ABSTRACT
In the twentieth century, more than 70 million people worldwide died from famine, making it the most famine-stricken period in history. The fact that famines are inescapably political is underpinned by the second important development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whereby food crises are now located almost entirely in sub-Saharan Africa, where the intersection of political conflict and natural factors has been most acute. This chapter examines the iconography of famine, asking how and why stereotypical portraits of famine victims continue to be produced and how they shape our understanding of the political complexities of food crises. It illustrates the issues at stake by going back to the case of Malawi in 2002. The author do so because of the way this food crisis demonstrates clearly the political nature of contemporary famine, and because of the way one of the iconic photographs from this context travelled across the media to be used in a number of different ways.
