What Today's Headlines About Famine Get Wrong
A new book offers a surprising perspective about the hunger crises dominating the news.
The author, Alex de Waal, a professor at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, is an old hand on this subject. For three decades he's been writing about famines — and in several cases assisting with the response. But in an interview with NPR, de Waal says this latest take — the book is called Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine — marks an evolution in even his own thinking.
Herewith some of the takeaways:
As bad as things are now — they used to be so much worse.
The past year has been unquestionably terrible, notes de Waal, with famine or near-famine conditions putting millions of people at risk of severe malnutrition and even death across Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Nigeria and Yemen.
But de Waal says the current situation still represents a relatively small deviation from an overall trend of enormous progress.
"If we look at the history of
