ABSTRACT
Rather like love and marriage, the linkage between drought and famine has been a subject of fascination - and contention - for years. What once seemed to be a fairly simple, direct cause-and-effect relationship, with drought causing crop failure resulting in a decline in food availability and eventual starvation (‘famine’), has become a horrendously complex and highly mediated relationship at best. Drought’s centrality to famine has diminished from the status of ‘cause célèbre’ to that of mere ‘trigger’, and by no means the only or most important trigger.1 Students of climatic instability continue to regard drought as a significant factor disposing to famine, and there is much evidence to sustain this view. Those who find trigger mechanisms too superficial to explain some thing as multidimensional as famine find deeper explan ations more to their satisfaction - underlying vulner abilities, eroded entitlements, overwhelmed coping strategies, harmful public policies, political economy relationships victimising specific groups (if not the poor at large), and - a recent concept - the trauma of ‘failed states’.2 There is much to sustain these perspectives as well.
