Famine: a perspective for the nutrition community.

Famine is a nasty turn of events that intrudes on the world's consciousness from time to time. Pictures of starving people and acutely malnourished children, rampant disease, a rising death toll, and massive suffering in some far-off land move many among us to contribute to famine relief, shocked by the paradox of famine in a world "awash in grain". Those who think about it appreciate that famine is related to poverty, that it is often triggered by climatic instability, and that it is both an instrument and tragic by-product of political conflict. But few know very much about famine beyond such fleeting insights. Even fewer are aware that the collective response to famine is woefully deficient. Just as we in the nutrition community had to fight long and hard to get malnutrition onto the development agenda as an explicit concern of public policy, so we and others like us are going to have to labor hard again to do the same for famine. This paper is an attempt to crystallize the issues involved.