I agree of course with everything you say, but I would just add a cautionary rider that the highly publicised famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s (as distinct from the one ten years earlier which you mention) was mainly attributable to lack of food virtually throughout the country as a result of three successive years of drought (almost unprecedented) affecting almost every area of this large and diverse country (also extremely unusual). Moreover a high proportion of the people affected were not in a money economy and so income variation didn’t apply, except to a limited extent to barter rates. However, the shortages and starvation were undeniably aggravated to some extent by the Mengistu government’s ban on the commercial movement of food from one province to another, by extremely poor communications between different areas (many starving people had to walk for several days to get to the nearest road), by the civil wars raging in the north and parts of the south of the country (for which incidentally Mengistu and his regime were not to blame), and by years of deforestation and soil erosion caused by the unavailability in the central highlands of any kind of fuel or materials apart from trees for cooking, heating or building. The practice of keeping cows (largely as a prestige symbol) instead of growing food didn’t help, either. But there can’t be any serious doubt that food aid on a large scale was essential if several million people were not to starve. Very little of the food aid supplied was diverted and there was almost no local food market to disrupt.

This hasn’t stopped some people making extraordinary allegations about the 1980s Ethiopian famine relief programme, even suggesting that LiveAid and the other ngos ‘did more harm than good’ — and this rubbish published in such august organs as Prospect magazine. You may have seen my post on this on my own blog, along with a similar exchange in the Guardian earlier.

As you rightly say, famines vary, and the response to them needs to vary, too.

Brian