Some obstacles to eliminating famine.

Few communities can be certain that their food supply is absolutely secure. River valleys show that there are times when a river needs its valley; it may be reasonable to use the valley as farmland if the interval between floods is 1-50 years: it is less reasonable to build houses in it. Similarly, volcanic soil is so fertile that farming the talus slope is profitable between eruptions. These predictable misfortunes are faced as calculated risks: they are brief and the area at risk is limited. The inhabitants can safeguard themselves by maintaining food stores, or by getting help from neighbouring communities. The impact of a plant disease is more varied. The famine caused by potato blight in Ireland had permanent political consequences. The social effects of the diseaseenforced change from coffee to tea cultivation in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) were much smaller. The Bengal famine of 1942, caused or exacerbated by Helminthosporium devastating the rice crop (Padmanabhan, 1973), had no great effect on the pattern of agriculture. A community that is accustomed to a fairly adequate diet tends to react vigorously and opportunistically to temporary deprivation, it makes use of whatever is edible in the vicinity and, when the crisis is over, it may make changes intended to minimize the risk of recurrence. In other regions, famine is a continuing threat to people who even in normal times are inadequately fed. This leads to apathy; most of the people are reluctant to make any changes and hardly believe that a better life-style is possible. Such communities are simply catastrophes waiting for a suitable occasion to happen. Most regions in this category suffer from drought. It can be argued that people should not try to live permanently in a region with uncertain rainfall unless it has such resources, e.g. oil, that food can always be imported. Even then, money earned by the resource may not filter down to those in need. Nomadism is a common traditional method for coping with this problem. There are now about IOO million nomads; many of them did not choose this style of life for its own sake but were pushed into inhospitable regions by more vigorous (perhaps because better-fed) neighbours as population pressure increased. Nomads, whether they live in Africa, Australia or the Middle East, have similar life styles; they have small essentially communist communities that neither have nor wish for more property than they can carry (some say, than they can carry in one hand). Nomads cannot be sharply distinguished from ‘hunter-gatherers’, living in regions with a small and erratic rainfall, who forage over large areas though they may choose to live crowded together when not foraging (Draper, 1973). Though such communities are at risk, various surveys (e.g. Harris, 1962; Truswell, Hansen, Wannenberg & Sellmeyer, 1969; Bhandari, 1974; Calloway, Giauque & Costa, 1974; Newman,