a specific type of production. Sen's entitlement approach to analyzing famine includes endowment (owned assets to establish entitlements to food) and entitlement (relationships which allows people access to food). Direct means food through self production and consumption, exchange means selling labor to buy food, trade means the sale of produce to buy food.

The book states that there are 4 stages that lead to a famine crisis: 1) shortages immediately leading to a strict economy 2) temporary search of work or food and selling possessions and assets 3) social collapse, migration and dispersal 4) arrival at relief like refugee camps and food distribution centers.

• dearth
• privation
• dispersal
• camp-living