Humanitarian aid should be a bipartisan issue. Congress needs to unlock the needed aid funds. There's no time to lose.
Starvation survivors bear lifelong scars. Severely undernourished children grow into shorter adults with subpar cognitive abilities. The social wounds of famine last generations. For a century after the Great Hunger of the 1840s, Ireland could not find a way to speak publicly about a trauma that killed a million people and also spelled the end of a cherished way of life. Witnessing famine is a life-changing experience, too. Forty years ago, I went to drought-stricken Darfur, Sudan, hoping to make my own contribution to feeding the hungry. I came away humbled by the stoicism and dignity of Sudanese families and their resourcefulness in coping with unimaginable stresses. Grandmothers showed granddaughters how to collect wild grasses, roots and berries; men traveled huge distances to find work so they could send money home; communities banded together to ration their last scraps of food for their children. I learned that those who had lived through famine were the true experts. That motivated me to research and write on the topic and to teach students about humanitarian studies. And over the decades that followed, the regular drumbeat of famines seemed to recede into history. Economic development, greater openness in societies where starvation could no longer be kept secret and a bigger and more professional aid apparatus appeared to spell the end of mass starvation. I wrote a hopeful essay in The Times eight years ago arguing as much, followed by a book, "Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine." But I was wrong. As I argue in a new guest essay for Times Opinion, the hope of an end to mass starvation is flickering. In Gaza, we see people reduced to famine at unprecedented speed. Sudan faces the world's biggest food crisis — while its neighbors are descending into hunger, too. Seasoned humanitarians are talking of "mass mortality events" in ways that haven't been heard in my professional lifetime. And as I write in my essay, as humanitarian needs go up, aid budgets are being cut. We know how to stop famines. We're just not doing it.
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2024/03/09
Opinion Today: We are back in the era of large-scale famines
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