| Abstract: | This paper explains and offers a criticism of the technical solutions that have been proposed in recent years to address Africa's hunger problems, summarizes selected results of some of these approaches, and suggests a more useful conceptualization of African hunger for policymakers. Hunger is a problem with multifactorial causality. As such, it is not given to solution by the sequence of reductionist approaches that have been applied in recent years. Widespread adoption by African governments of ultimately unsuccessful reductionist conceptualizations of hunger has had much to do with foreign aid dependency, the general absence from central policymaking circles of senior government officials with responsibility for hunger-related policies, and political preference for centralized bureaucracy. The paper concludes with some recommendations for community-based strategies of hunger alleviation.Barrett is an assistant professor of economics at Utah State University. This paper was written while he was a doctoral candidate in the Departments of Agricultural Economics and Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously he worked for four years as a development economist monitoring African economies for an international institution in Washington. His research focuses on agricultural development strategies and rural poverty alleviation. |
