Risk Factors and Predictability of Famine in Ethiopia: a Commentary

Extract

In recent decades, development economists have devoted much of their analysis to understanding a number of microeconomic issues, facing the less developed countries. Those issues range from straightforward poverty analysis to a more sophisticated exercise of optimal economic planning. By and large the body of research which has been done can be grouped into two broad categories: (1) exercises devoted to spelling out the various nuances and shades of poverty, which explain either the dimensions or the causes of poverty and related phenomena, and (2) those attempts aimed at developing solutions to the issues of poverty from the perspective of planners. Obviously, famine studies in general, belong to the first category. There has been substantial literature devoted to explaining “What is meant by famine?” Of course, one's position in this regard determines one's policy perspectives as well. The article under review purports to analyze “Risk Factors and Predictability of Famine in Ethiopia.” The discussion by the author of “what famines are and the theories of famine causality,” provides perspective only for the issue under focus, that is the risk factors and predictability.