| | Review of: A Year in the Death of Africa: Politics, Bureaucracy and the Famine by Peter Gill; An African Winter by Preston King; Imperialism, Colonialism and Hunger: East and Central Africa by Robert I Rotberg; Africa in Crisis: the Causes, the Cures of Environmental Bankruptcy by Lloyd Timberlake.
The search for the causes of famine in Africa continues. As was to be expected, disasters in the Sahel, the Horn and southern Africa have prompted a number of publications which seek to explain these events. This debate is not new. In the heady days of ROAPE 1 for example, it was all so simple: the Sahel famine of 1973 was, for Meillassoux, promoted by that region's unequal insertion into the world economy. The commoditisation of land and labour and the production of cash rather than food crops, impoverished west African farmers and made them more susceptible to lean years following drought. For Cliffe, in the same volume, Ethiopia's famine at that time was promoted by the disintegration of feudalism and the accompanying erosion of tenuous peasant rights which accompanied the spread of capitalist relations of production in agriculture. |
