>From Cormac O Grada's newly published Famine: A Short History:
"IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD, famines no longer capture the headlines like they used to. Billboard images of African infants with distended bellies are less ubiquitous, and the focus of international philanthropy has shifted from disaster relief to more structural issues, particularly those of third world debt relief, economic development, and democratic accountability. Totalitarian famines of the kind associated with Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and their latter-day imitators are on the wane. Even in Africa, the most vulnerable of the seven continents, the famines of the past decade or so have been, by historical standards, “small” famines. In 2002, despite warnings from the United Nations World Food Programme and nongovernmental relief agencies of a disaster that could affect millions, the excess mortality during a much-publicized crisis in Malawi was probably in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As for the 2005 famine in Niger, which also attracted global attention, experts now argue that it does not qualify as a famine by standard criteria. Mortality there was high in 2005, but apparently no higher than normal in that impoverished country.1"