Causes of shortage
The discussion above on prevalence and indicators of food shortage has illustrated that its causes are complex. Some hunger indicators, such as production shortfalls, highlight problems that may lead to food shortage. Others, such as DES, directly measure food availability within a country or region. These food-shortage indicators report outcomes of physical and biological factors, sociocultural influences, political-economic forces, and interactions among these elements.
Physical and biological factors
Production is only one determinant of food shortage, but a crucial one. It is obviously critical on the global level but can also be decisive for some countries or communities. Production potential varies across countries, dependent on natural factors (including climate, soils, water, food species, and pests) and cultural factors (including technology and investment strategies).
Climate
Temperature and rainfall are critical elements determining when and how often crops can be sown. While some Asian countries are able to harvest three times in a single year, food production nearly halts during dry seasons in many tropical zones and during winter cold in temperate areas. Extremes or thresholds of heat, increasingly accompanied by high ultraviolet radiation, and of cold, especially early frosts or late thaws, can ruin harvests. They test the limits of growing seasons and moisture-temperature tolerances of particular crop varieties. These extremes will be modified by global climate change, which promises to transform regional cropping patterns. For the present, drought is the most widespread climatic threat to production, and is treated more extensively below.
Seasonality means that there may be food shortage during part of the year in places where total annual production appears to be more than sufficient to meet nutritional needs. Agricultural societies and households adapt to potential seasonal scarcities by planting a variety of early- to later-yielding crops, storing or selling harvests to minimize losses, investing in social feasting when food is plentiful, and drawing on social obligations of reciprocity when food is scarce. They ration, process food staples more coarsely, supplement diets through foraging, and consume less-preferred foods. They also schedule crafts, migrant labour, and other economic activities to diversify and ensure income in "off" agricultural seasons. Despite such adaptive mechanisms, prolonged or multiple years of shortage, as experienced especially in SSA and South Asia, give rise to potential famine conditions (defined as widespread and extreme food shortage leading to elevated mortality and mass movements of population in search of food) that nowadays are addressed relatively successfully by state and international early warning systems (EWS) and response. Even where EWS are well established (as in India), however, seasonal hunger remains a problem addressed neither by state nor by traditional sociocultural mechanisms of food sharing, which tend to be undermined by modernization (Chen 1991).
Although drought is often thought of as the precipitating cause of famine, because so many farmers in a single area experience crop failure simultaneously, drought does not lead to food shortage or its extreme manifestation - famine - if there are adequate carry-over stocks available, or if food is available through market or relief channels (Ravallion 1987).
Creeping disasters, such as drought, are likely to devastate crops but leave infrastructure intact. Both timing and duration of rainfall may be implicated, since, for seed crops, moisture is critical immediately after planting and also at the stages when fertilizer is applied. Drought can also prevent planting if the rains are late, so that soils are too dry to till before the planting season has passed. Failure of rains at any of these stages greatly reduces harvests.
Since the early origins of agriculture, human societies have always tried to extend productive seasons and, especially, available moisture by controlling groundwater evapotranspiration, by various water-storage techniques, and by distribution via irrigation. Water control is closely linked to social power and control, since the ability of irrigation systems to enhance food production is limited by their general state of repair. Hydraulic systems, which initially require large amounts of capital and labour to construct, later require maintenance. Social resources must be mobilized through a sense of common purpose (or coercion) to preserve irrigation ways, which otherwise silt up, leak, and lose effectiveness. The history of political fortunes and social breakdown in the Near East and Middle East has been linked to cycles of "salt and silt," environmental and subsistence crises triggered by failures to control the life-giving waters of irrigation (Jacobsen and Adams 1955). The expansion and sustainability of Green Revolution (GR) agriculture in the modern era is similarly dependent on effective water management, which is necessary to prevent waterlogging and salinization of soils and crops, and silting and disruption of water channels.
At the opposite end of the rainfall spectrum, too much rain can also impair agricultural production, especially where flooding is severe enough to kill crops by uprooting or submergence, but also where it simply slows growths or makes cultivation and harvesting extremely difficult. Even after harvest, flooding can be devastating when it occurs before crops have been safely stored (Good 1986) and leaves crops vulnerable to rot.
Irrigation systems can be overloaded by flooding but also can be one of the mechanisms used to cope with irregular rainfall. Irrigation systems often do little to prevent damage caused by the force of the rains themselves but they do prevent further damage from waterlogging. They also enhance productivity in dry seasons by holding over water from heavy rains; this is accomplished through the use of simple earthen dams in Sri Lanka (Grigg 1985), as well as through more elaborate systems of canals and pumps. Along with terracing, irrigation systems may also limit soil erosion and help sustain soil fertility along flood plains.
Less regularly, food systems can be entirely disrupted by natural disasters, which affect both growing and marketing conditions and sometimes the social fabric. Hurricanes and, to a lesser extent, earthquakes can destroy crops. They can also devastate transport, markets, and other infrastructure, and cause food shortage even where the crops themselves survive. The economic destruction accompanying natural disasters, which can cause scarcities of many materials, often pushes prices upward, increasing the rate of inflation, reducing employment, and more generally contributing to balance-of-payments problems.
Inability of government to deal effectively with natural disaster, such as earthquake or drought, can threaten political stability and overturn fragile regimes. In each of the recent cases of Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Rwanda, their ruling governments' ineffectiveness in dealing with drought and ensuing famine conditions provided an opening for the political opposition to challenge successfully that government's authority and legitimacy. Political leaders were portrayed as prospering while the masses went hungry, and this became the successful rallying point for civil uprisings. Similarly, the inability of Samoza's regime in Nicaragua to alleviate widespread suffering from a hurricane became the trigger cause of the Sandanista's successful ascent to political power. Each case, however, was followed by periods of readjustment, civil disorder, and lowered food productivity.
Although the magnitude of disasters' effects on overall economic development appears to vary (Albala-Bertrand 1993), the short-term economic shocks caused by sudden natural disasters usually decrease marketed food availability in the affected regions, so that food aid may appear to be the only practical means of getting enough food to the affected populations. Inappropriate world response, such as Guatemala's inundation with donated food following the 1976 earthquake, sometimes disrupts markets and income for local farmers, who face plummeting food prices and agricultural income even where their crops have not been destroyed. The question of whether food aid increases food availability at the household level will be revisited in chapter 4.
Politicians and national politics are also important social actors in other ways. They provide the economic, social, and cultural framework (what policy makers increasingly term "the enabling environment") to prevent natural elements from precipitating wider disasters. Despite the seemingly arbitrary nature of sudden natural disasters, they do not affect all areas in the same way, even when their severity is of a similar scale. Healthy economies rapidly bounce back from shocks because they have more internal resources dedicated to mitigating the immediate and longer-term impacts on food production or distribution. Similarly, precautions that minimize the impact of disasters, such as earthquake-resistant housing and roads, are not distributed evenly either across or within countries. Some so-called "natural" disasters might be better thought of as man made. For example, flooding often results as much from deforestation as from excessive rainfall or unusually intense hurricanes. Abuse of land, particularly overgrazing, increases vulnerability to wind and flood erosion (Albala-Bertrand 1993). Sudden natural disasters cannot be prevented, but the effects that they have on food production and food importation are conditioned more by political and economic processes than by the intensity of the calamity.
Soils
Food production also varies according to soil structure and fertility, factors that are less easily measured - but perhaps more easily modified - than temperature or rainfall. The differences in productivity between the dark soils of the US midwest and the sands of the Sahara appear obvious, but it is less clear how much less-dramatic variations in soil conditions matter. Many tropical soils contain less nitrogen and phosphorus, have lower capacity to absorb fertilizers, and therefore have lower conventional productive capacity, but some tropical soils (most notably in the Amazon) have been very intensively farmed and further intensification is possible in other areas (NAS 1986).
Since agricultural methods and inputs vary in areas with different soils, the causes of disparities in productivity are multiple. Grain yields per hectare in SSA are about one-third of those achieved in East Asia, but SSA also struggles with more challenging climate, uses fertilizer at a rate less than 13 per cent of the world average (World Bank 1992), and has made little use of irrigation. Investments in agricultural intensification, including higher-yield-potential seeds, fertilizers, water management, and chemicals for pest control, are costly and make it unlikely that they will be easily or widely available for use by poorer farmers and countries. Especially where imported food is cheaper than domestically produced food, as is the case today in many developing countries, expanding local production may not appear to be economically feasible.
Production may also be limited by low soil fertility and restricted access to fertilizer supplies. Fertilizer is required to realize the full benefits from hybrid GR seeds; quantities of its use often serve as a measure of agricultural improvement or modernization. In contrast to the time when most farmers used local sources of animal or green manure to enhance soil fertility, most developing countries today rely heavily on inorganic fertilizers, which they must import. At both household and country levels, fertilizer constitutes a significant expense, and lack of means to purchase adequate quantities potentially reduces crop yields. Lack of cash, poor credit, or isolation from sources of supply due to underdeveloped infrastructure hamper farmers' access; lack of foreign exchange and balance-of-payments difficulties limit the total supplies imported and available within a country. The cost per unit of fertilizer is also a factor adding to the gap between fertilizer needs and the amount that many developing countries can afford to import (Monte�n 1982; UNCTAD and Mukherjee 1985). Upward fluctuations in the price of petroleum, a raw material for inorganic fertilizers, imperilled developing country food production in the mid-1970s, and could happen again. Timely, as well as total, availability constrains output, since optimal fertilizer impact is achieved only by applying it at the most sensitive points in the crop cycle. Only greater domestic production can protect farmers and consumers in developing countries from severe price fluctuations and transport or market bottlenecks.
Biological stressors
Disease, insects, animals, and weeds also damage crops and reduce yields, and are controlled by mechanical, land management, chemical, or biological means, including breeding plants and animals to resist key stressors.
Viruses are controlled by eliminating insect or other vectors and by breeding resistant seeds through conventional or new genetic engineering techniques. Biotechnology also offers new diagnostic techniques for identifying and limiting infections, as well as for producing and multiplying clean seeding stocks for vegetatively propagated crops, such as potatoes and manioc. Diagnostics and planting-material multiplication potentially can be carried out as local-level cottage industries. Bacterial and fungal diseases are also addressed through breeding programmes and sometimes chemical applications. In addition to the breeding and selection of resistant stock, animal diseases are controlled by preventive inoculations and curative remedies. Biological and chemical control of vectors are also common, and sometimes innovative, as where scientists of the Kenya-based International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology developed a simple cow urine-baited trap for tsetse flies, to eliminate trypanosomes.
Insect damage similarly is avoided by breeding resistant varieties, mixed-planting strategies that buffer particular host species from their characteristic pests, and insecticidal chemicals that kill (or otherwise interfere with the feeding, maturation, or sexual reproduction of) the target populations. Biological controls involve introducing predators or pathogens of the pest species. Integrated pest management that combines chemical, biological, and some hands-on mechanical strategies - such as removal of insect eggs before they hatch - are increasing worldwide, in response in part to their greater safety and lower costs and in part to the increasing environmental burden and decreasing effectiveness of chemicals. Chemical use soared during the early decades of the GR, as new seeds were accompanied by chemical packages that sometimes indiscriminately wiped out "good" as well as "bad" insects, removing the predators as well as pests, presenting an unprecedented opportunity for pesticide-resistant insects that co-evolved with the plants and chemicals in these GR ecosystems to cause severe crop damage. To restore insect ecology, reduce pesticide poisoning, and re-create a safer balance for plants and humans, Indonesia, as a case in point, banned most pesticides. On Java, in some seasons and places where rice-hopper damage can be anticipated to be enormous, communities have organized massive brigades of farmers and schoolchildren to collect the insects' eggs and so prevent damage (Indonesian National IPM Program 1991).
The discussion above on prevalence and indicators of food shortage has illustrated that its causes are complex. Some hunger indicators, such as production shortfalls, highlight problems that may lead to food shortage. Others, such as DES, directly measure food availability within a country or region. These food-shortage indicators report outcomes of physical and biological factors, sociocultural influences, political-economic forces, and interactions among these elements.
Physical and biological factors
Production is only one determinant of food shortage, but a crucial one. It is obviously critical on the global level but can also be decisive for some countries or communities. Production potential varies across countries, dependent on natural factors (including climate, soils, water, food species, and pests) and cultural factors (including technology and investment strategies).
Climate
Temperature and rainfall are critical elements determining when and how often crops can be sown. While some Asian countries are able to harvest three times in a single year, food production nearly halts during dry seasons in many tropical zones and during winter cold in temperate areas. Extremes or thresholds of heat, increasingly accompanied by high ultraviolet radiation, and of cold, especially early frosts or late thaws, can ruin harvests. They test the limits of growing seasons and moisture-temperature tolerances of particular crop varieties. These extremes will be modified by global climate change, which promises to transform regional cropping patterns. For the present, drought is the most widespread climatic threat to production, and is treated more extensively below.
Seasonality means that there may be food shortage during part of the year in places where total annual production appears to be more than sufficient to meet nutritional needs. Agricultural societies and households adapt to potential seasonal scarcities by planting a variety of early- to later-yielding crops, storing or selling harvests to minimize losses, investing in social feasting when food is plentiful, and drawing on social obligations of reciprocity when food is scarce. They ration, process food staples more coarsely, supplement diets through foraging, and consume less-preferred foods. They also schedule crafts, migrant labour, and other economic activities to diversify and ensure income in "off" agricultural seasons. Despite such adaptive mechanisms, prolonged or multiple years of shortage, as experienced especially in SSA and South Asia, give rise to potential famine conditions (defined as widespread and extreme food shortage leading to elevated mortality and mass movements of population in search of food) that nowadays are addressed relatively successfully by state and international early warning systems (EWS) and response. Even where EWS are well established (as in India), however, seasonal hunger remains a problem addressed neither by state nor by traditional sociocultural mechanisms of food sharing, which tend to be undermined by modernization (Chen 1991).
Although drought is often thought of as the precipitating cause of famine, because so many farmers in a single area experience crop failure simultaneously, drought does not lead to food shortage or its extreme manifestation - famine - if there are adequate carry-over stocks available, or if food is available through market or relief channels (Ravallion 1987).
Creeping disasters, such as drought, are likely to devastate crops but leave infrastructure intact. Both timing and duration of rainfall may be implicated, since, for seed crops, moisture is critical immediately after planting and also at the stages when fertilizer is applied. Drought can also prevent planting if the rains are late, so that soils are too dry to till before the planting season has passed. Failure of rains at any of these stages greatly reduces harvests.
Since the early origins of agriculture, human societies have always tried to extend productive seasons and, especially, available moisture by controlling groundwater evapotranspiration, by various water-storage techniques, and by distribution via irrigation. Water control is closely linked to social power and control, since the ability of irrigation systems to enhance food production is limited by their general state of repair. Hydraulic systems, which initially require large amounts of capital and labour to construct, later require maintenance. Social resources must be mobilized through a sense of common purpose (or coercion) to preserve irrigation ways, which otherwise silt up, leak, and lose effectiveness. The history of political fortunes and social breakdown in the Near East and Middle East has been linked to cycles of "salt and silt," environmental and subsistence crises triggered by failures to control the life-giving waters of irrigation (Jacobsen and Adams 1955). The expansion and sustainability of Green Revolution (GR) agriculture in the modern era is similarly dependent on effective water management, which is necessary to prevent waterlogging and salinization of soils and crops, and silting and disruption of water channels.
At the opposite end of the rainfall spectrum, too much rain can also impair agricultural production, especially where flooding is severe enough to kill crops by uprooting or submergence, but also where it simply slows growths or makes cultivation and harvesting extremely difficult. Even after harvest, flooding can be devastating when it occurs before crops have been safely stored (Good 1986) and leaves crops vulnerable to rot.
Irrigation systems can be overloaded by flooding but also can be one of the mechanisms used to cope with irregular rainfall. Irrigation systems often do little to prevent damage caused by the force of the rains themselves but they do prevent further damage from waterlogging. They also enhance productivity in dry seasons by holding over water from heavy rains; this is accomplished through the use of simple earthen dams in Sri Lanka (Grigg 1985), as well as through more elaborate systems of canals and pumps. Along with terracing, irrigation systems may also limit soil erosion and help sustain soil fertility along flood plains.
Less regularly, food systems can be entirely disrupted by natural disasters, which affect both growing and marketing conditions and sometimes the social fabric. Hurricanes and, to a lesser extent, earthquakes can destroy crops. They can also devastate transport, markets, and other infrastructure, and cause food shortage even where the crops themselves survive. The economic destruction accompanying natural disasters, which can cause scarcities of many materials, often pushes prices upward, increasing the rate of inflation, reducing employment, and more generally contributing to balance-of-payments problems.
Inability of government to deal effectively with natural disaster, such as earthquake or drought, can threaten political stability and overturn fragile regimes. In each of the recent cases of Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Rwanda, their ruling governments' ineffectiveness in dealing with drought and ensuing famine conditions provided an opening for the political opposition to challenge successfully that government's authority and legitimacy. Political leaders were portrayed as prospering while the masses went hungry, and this became the successful rallying point for civil uprisings. Similarly, the inability of Samoza's regime in Nicaragua to alleviate widespread suffering from a hurricane became the trigger cause of the Sandanista's successful ascent to political power. Each case, however, was followed by periods of readjustment, civil disorder, and lowered food productivity.
Although the magnitude of disasters' effects on overall economic development appears to vary (Albala-Bertrand 1993), the short-term economic shocks caused by sudden natural disasters usually decrease marketed food availability in the affected regions, so that food aid may appear to be the only practical means of getting enough food to the affected populations. Inappropriate world response, such as Guatemala's inundation with donated food following the 1976 earthquake, sometimes disrupts markets and income for local farmers, who face plummeting food prices and agricultural income even where their crops have not been destroyed. The question of whether food aid increases food availability at the household level will be revisited in chapter 4.
Politicians and national politics are also important social actors in other ways. They provide the economic, social, and cultural framework (what policy makers increasingly term "the enabling environment") to prevent natural elements from precipitating wider disasters. Despite the seemingly arbitrary nature of sudden natural disasters, they do not affect all areas in the same way, even when their severity is of a similar scale. Healthy economies rapidly bounce back from shocks because they have more internal resources dedicated to mitigating the immediate and longer-term impacts on food production or distribution. Similarly, precautions that minimize the impact of disasters, such as earthquake-resistant housing and roads, are not distributed evenly either across or within countries. Some so-called "natural" disasters might be better thought of as man made. For example, flooding often results as much from deforestation as from excessive rainfall or unusually intense hurricanes. Abuse of land, particularly overgrazing, increases vulnerability to wind and flood erosion (Albala-Bertrand 1993). Sudden natural disasters cannot be prevented, but the effects that they have on food production and food importation are conditioned more by political and economic processes than by the intensity of the calamity.
Soils
Food production also varies according to soil structure and fertility, factors that are less easily measured - but perhaps more easily modified - than temperature or rainfall. The differences in productivity between the dark soils of the US midwest and the sands of the Sahara appear obvious, but it is less clear how much less-dramatic variations in soil conditions matter. Many tropical soils contain less nitrogen and phosphorus, have lower capacity to absorb fertilizers, and therefore have lower conventional productive capacity, but some tropical soils (most notably in the Amazon) have been very intensively farmed and further intensification is possible in other areas (NAS 1986).
Since agricultural methods and inputs vary in areas with different soils, the causes of disparities in productivity are multiple. Grain yields per hectare in SSA are about one-third of those achieved in East Asia, but SSA also struggles with more challenging climate, uses fertilizer at a rate less than 13 per cent of the world average (World Bank 1992), and has made little use of irrigation. Investments in agricultural intensification, including higher-yield-potential seeds, fertilizers, water management, and chemicals for pest control, are costly and make it unlikely that they will be easily or widely available for use by poorer farmers and countries. Especially where imported food is cheaper than domestically produced food, as is the case today in many developing countries, expanding local production may not appear to be economically feasible.
Production may also be limited by low soil fertility and restricted access to fertilizer supplies. Fertilizer is required to realize the full benefits from hybrid GR seeds; quantities of its use often serve as a measure of agricultural improvement or modernization. In contrast to the time when most farmers used local sources of animal or green manure to enhance soil fertility, most developing countries today rely heavily on inorganic fertilizers, which they must import. At both household and country levels, fertilizer constitutes a significant expense, and lack of means to purchase adequate quantities potentially reduces crop yields. Lack of cash, poor credit, or isolation from sources of supply due to underdeveloped infrastructure hamper farmers' access; lack of foreign exchange and balance-of-payments difficulties limit the total supplies imported and available within a country. The cost per unit of fertilizer is also a factor adding to the gap between fertilizer needs and the amount that many developing countries can afford to import (Monte�n 1982; UNCTAD and Mukherjee 1985). Upward fluctuations in the price of petroleum, a raw material for inorganic fertilizers, imperilled developing country food production in the mid-1970s, and could happen again. Timely, as well as total, availability constrains output, since optimal fertilizer impact is achieved only by applying it at the most sensitive points in the crop cycle. Only greater domestic production can protect farmers and consumers in developing countries from severe price fluctuations and transport or market bottlenecks.
Biological stressors
Disease, insects, animals, and weeds also damage crops and reduce yields, and are controlled by mechanical, land management, chemical, or biological means, including breeding plants and animals to resist key stressors.
Viruses are controlled by eliminating insect or other vectors and by breeding resistant seeds through conventional or new genetic engineering techniques. Biotechnology also offers new diagnostic techniques for identifying and limiting infections, as well as for producing and multiplying clean seeding stocks for vegetatively propagated crops, such as potatoes and manioc. Diagnostics and planting-material multiplication potentially can be carried out as local-level cottage industries. Bacterial and fungal diseases are also addressed through breeding programmes and sometimes chemical applications. In addition to the breeding and selection of resistant stock, animal diseases are controlled by preventive inoculations and curative remedies. Biological and chemical control of vectors are also common, and sometimes innovative, as where scientists of the Kenya-based International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology developed a simple cow urine-baited trap for tsetse flies, to eliminate trypanosomes.
Insect damage similarly is avoided by breeding resistant varieties, mixed-planting strategies that buffer particular host species from their characteristic pests, and insecticidal chemicals that kill (or otherwise interfere with the feeding, maturation, or sexual reproduction of) the target populations. Biological controls involve introducing predators or pathogens of the pest species. Integrated pest management that combines chemical, biological, and some hands-on mechanical strategies - such as removal of insect eggs before they hatch - are increasing worldwide, in response in part to their greater safety and lower costs and in part to the increasing environmental burden and decreasing effectiveness of chemicals. Chemical use soared during the early decades of the GR, as new seeds were accompanied by chemical packages that sometimes indiscriminately wiped out "good" as well as "bad" insects, removing the predators as well as pests, presenting an unprecedented opportunity for pesticide-resistant insects that co-evolved with the plants and chemicals in these GR ecosystems to cause severe crop damage. To restore insect ecology, reduce pesticide poisoning, and re-create a safer balance for plants and humans, Indonesia, as a case in point, banned most pesticides. On Java, in some seasons and places where rice-hopper damage can be anticipated to be enormous, communities have organized massive brigades of farmers and schoolchildren to collect the insects' eggs and so prevent damage (Indonesian National IPM Program 1991).
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