Alex de Waal

Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, historicises the way “famine” in the postcolonial era was an extremely emotional word for which, fifty years ago, there were no appropriate structures nor any objective scientific metric for understanding where or when famine was occurring. By 1984-1985, however, the neoliberal governments of Thatcher and Reagan became deeply embarrassed by the famine in Ethiopia, de Waal narrates. From this embarrassment, an industry of refining the metrics of understanding what counted as famine, and what did not, was born, and from this, the IPC, or Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, was developed as the standardised UN system used to classify the severity of food insecurity and malnutrition in a specific area. De Waal discusses how the international aid system has been shackled into into viewing famine in a very apolitical way, refusing to exam the structural causes driving famine largely because international NGOs steered away from criticising governments in order to maintain cooperation for their relief work and that Western publics give assistance to victims of natural disasters as part of the “white saviour” theatre which depends upon eliding the political causes. Declaiming the importance of photography in chronicling the history of famine—from the Warsaw Ghetto, to the famine in Ethiopia (1983-1985), and Gaza—de Waal observes the dual role of these photos: first, that the perpetrator of famine was not only absent from the frame, but was often the person taking the photo; and second, that because the perpetrator was rarely within the frame, the subjects of these photos were often blamed as the true perpetrators of famine, such that Jews attempting to preserve a “veneer of normality” in the Warsaw Ghetto or Palestinians in Gaza who are more portly, were ultimatley inculpated as the cause of the famine. Considering the merits of Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET), he notes that it lacks the key element of examining the policies and intention of those doing the starvation. De Waal underscores that “to starve” does not just refer to the experience of people starving, but it also means the act of starving people, as he goes on to describe how the East India Company, through onerous taxation from 1769 to 1770, created a famine in Bihar and Bengal, ultimately killing one-third of the population. Get full access to Savage Minds at www.savageminds.co/subscribe