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  • Forty Years After: Reflections on Food, Famine and Hunger in the West African Sahel

Forty Years After: Reflections on Food, Famine and Hunger in the West African Sahel

Thursday, March 02, 2017

7:30–9 p.m.

Presidents Hall, Franklin Hall

Lecturer

2017—Michael Watts

Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Almost a half century ago, the West African Sahel – stretching from Senegal in the west to the Horn of Africa in the east – experienced a raft of massive food crises in which millions of people died from hunger and disease.  Situated on this larger canvas, during the mid-1970s, I tried to understand the relations between drought-prone regions and the onset and dynamics of famine through an historical and local village study in northern Nigeria.  The book which emerged from that research – Silent Violence – was published in 1983 but was reprinted in 2014 against the backdrop of recurrent and widespread hunger and food insecurity in the region.  In 2016, some 4 million people were again confronting famine-like conditions in the northeast of Nigeria alone.  In this lecture, I revisit Silent Violence as a way of exploring why hunger and famine have proved so durable and resistant in semi-arid West Africa. Currently, the region is caught between the challenges of global climate change and new threats associated with terrorism, illicit economies, and so-called “fragile and conflicted states.”  Most striking of all is the rise of a new and widely influential development discourse and form of analysis – resilience theory – which purports to offer new insight on vulnerability and food insecurity, and offers sets of practices to build resilient communities, households, and individuals: to make farmers and pastoralist drought- and famine-proof.  By revisiting the critical analyses of famine that emerged in the 1980s, I offer an assessment of these contemporary approaches to food security in the Sahel and consider whether they are capable of resolving the serial food crises and the recurrent famine-proneness of the region.

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