For governments, relief actors and international organizations, the classification of famine is a source of tension, due to the political, media-related, humanitarian, financial and emotional stakes involved. But what is famine, what criteria and data are used to define it, and by whom? Who declares it, and what are the public and political uses of such declarations? These are some of the questions examined in this article by Michaël Neuman.

Introduction

What constitutes famine is a frequently discussed topic and, at times, the subject of intense controversy between governments, relief actors and international organisations, even within the countries concerned. Simultaneously or successively, it can be ignominious for the governments of the countries in which it is declared, an opportunity for aid organisations to trigger relief operations and raise the funding required, or even an opportunity for the authorities to harness some of the aid this generates. For both the general public and the humanitarian “system” itself, famine also retains a particular emotional charge, evoking images of emaciated adults and wide-angle shots of people dying of hunger, whilst malnutrition focuses on images of children’s bodies. As François Jean, a political scientist at The Fondation Médecins Sans Frontières, stated nearly forty years ago: “During the 20^th century famine caused as many deaths as did conflicts between nations. How many of us, indeed, are aware that one famine in Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus alone killed as many peasants as all the combatants killed during World War I? How many, for that matter, realise that deaths resulting from the ‘Great Leap Forward’ were as numerous as those of the Second World War – civilian and military alike”https://msf-crash.org/sites/default/files/2017-06/f309-fromethiopiatochechnyab.pdf? For all these reasons, a declaration of famine is as much a challenge for relief organisations as it is for States and funding bodies.

So what is famine, on what criteria and on the basis of which data is it defined, and by whom? Who declares famine and how are these declarations used for public and political purposes?

IPC's challenging ambitions

Since 2004, the indicator of the severity of food insecurity has been the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a tool originally developed for Somalia by the Food Security Analysis Unit (FSAU) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Prior to this, the use of the term “famine” had not been limited by any precise terminology or specific technical criteria, and therefore remained open to interpretation. The international crisis-management system therefore decided to adopt an “objective” instrument – agreeing on the numbers and building on the consensus made it possible to trigger relief efforts and act. Therefore, “from the IPC perspective, ‘famine’ is not a rhetorical, emotive term. Rather it is a scientific classification based on standards, evidence, and technical consensus”https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/resources/resources-details/en/c/1129202/. To quote Rony Brauman on the food situation in Somalia in 2011, “Expressing the horror of a famine in terms of numerical indicators and quantitative thresholds may seem inhumane, or even shocking. Yet because declaring a humanitarian state of emergency has serious ramifications both politically and in terms of emergency aid, agreement on an at least somewhat objective definition is essential”https://msf-crash.org/en/publications/war-and-humanitarianism/famine-somalia-warning-against-warning.

Piloted by around twenty international and/or non-governmental organisations and implemented in roughly thirty countries, the IPC is now the most widely used tool for measuring food insecurity, and therefore, for determining the existence or not of famine. It is a model based on “multi-stakeholder technical consensus” underpinned by the convergence of evidence. The data used to calculate it are generally taken from World Food Programme (WFP) food security surveys and SMART (Standardized Monitoring and Assessment of Relief and Transitions) surveysLaunched in 2002 and widely used by NGOs, international organisations and States, the SMART survey method integrates nutritional status and mortality data to assess the scale and severity of a nutrition crisis. designed to assess mortality and nutritional status within a given population.

Famine is the most critical level of the IPC, which has five degrees of severity by region, area or population grouphttps://fsnau.org/ipc: 1) generally food secure, 2) borderline food insecure, 3) acute food and livelihood crisis, 4) humanitarian emergency, and 5) famine/humanitarian catastrophe. According to this classification, famine occurs when: (1) at least 20% of households face severe food shortages and have a limited ability to cope with them, (2) the prevalence of global acute malnutrition exceeds 30%, and (3) the crude death rate exceeds two deaths for every 10,000 people per day In short, the IPC “defines famine as a situation in which at least one in five households has an extreme lack of food and face starvations and destitution, resulting in extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition and death”https://www.ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ipcinfo/docs/IPC_Famine_Factsheet.pdf. Furthermore, a population is deemed to be in a “food crisis” as early as Phase 3, meaning that it must implement adaptation measures in order to survive (sale of livestock or land, displacement, etc.)Note that the threshold of two deaths per 10,000 people per day is highly debatable: it is double the standard emergency threshold, which itself does not take account of the worldwide decline in mortality over the past 30 years (see Fabrice Weissman, Mortality Emergency Threshold: A Case for Revision, June 25, 2018, URL: https://msf-crash.org/en/blog/medicine-and-public-health/mortality-emergency-threshold-case-revision.. It is also from Phase 3 that the tool, whose aim is to prevent the occurrence of famine, is used to trigger relief operations. The IPC itself does not collect the data, nor does it declare famine – this is done by the relevant stakeholders at country level, i.e. analysts working for the States concerned, NGOs, UN agencies, and technical partners such as the food security analysis mechanism, FEWS NETFEWS NET (Famine Early Warning Systems Network) is a website dedicated to food insecurity information and analysis. It was established in 1985 by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United States Department of State, in response to famines in East and West Africa. (see https://fews.net/).. If famine is suspected, an additional step is taken: the IPC Famine Review Committee is called in. In most cases, however, and in keeping with the principle of State sovereignty, it is the government of the country concerned which directs the mechanism, which is clearly not without its problems, especially in war-torn countries.

As obvious as it may seem, producing these indicators is a complex and delicate matter: while it is possible to measure famine, it is a particularly complicated procedure, especially in times of war. Mortality calculations require basic demographic data, which are generally lacking in many countries. Extrapolating the results gleaned at specific times and in specific places is itself risky. Assuming, as is sometimes the case, “that a famine will spread from localized foci, like an infectious disease”https://msf-crash.org/en/publications/war-and-humanitarianism/famine-somalia-warning-against-warning, is equally questionable. Furthermore, regardless of their quality, indicators can mask the discrepancies between the conclusions they reach and the perceptions of the people experiencing these situations. In addition, each of the three components used to define a famine situation is a fraction (number of affected persons/population concerned) whose numerators and denominators are fraught with uncertaintyhttps://msf-crash.org/en/dossiers/famine-political-implications-and-operational-responses.

The scientific ambitions of the IPC are not therefore immune to the struggle to influence the figures, to block or, conversely, encourage the dissemination of the findings of the surveys on which its phases are based (on the part of governments, funding bodies, and the relief organisations themselves). Given the pressure brought to bear on the evaluators responsible for gathering data – the intimidation to which they may be subject, the paucity of the population and mortality data available, population displacement, access issues, and the sometimes crippling delays between gathering, analysing and disseminating the data – the consensus is often the result of dubious compromises. Anthropologist and former humanitarian aid practitioner François Enten has described how some analysts and funding bodies work with two sets of figures: one public and official, the other private, but generated from “real” datahttps://www.manchesterhive.com/view/journals/jha/5/1/article-p37.xml. For specialist food security researchers Daniel Maxwell and Peter Hailey, “the evidence suggests that numbers are often inflated where resource allocation is concerned but may be decreased – at least for certain categories, notably populations in IPC Phase 5”https://www.manchesterhive.com/view/journals/jha/3/1/article-p16.xml. Given the political problems a declaration of famine creates for governments and international agencies, one negotiation method consists of placing a large part of the population in Phase 4, but none in Phase 5. This is because States are often very reluctant to use the word “famine”, a word synonymous with government incompetence (at best), or crimes (at worst) and especially because famine – and its political use – has historically been the cause of regime change, thus worsening existing political and social crises. This was the case for the 1630–31 famine in China which helped to bring down the Ming dynasty, and for the great Ethiopian famine of the 1970s which caused Emperor Haile Selassie’s regime to collapse. This political aspect was also evident in the way in which the State of Israel – for many years and well before its deadly response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 – planned to subject the Palestinians to weight loss but not starvation: “It’s like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will slim down nicely, but they won’t die”, explained an advisor to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2006. “There will be no famine in Palestine, there will be no famine in Palestine, Israel won’t let it happen,” said some officers of COGAT, the Israeli military administration unit in charge of supervising civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the early 2000shttps://msf-crash.org/en/blog/war-and-humanitarianism/gaza-alive-slimmer, reinforcing the idea that there is a threshold beyond which malnutrition is no longer socially or politically acceptable.

The political and communicational uses of famine

The political power of famines is so great because they are the result of a combination of cyclical and structural factors. Many studies have shown that famine is not the result of food shortages but rather of political and social problems or deliberately discriminatory policies that affect the distribution and sharing of existing foodstuffs. Famine situations reveal the weaknesses and failures of national aid and development systemshttps://guide-humanitarian-law.org/content/article/3/famine-1//. Amartya Sen’s workhttps://academic.oup.com/book/32827has also shown that the non-democratic nature of a political regime, inequalities in access to food, and the existence of conflict favour the onset of famine or even its use as a weapon of war.

The funding bodies themselves can in turn be very reluctant to use the language of famine, as it can be read as a sign of the failure of cooperation and development-aid policies, or as evidence of the consequences of restrictions imposed under sanctions regimes (consider the embargo on Iraq in the 1990s, the policy of draining rebel-held areas in Angola at the turn of the 2000s or, more recently, anti-terrorist policieshttps://www.manchesterhive.com/view/journals/jha/3/1/article-p16.xml). For humanitarian aid actors, however, the very mention of famine can provide the opportunity to mobilise the media and funding bodies in order to improve the chances of being able to act and intervene. Some governments have also considered such situations as a blessing in disguise, as was the case in 2000 when the Ethiopian government was faced with a renewed outbreak of pockets of malnutrition in the Ethiopian region of Ogaden. Fabrice Weissman has documented how the federal government “managed to charge the socio-economic cost of its political decisions to the international community and ‘outsource’ the financing of its apparatus of domination”https://msf-crash.org/sites/default/files/2017-09/fabrice-weissman-a-qui-sadresse-laide-alimentaire-urgence.pdf.

In the words of Daniel Maxwell and Peter Hailey, as “[the word] ‘famine’ retains the power to shock”https://www.manchesterhive.com/view/journals/jha/3/1/article-p16.xml, political groups, aid organisations and the media thus have their own reasons for making political capital from it. As François Enten summarises, “the spectre of famines can be invoked by politicians or aid actors to revive the inertia of public opinion and the international community, tipping into an emotional register partly fuelled by the imagery of past crises”https://www.manchesterhive.com/view/journals/jha/5/1/article-p37.xml.

The coup d’état in Niger which resulted in the overthrow of President Tandja in 2010 also illustrates the challenge that a population’s food situation can represent for the authorities. In his contribution to the book Niger 2005: Une catastrophe si naturelle [A Not-So Natural Disaster: Niger 2005] political scientist Mamoudou Gazibo, analysing the political landscape during the country’s food crisis, states that “describing problems also involves imposing a meaning on them, specifically with regard to their causes and the subsequent political blame”. During the summer of 2005, whilst “the unbearable images of starving children and the urgent need for aid” appeared in the international press, “the domestic media mainly focused on the semantic quarrel between the political stakeholders. In fact, the debate polarized between the position of President Mamadou Tandja, who supported the argument that Niger was not facing a famine but rather a food crisis, and that taken by his Prime Minister, who spoke more willingly of famine. That second position was relayed by the opposition and civil society.” For President Tandja, the crisis was, above all, the result of a “slight food-production deficit... a result of the particular situation of a landlocked Sahelian country that is regularly threatened by climatic variations for others, especially members of the opposition and the private press, it “was also the result of internal political dysfunction and reflects the current state of the political institutions and democracy in Niger”. Mamoudou Gazibo adds that “the convergence of a cluster of phenomena such as historical memory (the famine of 1974 and the coup d’état which it served to justify), the symbolical dimension (the famine indicates the leader’s misfortune falling on his fellow citizens), and the personal variable (President Tandja was one of the instigators behind the 1974 coup) explain why both sides insist on imposing their interpretation… of the phenomenon”https://msf-crash.org/en/natural-disasters/niger-not-so-natural-disaster.

The situation in Ethiopia’s Tigray regional state, caught up in a deadly war and genocidal violence since late 2020, is one of the most recent controversies to emerge about this issue of classification. In late December 2023, faced with the increasing number of deaths in the region, the scale of undernourishment and the occupation of land by militias favourable to Addis Ababa, the Tigrayan administration declared a state of famine. The president of the region even drew a parallel with the famine of 1985, calling for aid from both the “international community” and the Ethiopian government, accused of voluntarily abandoning the Tigrayans to their fatehttps://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2024/03/06/en-ethiopie-la-famine-au-tigre-une-bataille-politique_6220478_3212.html. The response was to denounce the politicisation of the crisishttps://www.france24.com/en/africa/20231230-tigray-authorities-warn-of-looming-famine-in-ethiopia-s-war-scarred-north. By 2021, the IPC had placed the Tigray region in Phase 5, concluding that 350,000 people were in “Catastrophe”https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipc-country-analysis/details-map/en/c/1154897/?iso3=ETH.

A few years earlier, in May 2018, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2417 condemning the use of starvation as a method of warfarehttps://press.un.org/fr/2018/cs13354.doc.htm. This vote was the direct result of the warnings issued by humanitarian aid organisations – including the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator – concerning the populations of four countries (Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen and Somalia – 20 million people in total) facing the simultaneous risk of faminehttps://press.un.org/en/2017/sc12748.doc.htm. These figures, quoted by various media and international organisations, were mainly based on extrapolations from documented pockets of famine. These famine warnings nonetheless prompted the US Congress to allocate an additional $990 million in aid, which was far from certain under Donald Trump’s presidency. In their analysis of six crisis situations in the 2010s (Yemen, Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya), Daniel Maxwell and Peter Hailey found that, due to constraints on data gathering and pressure brought to bear on their analysis, the analysis process itselfhttps://www.manchesterhive.com/view/journals/jha/3/1/article-p16.xmlwas unable to deliver quality information, thus leaving room for all kinds of distortion.

The same logic led some relief organisations to issue an increasing number of alarmist – even fanciful – statements about the nutritional situation in Yemen in the late 2010s. Whilst some of the population – caught in the war between the Houthis and the armed coalition led by Saudi Arabia – were suffering from the consequences of limited imports, Houthi control over relief supplies, and insufficient agricultural production, the warnings paid no attention to the data on the food and nutritional situation of the population, data which, incidentally, were undeniably poor. The advocacy strategy designed to heighten the “international community’s” coverage of the situation in the country, increase the funds available, and even expedite the conclusion of a truce or ceasefire, seemed to justify all the exaggerations. The Yemeni example illustrates the fact that, as François Enten has suggested, statements of alert are the result of two dimensions: a technical dimension and a communication dimension, with the latter relying as much as the former on the expertise of the actors who deploy them”.

In actual fact, relief organisations and the media share the idea that emotion is an important factor in early-warning strategies: sensationalist rhetoric (“one child dies every ten minutes”), staggering figures (“85,000 children died of hunger”), superlatives (“the worst humanitarian crisis in modern times”) and photos of emaciated children which are meant to encapsulate the situation of the population, are all used to provoke an international response. Under these conditions, the IPC is proving to be no more than a minor player in the construction of the crisis.

At the time of writing, the Gaza Strip is the scene of one of the latest instances of the political – and judicial – use of the term “famine”. On 28 March 2024, the judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) observed that “Palestinians in Gaza are no longer facing only a risk of famine… but that famine is setting in”https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2024/03/29/la-cour-internationale-de-justice-ordonne-a-israel-d-empecher-la-famine-qui-s-installe-a-gaza_6224742_3210.html. Their decisionhttps://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240328-ord-01-00-en.pdf, in response to a request by South Africa which referred to “genocidal starvation”, called on Israel “In conformity with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, and in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, in particular the spread of famine and starvation”, to ensure the provision of basic services and humanitarian assistance. In this instance, the IPC confirmed the disaster, placing the entire Gaza Strip in Phases 4 and 5https://www.ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ipcinfo/docs/IPC_Gaza_Strip_Acute_Food_Insecurity_Feb_July2024_Special_Brief.pdffor the period March to July 2024.

The viewpoint of those who suffer

Whilst the controversies surrounding famines constantly draw on their dual political and technical dimensions, researcher Alex de Waal has introduced a third dimension. A specialist in famines and Sudan, De Waal feels that it is important to distance ourselves from the technical aspects and the advocacy initiatives of the agencies and focus on those people who are experiencing episodes of famine and living with the memory of previous ones. For De Waal, famine is thus part of the social memory of communitieshttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01436597.2023.2219609. Drawing on the memory of the Darfurians, De Waal distinguishes between chronic hunger and episodes of malnutrition on the one hand, and famines that decimate communities on the other. He says that in many agrarian societies, these famines have names. They are the phenomena which “eviscerate” livelihoods, break social bonds and disrupt the landscape. In other words, it is all about the loss of a way of life. Lamenting the lack of attention paid to the way in which the very people who endure these destructive episodes describe, characterise and live through them, he reminds us of the importance of understanding, beyond the figures, the social dimensions of famine.