by Robert W. Kates

About the author: Robert W. Kates is director emeritus of the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program, a research and educational organization based at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

As we witnessed the starvation, disease, and dying in Somalia in the early 1990s, it was surely difficult to remember that Somalia was the site of the greatest triumph of 20th-century international public health. There, in October 1977, Ali Maow Maalin, a 23-year-old cook in the town of Merca, was identified in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization as having “the world’s last endemic case of smallpox.” Now, more than 15 years later, Somalia may again prove to be a turning point in the much longer and larger human struggle to end deaths from famine. To understand that opportunity amid...