Without food to sustain it, the body eats itself. It begins with the carbohydrates and the fats. Once those supplies are exhausted, it feasts on organs and muscle. Metabolism slows, kidney function fails, and the immune system weakens. The colon loses its ability to reabsorb electrolytes and water. Quotidian diseases become deadly. Mass starvation also tears at the social body. Mothers triage between hungry children. Social structures become strained and buckle. The consequences can last for decades. Starving infants become undernourished mothers; the legacy of the Dutch Hongerwinter (1944–45) still marks young bodies today. Various names have been given to this experience. In Ireland, the events of 1845–52 are known as the Gorta Mór, the great hunger; in Bangladesh, a distinction is drawn between akal (‘when times are bad’) and a nationwide crisis, mananthor (‘when the epoch changes’). I once asked a South Sudanese friend, who survived the scarcities of the civil war (2013–18), what hunger tastes like. ‘It tastes like lilies’, he told me, as he recalled plunging into rivers in search of something—anything—to eat.

The number of lily-eaters is increasing. In 2024, some forty million people in the Horn of Africa will go hungry. Much of this hunger is driven by conflicts in which the belligerents have disrupted agricultural cycles and used starvation as a weapon of war. The destruction of food stocks, increasing desertification due to climate change, and the total collapse of economies that contain virtually no productive industries, have left populations at the mercy of predatory regimes propped up by the international community. In Sudan, a seventeen-month-long civil war has created the world’s largest hunger crisis. Friends in Khartoum, where the conflict has destroyed much of the city, report daily deaths. The Clingendael Institute, a Dutch thinktank, estimates that as many as 2.5 million people will be dead by the end of September. The violence is only part of the story. What these conflicts have made visible is the fragility of import-reliant economies, sensitive to the sort of global food price spikes that occurred after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the Horn, the pastoralists and smallholders now exposed to the fluctuations of the global market and the depredations of regional conflict have already suffered forty years of immiseration and land grabs—often in the name of the marketization of Sub-Saharan economies—that have diminished their capacity to survive shocks to food production systems.

The technocrats tasked with calculating the extent of the crisis in the Horn have their own terms for mass hunger, classificatory scales that allow humanitarians to rank disasters, like a morbid pop chart. There is an emergency level of food insecurity. There is catastrophic food insecurity. There is a risk of famine and there are famine-like conditions. In Sudan, thousands are dying of hunger and malnutrition-related diseases. But, with the exception of a single enclave—a camp in North Darfur for people displaced by war—there is no famine, not according to the technocrats, who have walled off the term with precise criteria, determined by opaque international institutions.footnote¹

While famines are rarely announced by the un-backed body that has made itself responsible for determining them, the heads of humanitarian agencies, in search of donor funds, compete for superlatives. In 2020, the un’s World Food Programme (wfp) claimed that Yemen was facing a famine of Biblical proportions (the evidence was rather more mixed).footnote² Rhetorical invocations of famine are a recent phenomenon, the product of a particular geopolitical moment. For much of the twentieth century, famine was not the cause of moral outrage, but an accepted weapon of war. There were the charnel houses built for the Great War famines of the Middle East, Holodomor and the ‘three years of great famine’ in China. The us blockade of Japan during World War ii was simply called Operation Starvation. The Allies’ desire to avoid too many questions about their tactics was one of the reasons that mass starvation was not included as an independent war crime in the Genocide Convention, despite Raphael Lemkin’s forensic studies of Nazi ‘racial discrimination in feeding’.

Today, invocations of famine come with a widely recognized visual grammar, which emerged during the Ethiopian famine of 1984–85: crowds of refugees fleeing starvation, kwashiorkor bellies, Michael Buerk’s broadcasts and Bob Geldof. This visual grammar implies a set of political relations. In one classic image of a famine scene, iconified in countless humanitarian fund-raising pamphlets, there is a mother, a starving child, and—the key to it all—a doctor. The scene must be understood from the perspective of a concerned spectator, wondering what to do about a catastrophe ‘over there’. The action suggested by this imagery is always an intervention from abroad; agency is reserved for the agencies. Merely to name a famine, the humanitarian appeals suggest, will awaken the world’s conscience and unlock the pockets of the donors. The international humanitarian order will determine the extent of the crisis, and the aid agencies will step in to save the day.

The prevailing approach to mass hunger took shape in the 1970s and 80s, during a series of droughts in the Sahel that intensified a broader regional crisis of state capacity. From the mid-1970s, Sub-Saharan African economies collapsed, and largely continued to decline into the 1980s and 1990s.footnote³ Despite the post-independence optimism of the 1960s, many African states had been kept in a marginal position within the global economy, reduced to being producers of raw materials and little else. This subordinate status left them exposed to the sharp increases in oil prices of the 1970s. The global recession that ensued slackened demand for African exports, precipitating the collapse of the labour market across much of the Sahel and the Horn.footnote⁴ As Giovanni Arrighi has argued, the transformation of the us’s role in the global economy—from ‘the major source of world liquidity and of direct investment’ in the 50s and 60s, to the ‘world’s main debtor nation and by far the largest recipient of foreign capital’ in the 80s—deepened Africa’s crisis. This ‘reversal of historic proportions’ increased demand in the us and depressed it in the rest of the world, which was left competing to provide cheap industrial products for American consumers.

Worse was to come. In 1981, a World Bank document known as the Berg Report laid the blame for the African crisis at the door of the state: protectionist state policies should be abandoned, domestic food production substituted for export crops, and in this fashion, Africa would be saved.footnote⁵ The structural adjustment policies that followed further eroded state capacity. Far from rescuing the continent, these reforms intensified the patrimonial tendencies of post-colonial governments, and led rent-seeking elites to sell off what remained of the state, leaving a shell behind.footnote⁶ The contractions of the 1980s left elites in the Sahel and the Horn dependent on the privatization of state assets, predation on the populations they controlled, international loans, and their capacity to function as middle-men in global commodity chains that entrenched African countries’ marginal position within the world economy.