The politics of food and starvation

Abstract

This article evaluates the persistence of famine and hunger in Africa. It assesses Africa's food crisis and traces some of the key debates on famine and starvation since the 1970s. It examines the continuity and change in those debates and argues that many of the recent insights into the ways in which food systems may become vulnerable to famine can be provided by an assessment of the political struggles involved in agricultural modernisation.