On 20 July 2011, the United Nations declared famine in two southern regions of Somalia, marking its first famine declaration in nearly 30 years. Since July, four additional Somali regions have been added to the UN’s list, while hunger and malnutrition run rampant in Ethiopia and Kenya as well. Despite recent rainfall, the World Bank and USAID estimate that over 13.3 million people throughout the Horn of Africa are affected by the crisis, with 4 million in Somalia alone facing a humanitarian crisis, and 750,000 at risk of death due to famine in the next four months if an “adequate response” is not made. [1] 4.8 million people in Ethiopia and 4.3 million in Kenya have been identified as requiring humanitarian assistance, and both nations face increasing numbers of Somali refugees.[2]
Drought is an easy explanation for the crisis, although an incomplete one. This year, the eastern Horn of Africa suffered two consecutive poor rainy seasons, leading to one of the driest years since 1950. Rainfall was less than 30% of the 1995-2010 average in some areas, leading to excess livestock mortality rates of nearly 60% in severe cases. There is general consensus that an exceptionally strong La Niña oscillation drove the severity of the drought, but scientists are cautious to prematurely attribute the event to climate change. Another important localized driver is increased conflict in Somalia, which has decreased agricultural investment due to concerns of risk, and inhibited humanitarian access to the region.[3]
However, treating this event as temporally and spatially isolated is both inaccurate and deleterious, especially if we hope to prevent similar crises in the future. The global food market has recently faced exceptionally high and volatile prices, with indices of staple crops surpassing levels reached in the 2008 food price crisis. High global prices and dangerous levels of volatility have seeped into East Africa, where Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya respectively have experienced 240%, 117% and 58% increases in cereal prices over the last year. The World Bank identifies Somalia as a “high exposure” state on its Nutritional Exposure to World Markets index, and both Somalia and Ethiopia as “high exposure” states on its Household Vulnerability to Food Prices index.[4] These World Bank indices, in combination with literature from the International Food Policy Research Institute,[5] UN FAO,[6] and others[7], reveal that global markets weigh heavily in Eastern Africa and therefore must be taken into account when addressing the causes and responses to the current crisis. These same sources reveal that recent global price volatility has been driven by biofuel investment, financial speculation, protectionist trade policies, and increased extreme weather events. International forces, therefore, must play a part in an accurate causal explanation of the 2011 East Africa famine, as well as the formulation of appropriate responses.
My goal is to use discourse analysis to address the dichotomy between a common conception of famine as a temporally and spatially isolated event, and a more empirically driven understanding of famine as affected by globalization, market power and climate change. My research question: How has the media portrayed the causes of and appropriate responses to the 2011 East Africa famine in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, and how does this differ from the causal explanations and suggested responses provided by the research community?
Following methodology of Billet (2010)[8] and Boykoff and Boykoff (2004),[9] I will empirically compare newspaper coverage of the drought and famine, relying on The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and possibly The Nation, a widely read Kenyan newspaper. I have chosen these based on geographic dispersion and reader influence. I will code each article under two themes, causes and responses, and a variety of subthemes that address temporal and spatial issues (e.g. drought versus biofuel investment in the United States as causal explanations, or food aid versus decreased speculation in food commodity markets as appropriate responses). A preliminary search of these sources generates around 350 articles across all newspapers from 1 January 2010 (global prices began to sharply increase mid-2010) to the present. I will statistically analyze the coded results, hoping to identify both commonalities and differences across the diverse media sources.
This research fits into a broader literature on the evolution of public and academic understandings of famine. See, for example, Howe (2002)[10] and Vanhaute (2011).[11] It also contributes to work on media representations and journalistic incentives, as described by Fairclough (2003)[12] and Fowler (2001).[13] Moreover, it directly relates to political ecology’s attempt to integrate political economy into resource-based social events through comparison of proximate biophysical drivers and ultimate causes powered by globalization, market speculation and North-South divides.
[1] “Food Price Watch (Full Report) - November 2011”, n.d., http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTPOVERTY/Resources/336991-1311966520397/Food-Price-Watch-November-2011.htm.
[2] “USAID Fact Sheet: Horn of Africa Drought | IIP Digital”, n.d., http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/texttrans/2011/09/20110918141920su0.9148305.html#axzz1g2FFsbSM.
[3] USAID and Famine Early Warning Systems Network, “May - September 2011: Scenario Building for the Eastern Horn” (USAID, June 8, 2011).
[4] “Tracking the Horn of Africa Food Security Crisis | Food Security Portal”, n.d., http://www.foodsecurityportal.org/tracking-horn-africa-food-security-crisis.
[5] Maximo Torero, “Two Food Crises in Three Years: What’s Going On? What Lessons Have We Learned?” (International Food Policy Research Institute, December 5, 2011).
[6] FAO Regional Office for East Africa, “Regional consultation on policy and programmatic actions to address high food prices in East Africa”, April 2011, http://www.fao.org/isfp/isfp-home/en/.
[7] USAID and Famine Early Warning Systems Network, “May - September 2011: Scenario Building for the Eastern Horn.”
[8] Simon Billett, “Dividing climate change: global warming in the Indian mass media,” Climatic Change 99, no. 1-2 (June 5, 2009): 1-16.
[9] Maxwell T Boykoff and Jules M Boykoff, “Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press,” Global Environmental Change 14, no. 2 (July 2004): 125-136.
[10] P Howe, “Reconsidering ‘famine’,” Ids Bulletin-Institute of Development Studies 33, no. 4 (October 2002): 19-+.
[11] E. Vanhaute, “From famine to food crisis: What history can teach us about local and global subsistence crises,” Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 1 (2011): 47-65.
[12] Fairclough Norman, Analysing discourse : textual analysis for social research (London: Routledge, 2003).
[13] Roger Fowler, Language in the news: discourse and ideology in the Press (London: Routledge, 1991).
Since we discussed this on skype I wont comment online. Will check in to see if it is all going well with the paper.
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