NEWS Here’s Why There’s a Searing Ethiopian Drought Without an Epic Ethiopian FamineMay 10, 2016

Inter­est­ing piece by Andy Revkin on famines: Amartya Sen was right!

I hope you’ll read “Is the Era of Great Famine Over,” an Op-​​Ed arti­cle by Alex de Waal, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the World Peace Foun­da­tion at Tufts Uni­ver­sity, which has a pro­gram track­ing famine trends.

Fil­ing from Ethiopia, which is in the midst of a potent drought but — for a change — not a calami­tous famine, de Waal made these core points: 

How did Ethiopia go from being the world’s sym­bol of mass famines to fend­ing off star­va­tion? Thanks partly to some good for­tune, but mostly to peace, greater trans­parency and pru­dent plan­ning. Ethiopia’s suc­cess in avert­ing another dis­as­ter is con­fir­ma­tion that famine is elec­tive because, at its core, it is an arti­fact and a tool of polit­i­cal repression.

It’s worth stress­ing that last line:

[F]amine is elec­tive because, at its core, it is an arti­fact and a tool of polit­i­cal repression.

Please read the entire arti­cle and con­sider the trend against what has been learned by schol­ars like Joshua Gold­stein and Steven Pinker about death rates from war and vio­lence; declines in deep poverty as shown by Max Roser; and child mor­tal­ity rates from the World Health Organization.

There’s a valu­able deeper dive on global famine trends on the Tufts website.

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Over all, human prospects con­tinue to improve.

Set­backs are nearly always the result of rup­tures in gov­er­nance or unchecked extrem­ism and vio­lence. Click back to Nick Kristof’s sear­ing com­men­tary from South Sudan last year for another exam­ple. Here was his con­clu­sion, even as he wit­nessed peo­ple col­laps­ing on the street:

You might think that what’s needed to end a famine is food. Actu­ally, what’s essen­tial above all is an inter­na­tional push of inten­sive diplo­macy and tar­geted sanc­tions to reach a com­pro­mise peace deal and end the civil war.

While the gen­eral pic­ture is bright­en­ing, trend is not des­tiny, and, of course, the non-​​human world is not doing nearly as well.

But with sus­tained cit­i­zen engage­ment, increased mon­i­tor­ing and trans­parency, more “mun­dane sci­ence” (in the best sense, as con­veyed by Dan Kam­men and Michael Dove) and pres­sure on despots and other bad actors, chances of up-​​side sur­prises remain high.

Post­script | Don’t miss the slide show on the polit­i­cal roots of a host of great famines that accom­pa­nies the de Waal article.