Something remarkable is happening in Ethiopia: Although the country is in the middle of yet another brutal drought, it’s no longer leading to deaths from starvation.
World hunger is at its lowest point in at least 25 years. Thank democracy.
Libby Nelson is Vox’s policy editor, leading coverage of how government action and inaction shape American life. Libby has more than a decade of policy journalism experience, including at Inside Higher Ed and Politico. She joined Vox in 2014.
That’s notable given Ethiopia’s history: A drought and subsequent famine in the 1980s, exacerbated by a civil war, killed at least 600,000 people.
What’s changed, argues Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, isn’t the country’s resources but its politics. Ethiopia is no longer in the middle of a decades-long civil war, and the government has relief programs to fend off widespread famine. “Famine is elective because, at its core, it is an artifact and a tool of political repression,” de Waal wrote in the New York Times:
After countries have passed a certain threshold of prosperity and development, peace, political liberalization and greater government accountability are the best safeguards against famine. There is no record of people dying of famine in a democracy.
This isn’t just good news for Ethiopia; it’s part of a bigger trend of good news for the world.
Global hunger is at historic lows, and has fallen dramatically since the 1990s, as measured by the International Food Policy Institute’s Global Hunger Index. In 1990, 17 countries, including Ethiopia, had a level of hunger deemed “extremely alarming,” and the hunger situation was considered “alarming” in 25 more. In 2015, that number had fallen to just eight nations with alarming levels of hunger.
The decline in hunger has happened at the same time as a global expansion of democracy. The number of democracies worldwide has been at a historic peak since the mid-2000s. And experts argue this isn’t a coincidence: The more governments are accountable to their citizens, the less likely they are to let them starve.
Go deeper:
- The argument that democracies don’t experience famine started with Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen — but it’s important to note that he never argued that no one dies of hunger in a democracy, simply that famines don’t kill hundreds of thousands.
- When Somalia suffered a famine a few years ago, the causes were natural, but the reasons it got so bad were political, as this conversation among researchers shows.
- The world is getting better in all kinds of ways. Here are 26 charts showing some of them from Vox’s Dylan Matthews.
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