Demographic Responses to Food Shortages in the Sahel

To MALTHUS AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES, it seemed self-evident that crop failures and food shortages would inevitably produce starvation, sickness, and excess mortality among the poor in the stricken populations. Certainly, the African historical record is full of periods of crisis mortality, many of them linked to famine and some of them occurring well into the twentieth century (see Watts, 1983 for a chronology from northern Nigeria, and Carreira, 1982 for a welldocumented account of famine-induced mortality in the Cape Verde Islands). Although the data on famine mortality for most of sub-Saharan Africa are very poor, close examination of some of the better documented crises suggests that war and epidemics may be much more important killers than rank starvation. As Figure 1 shows, there is some geographical coincidence between wars and famine in contemporary Africa (Griffiths, 1988). Even the highest estimates of mortality in the Sahelian droughts of the 1970s and 1980s pale into insignificance in comparison with the numbers of excess deaths associated with the great 1918-19 African influenza epidemic, with the Biafran war of secession of 196769, or with the wars in Uganda.I There may well be some circumstances in contemporary Africa where a direct relationship between food production and mortality can be observed, but generally, the world has changed in several important ways that make it less and less likely that mass starvation will be the inevitable result of either natural calamity or excessive population growth. We cannot of course exclude the possibility of future high mortality levels resulting from civil or international war. In this essay, my main interest is in demographic changes associated with food shortages arising not from war but from other dislocations or breakdowns of the economy-some provoked by natural calamities but most if not all having roots in the structure and organization of production and its social and cultural context

Agricultural economics · Biology · Business · Economic shortage · Economics · Food shortage · Geography · Socioeconomics · Ecology · Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management

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