WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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.
Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Michael Watts’s foundational research on political ecology, vulnerability and resilience, agrarian political economy, the social production of famine, oil and development, and environmental justice continues to shape scholarly debates and research programs across the environmental social sciences, area studies, and humanities. Professor Watts is the Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies at UC-Berkeley and the Centennial Professor of International Development at the London School of Economics.
