Introduction

Poor rural people in marginal environments have a remarkable capacity to cope with food shortages. Because famines have traditionally been understood by outsiders as abnormal, time-bounded events, survivors’ capacities to cope have been viewed as short-term responses. If policymakers can recognise how people cope, and reinforce this capacity, famines can be predicted and mitigated. Thereafter, it will be business as usual. In contrast, this book endorses the view that famines are part of a downward spiral of impoverishment and increasing vulnerability towards destitution and sometimes death. As a result of the two Sahelian droughts of the early 1970s and the mid-1980s, fundamental changes are taking place in livelihoods, as people adapt to confront declining food security. This book explores the nature of this process of adaptation, which can be envisaged as a transition from highly resilient and insensitive livelihood systems to vulnerable ones. It examines how these changes can be tracked over time to predict periods of unusual food stress and to indicate appropriate ways of improving household food security in sustainable ways. Understanding adaptation is the bed-rock on which successful famine prediction is based; identifying the limits to and potential of adaptation is the basis on which famines can be prevented.