by Alex de Waal

About the author: Alex de Waal is the associate director of the London-based Africa Watch, which is a division of Human Rights Watch, an organization that
monitors and protests human rights violations worldwide.

Reports of mass starvation in Somalia in 1992 and the threat of widespread hunger across much of southern Africa prompted by-now-familiar appeals for
emergency food shipments. Unfortunately, the complicated logistics of procuring and delivering large-scale aid mean that food can never arrive in time to stave off a crisis once it is imminent. What’s more, the urgent need to deal with the immediate problem obscures lessons that the West has repeatedly failed to learn: No country has moved from being famine-stricken to famine-free by receiving food aid. And no government is so poor that it cannot...