At first glance the situation seems quite bizarre. The numerous warnings were loud and clear, thanks to drought-management specialists reporting weekly to the central government. Despite their efforts, however, some 2.5 million people are now suffering from hunger and are likely to starve in large numbers unless there is provision from abroad of immediate, and massive, food supplies. Meanwhile, only a few hundred miles westwards in the same country, farmers are celebrating a record breaking harvest. Too contradicting to be true? Not at all! This is the sad situation people in northern Kenya, one of Africa's richest and most stable countries, face today.

To understand this absurdity one must review the underlying factors of phenomena such as hunger, famine and the subsequent efforts in academic circles to develop a comprehensive explanation.

Until the 1970s hunger and famine were generally explained by a shortage of food. This simple cause-and-effect relationship was tackled by Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen who proved for the first time that the primary cause of famine is not a shortage of supply but rather a reduction of the possibilities to acquire food. In economic terms he defines the problem as one of distribution. He uses the expression 'Food Entitlement' - the right and ability of one to acquire food - to explain the genesis of a famine. A continuous decline of Food Entitlement of a social group explains the existence of famine and food surplus at the same time. Food Entitlement is influenced by many factors including the ownership of land and its cultivation, the possibility to buy subsidised food, the existence of a social security system and adequate employment or income.

This picture goes hand in hand with Sen's second proposition that hunger never affects all social groups equally. In Kenya farmers in the West refuse to sell their harvest to the government since they can realise higher gains by selling it to merchants in Tanzania. At the same time nomads in the North who suffer from food shortages resort to slaughtering much of their cattle (the only source of income for most) in order to survive, resulting in a simultaneous slaughtering of their livelihood. The ensuing decline of their purchasing power, combined with the high prices Western farmers reel in for their products results in ever gloomier prospects for those in the North. This scenario clearly shows that there are always winners and losers from such tragedies.

Sen's theory is still considered groundbreaking. Today virtually all publications on famine refer to his Food Entitlement Decline theory. In recent years social scientists have used his theory as a building block and added deeper and more structural explications onto his economic perspective. Robert Chambers, for example, introduced the concept of Social Vulnerability of the groups who are more likely to be threatened by famine than others. According to Chambers, this Social Vulnerability is two-fold. On one end there are external risks, such as droughts and floods, while on the other side there are internal possibilities which allow a social group to cope with these external risks. This includes the ability to cross national borders to look for better conditions.

However, if ethnic, political or cultural factors hinder these groups from reacting adequately to the external risks they are threatened by hunger. This approach refers to a much wider context than Sen's and was further extended by Michael Watts and George Bohle. They included a long-term dimension to Chamber's concept of Social Vulnerability. For them the destruction of ecological resources or a shift of the political and economic balance of power also counts towards the Social Vulnerability of certain groups. By adding this dimension, Watts and Bohle integrate parts of Sen's approach and place the expression of 'marginality' at the centre of their concept. That is, certain social groups are vulnerable and in the case of emergency are thus the first to be threatened by hunger. Their marginalised state means they cannot, for whatever reason, take advantage of opportunities or sufficiently benefit from available resources.

Thus, to comprehend the contradicting realities of extreme hunger on one hand and record breaking harvests on the other one must analyse which political, social, cultural and economic possibilities are available to certain groups. Hunger becomes a question of societal hierarchy and the distribution of food reflects who participates in, and controls, the process of production within a country. As long as things go well, this delicate balance has no dramatic consequence. Yet as soon as critical external incidents occur - either natural (drafts, floods) or manmade (civil war, mismanagement, economic crisis) - their combined impact becomes horribly apparent. In any case, more than one parameter will stimulate the rise of a famine.

This is the case in Kenya where a number of factors can be identified in the development of famine in the north. Many of these risks are homegrown and did not appear overnight. Nobody knows what happened to all the alarming drought reports in Nairobi since September. It is apparent, however, that these reports did not receive much attention. It was only just before Christmas, as more and more images of starving children were sent around the world, that President Kibaki flew to the suffering region, accompanied by two planes full of secretaries and ministers, to announce that the problem would be put at the top of the agenda. Yet the president and his entourage spent most of their time making speeches to the media and not more than 10 minutes with the underfed nomads. Only time, so precious for many, will tell how long this issue remains a priority on his agenda.

Given the circumstances it was a wise decision for the President not to travel through the countryside. Roads to the poor Savannah region are virtually impassable, which is less a problem of funding and more one of political will. The Kenyan government has never shown much interest in investing in basic public services in this remote area which has little economic importance. This failure now blocks people from leaving their hostile land and diminishes the incentive for the provision of assistance.

These examples by no means paint the entire picture. Aside from the as a natural disaster of drought, there are other contributing global factors including increasingly unbalanced world trade conditions. However, these global factors would never have led to such a catastrophe without the interaction of the homemade risks outlined above. In Kenya, for the most part, it is the internal factors that have led to the marginalization and continued suffering of the nomads in the North.

This combination of events has led to the point where the international community is now obliged to step in by sending food aid, with all its well-known negative longterm effects on dependency and the local economy. As long as vulnerable groups are remain at risk of being marginalised, it will only be a question of time until again we see people starving in spite of bumper crops in Kenya or elsewhere around the globe.

Florian Vogt holds a B.A. in International Relations from the School of International Studies, Technical University of Dresden, Germany. He is now studying Medicine at Heidelberg University, Germany. His main academic interest is on humanitarian affairs.

References:
Chambers, Robert: Rural Development - Putting the Last first, Longman, London, 1983
Ehlert, Stefan: Keine Nahrung, kein Wasser www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/politik/514555.html [4.1.2006]
Ehlert, Stefan: Zu Spät, www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/seite_3/516355.html [11.1.2006]
Reker, Judith: Millionen droht der Hungertod, www.spiegel.de/panorama/0,1518,395066,00.html [14.1.2006]
Sen, Amartya: Poverty and Famines - an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981
Thielke, Thilo: Tödliche Abhängigkeit, Der Spiegel, (3) 2006
Watts, Michael and Bohle, George: Hunger, Famine and the Space of Vulnerability, Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, 1993