Coping with Africa's food crisis

Three forms of the food crisis in Africa are outlined - food prices, food availability and insufficient production. The political causes, manifestations, responses and outcomes of these are shown to vary according to the nature of poverty associated with food insecurity. This is demonstrated by selected studies from Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Zaire and Zambia. It is argued that differential access to power and food underlines the crisis of insufficient production. Separate essays show how different sectors of African society respond to that crisis as expressed in changing state-society relationships and what the effect has been upon political trends and access to power of the coping strategies of international, national and local popular forces. -J.G.Tyrrell