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Why Are Famines Difficult to Predict?
| Article
# : |
17438 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1990 |
2,185 Words |
| Author
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Michael H. Glantz
Michael H. Glantz is head of the Environmental and
Societal Impacts Group at the National Center for Atmospheric
Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. |
Since the earliest times, people have been fascinated by the prospects of forecasting future events. Which army will win a battle? Will drought occur this year? Will there be an economic recession? Will it rain this weekend? Will a volcano erupt? When will the next earthquake take place?
Some forecasts of future events, however, are more crucial to society than others. Forecasts of life-threatening situations obviously take precedence over others. And most recently, forecasting famines has become a particular focus of attention.
The Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 and the apparent failure to forecast it heightened emphasis on the importance of famine early warning systems to humanitarian responses. If one could forecast the emergence of famine or its precursors, action could be taken to avoid the actual outbreak of famine.
Interest in famine early warning systems is not new. India has had famine codes since the 1870s; and the Sudan had them in the 1920s. Why, then, are societies still seeking to understand this age-old process? Why do we still have famines, given the great technological and industrial developments of the past few centuries? Of the 25 officially designated droughts in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1980s, why did five of them still result in famines?
In fact, it was the devastating impact of famine in Ethiopia in the early 1980s that sparked resurgent interest in famine prevention through forecasting. This interest was generated less by official government concern than by citizen responses in developed countries. Despite pleas for food assistance by the Marxist Ethiopia government's Relief and Rehabilitation Commission (RRC) over a period of a few years, little assistance was forthcoming from the international donor community. Only after a BBC camera crew filmed the horrible conditions in the Korem refugee camp located in north-central Ethiopia, and released it to the world media in October 1984, did people everywhere raise pressure on their governments to respond to the emergency.
Ethiopia has had a formal early warning system ever since the devastating famine of the early 1970s, which led to the military's overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie's regime. Using the lack of responsiveness by the Selassie government to the victims of drought and famine as an excuse, a Marxist faction took power and jailed the emperor, who died in captivity in
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