Thinking the African Food Crisis - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 770

Chapter 32
Thinking the African
Food Crisis
The Sahel Forty Years On
Michael J. Watts
Introduction
In1948theirstDirector-GeneraloftheFAO,SirJohnBoydOrr,resigned
fromtheorganization,famouslycomplainingthat“whenpeopleaskfor
bread, we give them pamphlets.” . . . With pamphlets now replaced by sat-
ellite images and integrated information systems, the criticism remains
hauntingly pertinent.
Rupert Alcock, Speaking Food ,2009
Alongtimeago—intheearly1970stobeprecise—IwasresidentinSahelianWestAfrica
duringthegreatdrought-famine.SubsequentlyI wroteabook, Silent Violence (Watts1983),
about famines and food crises in that part of the world, specifically the dryland savan-
nasofnorthernNigerianeartheNigerborder.Itremainsanopenquestionwhetherthe
political-economic conditions, the life chances, and the vulnerabilities to climatic vola-
tilityconfrontingthefarminghouseholdsamongwhomI lived—andwhonowconfront
thedarkcloudsofglobalclimatechange—havesubstantiallyimprovedsincethattime.
Situating northern Nigeria on a larger Sahelian canvas extending from Senegal to the Horn
of Africa, a reasonable person might conclude that the deep problems of poverty and food
insecurity among peasant and pastoral forms of livelihood have been remarkably resistant
to human intervention across the Sudano-Sahelian region. My intention in this chapter is
torelectupontheenduringcharacteroftheSaheliancrisis—whatLaurenBerlant(2007)
referringtoratherdiferentcircumstancescalls“slowdeath”—andwhatitmightsuggest
about the operations of, and prospects for, African agro-food systems, on a continent upon
which the crashing waves of land grabs, climate change, resource scrambles, and the next
phase of the GMO-charged Green Revolution are apparently already breaking.