GeoJournal 17.1/1988 145

Reports

The Faces of Famine: A Response to Torry*

Wat t s , Michae l , Prof . D r . , U n i v e r s i t y of Ca l i fo rn ia , D e p a r t m e n t o f G e o g r a p h y , B e r k e l e y , C A 94720, U S A

* Torry, W. J.: Economic Development, Drought, and Famines: Some Limitations of Dependency Explanations. GeoJournal 12, 1, 5 - 1 8 (1986)

Over the last few years we have been bombarded with images of famine. In some popular representations, famine has become the embodiment, a sort of effigy, of the deep and enduring "crisis" of post Independence Africa. The food crisis in Ethiopia since 1983, for example, which necessitated the largest food relief effort in history, has been protrayed with appalling clarity in the media and briefly became the flagship for a community, the rock music industry, not especially distinguished by its public spiritedness. Images of starving Tigrean children in Sudanese refugee camps surface on the pages of the New York Times as elements of a bricolage, jumbled together with glossy advertisements for sable jackets and the latest icons of middle class consumer sovereignty. As John Berger (1980) has observed, these powerful images of starvation have a dispelling quality, blaming everyone and no one. Mass starvation of the kind witnessed in The Horn is overwhelming, both practically and analytically; we feel helpless in the face of one, perhaps two millions deaths, but no less so because the etiology of such terrible suffering is itself a matter of debate.

Famine studies raise issues of central concern to social theory and the social sciences generally. Food crises throw into dramatic relief the inner working of social systems. For this reason, coupled with the high visibility of famines especially in Africa over the last 15 years - initially in the Sahel and Ethiopia, and more recently The Horn and Mozambique - there has been a veritable boom of famine and famine related studies1); and inspire of financial austerity in academe, there has been a proliferation of famine and food studies groups: the Flinders famine group, the refugee and famine unit at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford, the International Disasters Institute in London, and assorted working groups associated with the International Geographical Union, the Association of American Anthropologists, and the Max Planck Institute in FR Germany to name just a few.

It is because of the visibility and significance of famine in its various popular guises, and because of the now considerable corpus of work that one should take the recent intervention of Torry (1986) in the pages of this journal very seriously. I wish to take this opportunity to respond to most of the substantive points that he raises in his article because I believe he has funda- mentally misrepresented a significant body of work on famine of which my own studies of the Sahel are part. His strident critique is, I believe, profoundly wrong on many counts and yet without an intellectual or theoretical position of its own2). The questions provoked by Torry's ideological intervention are nonetheless pertinent for geographers, not least because Geography moreso than most of the social sciences, has provided a sustained input to the study of drought, famine and development (Richards 1987).

Famine Fictions

Torry is dismayed by the proliferation of sociological theses on famine causation which, in his view, posit climate as essen- tially catalytic, and political and economic relations as struc- tural, ultimate causes. Poverty causes famine while poverty itself germinates in the fertile soil of colonial and neo-colonial capita- lism. According to thiis "dependency" explanation which Torry sees as de rigeur in famine research, nations and classes lose control over productive and political assets which lubricates the slide into the chasm .of famine vulnerability. The language of dependency and Third Worldism has, in Torry's eyes, thus colonised the study of famine and he apparently believes (p. 5) that a huge, not to say amorphous, body of literature falls under the pernicious sway of "dependency explanations". The lodestar of dependency is that " c o l o n i a l . . . wealth accumulation breaks down grass roots resilience against severe food shortage" (p. 6). For Torry, the dependency theories view capitalism as obsessi- vely vampiric: sucking out the lifeblood of millions of rural producers, capitalism leaves in its wake the corpses of a once vibrant smallholder economy, communities of impoverished peasantries, atomised, without mutual support and grain surpluses and often without productive resources.

So deeply entrenched are these dependency tenets (p. 6), that Torry can review them in two short paragraphs. And my own book Silent Violence seems to be the lodestar for Torry's wrath, however, as it "strikingly resembles dependency models adapted for other societies" (p, 6). In throwing a huge variety of often entirely contradictory work into this dependency bucket, Torry has devised a siraple-minded caricature for his ungenerous critique. The crux of his attack on dependency revolves around three propositions. First, that dependency theory privileges ultimate rather than proximate causes and hence the fundamental linkages between the two are sublimated. Second, capitalism has no monopoly on famine, indeed Torry has discovered that there have been famines in Marxist and socialist states. There is, in other words, more to famine than the "doctrine" of political economy (p. 6), by which I presume he means the theory up, on which actually existing socialism is purportedly built. And third, local communities and famine victims are not just hapless creatures at the mercy of hegemonic external agencies; rather, "they bear responsibility for a measure of risk and loss" (p. 6).3) Conversely, agencies which, at least in the dependency canon, create famine risk (credit institutions, political parties) may be prominent risk mitigators. In sum, famines have no real identity in dependency explanations and hence provide no foundation for a rigorous comparative study of famine dynamics (p. 13).

Fathoming Famines

What are we to make of this position? First and foremost Torry has painted a carricature, which is to say it is full of half truths and a great deal of falsity and misrepresentation. What is for example the purported unity and theoretical status of depen- dency? It's adherents apparently believe that "entire classes and nations lose control of their productive assets" (p. 6); who on earth has articulated such a position with respect to famine etiology? At various times dependency is equated with poverty, with the absence of purchasing power, and with exploitation by the state, market and powerful countries. But what exactly does a moribund cover term like dependency in reality convey? There is dependency associated with all levels of social reality and with all levels of political power and authoriry. But as dependista theory in Latin America has come to illustrate,

146 GeoJournal 17.1/1988

dependency is about the Janus-faced nature of power, the delicate polarity of political, economic and cultural forces, the subleties and nuancies of hegemonic control, not about simple- minded determinism (Palma 1978). Dependency as employed by Torry is entirely vacuous. The vacuity is painfully evident if one examines the purported cardcarrying members of the depen- dency party, and a motley and heterogeneous rabble they are. "Neo-marxists" such as Watts (who if I may say so is not a neo anything) and Meillassoux (1974), moral economists such as Scott (1976) and those poor souls without theory (!) such as Amartya Sen (1981) and Franke and Chasin (1980). This is, of course, a nonsense classification. Meillasoux's piece was a polemical intervention which had certain parallels with early dependista theory of the E C L A variety, but Scott combines Mill and Durkheim at the level of community solidarity with a Chayanovian theory of peasant economy, while Sen employs entitlement and property rights - a combination of classical political economy with public choice theory - to show that "the phase of economic development after the emergence of a large class of wage laborers but before the development of social secuirty arrangements is . . . a deeply vulnerable one" (1981, p. 173). To simply say that such explanations of famine invoke dependency and are necessarily structural, unilinear, and external is quite wrong-headed. Torry states, for example, that dependency accentuates ultimate causes but Sen's theory, insofar as entitlements tend to privilege distribution not production, is really about proximate causes. Indeed, as I have argued Sen does not infact situate his boom or slump famines in relation to a broader notion of a long-term reproduction crisis (see also Bush 1985): that is to say, how a partially prole- tarianised class develops such that it is subject to certain vicissitudes and entitlement fluctuations. Perhaps the only work which vaguely approximates the crudity of dependency Torry- style is Franke and Chasin's (1980) book on the Sahel, but this too would grossly devalue the careful analysis of power in their study. In a sleight of hand, Torry converts a series of quite different conjunctural analyses into a trans-historical theory ("dependency") which is then contituted in such a way that it appears as a platonic law: deterministic, naively structural, linear and so on.

Torry's canonisation of my own study of N Nigerian famines as a dependency explanation is especially galling since it is a long, perhaps long-winded, attack on dependency theory! It is somethat embarassing to have to reiterate the argument because the drift is, I thought, quite straightforward. I situate my analysis of famine on the broad canvas of the integration of Nigeria into a dynamic and evolving capitalist world economy, a long and jagged process which was shaped by the period when N Nigeria was integrated into another world system - Islam - and by the era of mercantile expansion during the 18th and 19th centuries. To posit this process as a one way dependency was, in my view, quite erronenous; explanations which did were fre- quently determinsitic, functionalist in invoking the overriding power of capital, narrow in its view of capitalism itself and flawed in its denial of the agency of Africans themselves. In examining colonial rule in N Nigeria, for example, I tried to show that the entire project was as much about defeat (for the British) and the ceding of power - and hence the expansion of the class perogatives of indigenous ruling classes and merchants - as direct imperial domination or unproblematic surplus extraction from periphery to centre. Indirect rule emerges as a defeat for Lugard and as a political and :financial compromise.

The colonial state was accordingly wracked with contra- dictions: it felt impoverished, it feared populist Muslim uprisings and yet depended on antagonistic local elites and European interests. Balancing these demands with the real politique of

getting export commodities from millions of decentralised peasants whose labor process could not always be readily controlled was a sort of administrators nightmare. These forces shaped the nature and development of commercialisation in N Nigeria and, as I attempted to show, the origins of food crises. Famines had to be seen through the lens of partial commoditi- sation, the contradictory demands paced upon the colonial state, the critical role of European and local merchants, and the relative weakness of the colonial project in some fundamental respects. It was this constellation of forces which explains why the colonial state acted in ways which increased the likelihood of famine and at the same time prevented them from mobilising a successful relief effort.4) To suggest that my argument simply invokes market dependnece or ultimate causes ("capitalism's culpability") is a nonsense. I employed the notion of moral economy not in the Scott (1976) sense but as it was originally used by Edward Thompson (1963) precisely because I wanted to show that at the local level there was anything but simple dependence; it was about the relative strengths and weaknesses of different classes and about the spaces created by colonialism and filled, as it were, by African agency. I did not argue, like Scott, that the market eroded grosso modo the social fabric of villages but rather that it was the way the market developed that mattered. I followed Brenner (1987) in arguing that pre-capitalist property relations are resilient and hence that famines are informed, to use Torry's moribund language, by "external and internal causes" (p. 6).

The second assault by Torry bludgeons risk and disaster as concepts, and decries the propensity of dependency analysis for determinism and cultimate causality (p. 7). He then outlines in a rather pedantic fashion the differences between ultimate, proximate and counter risk drawn from my book (indeed, part of Figure 2, the household adjustment sequence, is a slight modification of a figure in Silent Violence). Torry's exegesis is certainly not original and has been articulated in a variety of ways elsewhere (see for example Mabbs-Zeno 1987) albeit in slightly different language. However, I commit the gross sin of riding roughshod over proximate and counter risks and or assuming that "ultimate risk analysis covers sufficient and necessary causal conditions" (p. 9) i.e. the heresy of determinism. All of these accusations are simply preposterous. First, Toffy does not understand that to invoke structure is not to call up the dreaded rattle of determinism. My own approach grew out of the Thompson-Anderson debate on structure and agency and specifically the so-called realist view of structure subsuming necessary and contingent relations (Sayer 1984). I simply cannot see the crass determinism that Torry rails against especially since I sought to critique dependency theory and to place an analytic emphasis on the variety of historically contingent ways in which agrarian commercialization develops.5) Second, I did not employ the lexicon of ultimate and proximate causes and counter risk but rather the language of social ralations, reproduction and adaptive structure. Hence I cannot understand why I apparently gloss over proximate causes and counter risk. For the former, I make it very clear that, for example, famine dynamics varied temporally across the colonial period because of the contingent conditions associated with each crisis. The internal architecture of 1927 in which the boom of the 1920's, the deepening of mercantile activities and the devastating consequences of new taxes (including tire timing of revenue collection) were so important (i.e. proximate) is quite distinct from the constellation of forces during 1942-1943 associated with the exegencies of a wartime economy. I set these distinctions in terms of a theory of conjunctures and hence spend a great deal of time creating the immediate context of famine - 90 pages (in chapter 6) for three famines to be precise. Simi-

GeoJournal 17.1/1988 147

larly, I discuss counter-risks in terms of adaptive capability but I do so not, as Torry suggests (p. 6), by compulsively document- ing the breakdown of grassroots resilience. Rather I examine the uneveness of social change at the community and household level drawing on Bettleheim's conservation-dissolution idea (ff. 185).

The major loci of counter-risks that I discuss in detail concerns crop management, experimentation and agro-ecology (pp. 414-430), which Torry apparently did not read, and which is perhaps the centrepiece of the village study. The lynchpin of my argument is on-line flexibility rather than a standard farm plan (as is argued conventionally), a position that has been substantially supported in a recent book on hunger among the Mende by Paul Richards (1987). Torry suggests that these pur- ported absences including the neglect of food aid (p. 10) "emblamatize" (?) the "lack of balance" in dependency explana- tions ([). Yet, I make it clear that food aid and international assistance was almost non-existent (I cite the district relief figures on pp. 389-392) and cite the relevant literature analysing why this was the case in N Nigeria (see van Apeldoorn 1981). I also refer to the 'counter-risks' of colonial investment in transport infrastructure (pp. 309-310) but try to show how, when linked with the social development of the market, it can be a double-edged sword. Transportation improvement did not automatically produce the much vaunted self-regulating market which the structure-conduct-performance model of exchange purports to have found in West African food supply systems (Harriss 1983).

Torry concludes his remarks on risk and disaster by raising a series of essentially empirical questions and the evidentiary basis of some of the claims in Silent Violence. He reduces my 400 page argument to 13 lines (p. 9) - "this is basically Watts' evidence" - and the village study including my "stereotypical model of responses to famine" (p. 10) to "impressionistic appraisals" without empirical data. Whatever the multiple failings of Silent Violence, the stereotypical model (which he uses in his article!) was based on surveys, inteviews and a historical reconstruction of the 1973 famine, not on fictions and impressions cooked up in Berkeley. It may well be that my famine descriptions are sketchy - but certainly more than the 70 pages that Torry refers to (p. 10) - and that I do not show how class exploitation beleagured peasant households, but an assessment of such claims rests on the plausibility of my historical recovery and reconstruction and a careful historical critique, a subject that Torry scrupulously avoids.6)

I wish to make clear, however, that there are a multitude of empirical fractures in my own work which I do not seek to paper over. These lacunae highlight my own inadequacies certainly but in addition they emerge, as Torry implies (p. 9), from the recondite character of, and empirical demands associated with, the object of study itself. Famines do not necessarily or even readily appear in the historical record (witness China in the late 1950's), the before-and-after survey data impose heavy demands on time and resources, crucial data is locked up in private relief agencies, and there are difficult ethical issues associated with the in situ study of extreme human suffering. But again Torry's position is disingenuous, First, he himself has not attempted empirically or theoretically the sort of study he proposes - I await with great anticipation his "balanced", non-deterministic, unified study of comparative famine dynamics - since most of his own canon is secondary and derivative. And second, some of the more admittedly speculative aspects of Silent Violence have been taken up in recent work - much incidentally by these unbalanced dependency theorists! - some of which supports my case (IDS 1987; Sutter 1987; Vaughn 1987) and some of which

elaborates the questions raised by Torry (Richards 1987; McCann 1987).

Torry's second proposition that "capitalism has no monopoly on famine" (p. 10) is at one level not to be taken seriously. He himself suggests that while "few writers" make such a claim, nonetheless "the impression easily takes hold" (p. 6). Takes hold for whom? I have no idea who has made such claims - and neither does Torry since he cites no authors - and in my own work I specifically refer to and describe pre-capitalist famines! The most prosaic of famine texts begin with some sort of incantation of early pre-Christian famine citations in China, India, Ethiopia and so on. The 40 odd millions who have perished at the hands of famine since 1940 died on the soil of states colored by politics of almost every hue. Torry is anxious to demonstrate however that communism has a first rate track record on starvation and that 30 millions died under Mao during the Great Leap Forward, citing new statistics to boot. Unlike India which "succeeded so impressively", China suffered massive famine by virtue of its closed, totalitarian politics, the absence of a free press and the suffocation of aggressive political parties. Further, t]hese different ratings on the food security scorecard have, in Torry's brief, nothing whatsoever to do with political economy, the lodestar of dependency analysis.

This is an argument which has the imprint of the Heritage Foundation and carries, in my opinion, the same intellectual respectability as tlhat august institution. Leaving aside the contentious issue of the Ashton (1984) estimates on Chinese famine deaths, I find it odd that India should be heralded as such an "impressive success"; after 30 years of enormous international support and the billions of dollars of Green Revolution investment, the numbers in absolute poverty have grown very substantially. The eradication of famine is indeed no mean feat but this raises the question of India's adoption of the constitutional right not to be hungry, an issue organically connected to India's political economy (see Sen 1985). Torry labors under the belief that it has something to do with phalan- xes of lower level administrators and a free press. Of course, the association between states with a free press, political parties and the absence of famine which Torry asserts (p. 13) is spurious in any case since such countries are also rich.

Torry's broad and highly unoriginal claim that communism also breeds famine actually forecloses more insights than it yields. For example, the Soviet famine of 1928-1932 in which perhaps seven millions perished - about which incidentally there is a huge literature (Kosinski 1987) - can be approached from a political economic perspective which yields much more light than "communism produces famine", or "totalitarianism generates starvation". Conquest's new book (1987) suggests that the Ukraine famine of 1932-1933 was not caused by collectivisation, but the Kazakh famine of 1930-1933 most certainly was. The latter involved peasant resistance and kulak struggle whereas the former was not so much an attempt to convert the Ukraine into a grain reserve for the Far Eastern Army as much as a genocidal drive against Ukrainian nationalism. In both cases, the origins of dekulakisation and grain appropriation to feed the cities, the differential famine dynamics in the period before and after the New Economic Policy, and the distinctive character of anti-collectivism and Stalin's genocidal anti-Ukrainian sentiment can be, and has been, broached in a productive fashion using the tools of Torry's bete noire, political economy.

What is so patently clear in Torry's remarks is that he is making a political and ideological point. To employ political economy qua theory it to apparently support the practice of communism! If there is unbalance and partiality in famine assessment it is unequivocably contained within Torry's tirade.

148 GeoJournal 17.1/1988

Hence in refering to the mortalities and displacements in Ethiopia since 1982, Torry points to an Ethiopian xenophobic fear of the West, and inefficient relief administration and settlement programs. Yet a quite different reading of the famine can be made that does not expiate state culpability. Specifically, President Nixon's renegging on promises to the new socialist gevernment in 1974, the Hickenlooper Amendment to the US Foreign Assistance Act, and the sharp decline in Western bilateral assistance all suggests that Ethiopian xenophobia was anything but groundless. Relief may indeed have been inefficient and politicized but Cutler (1986) points out that western donors were cynical and slow, while the US National Security Council deliberately delayed assistance (Smith 1987) as one might expect in the context of extreme Cold Warism and Western xenophobic fear of the Soviet evil empire! (see Gill, 1987)7). And, not least the inefficiency of the state Rehef and Rehabilitation Commis- sion - deeply politicized by the thirty year civil war in the N territories - was concurrent with a remarkable relief effort by the Relief Society of Tigray (REST) and the Eritrean Relief Association (ERA). None of this absolves the Ethiopian state for the terror of its massive relocation program and its desire to subordinate rural famine control to other goals. But Torry has in no sense established that the Ethiopian case cannot be power- fuly rendered through a political economic analysis; indeed, Cutler (1986) whom he approvingly cites, concludes his most recent work by targetting "international alliances" as the lynchpin of famine response, that is to say the counter-risks that Torry believes dependency analysis sublimates altogether.

The final point refers to Torry's spellbinding observation that any respectable study of famine must combine internal and external causesS). Dependency explanations neglect the internal which, in Torry's lexicon, is synonymous with the local. Silent Violence projects this heresy of course because I do "exempt traditional (sic) institutions" in famine causality and simply posit that "norms of mutuality . . . provide widespread subsistence guarantees" (p. 12). This is all very tiresome. Very few people - Scott (1976) included - suggest that the moral economy is a failsafe local security system. I spend a great deal of time pointing out that if one adopts a Thompsonian view of moral economy one has anything but a panglossian world of benevolent patrons and peasants. I specifically examine the limits (especially in the 19th century) on local resilience and how in some fundamental respects (but not in others) the norms of mutuality were undermined by the growth of commodity relations. But this process was uneven and hence "traditional" institutions persisted albeit with a new content. Hence in my discussion of cycles of household reproduction and seasonality (pp. 441-47) I try to show how "traditional relations" (credit, trade) are constitutive of the plight of the vulnerable ultrapoor. Specifically, I discuss how imperfect markets are interlocked (money, grain and labor), an argument that has been further developed recently by Saul (1987) and Pacey and Payne (1985). I neither suggest that trade is exploitative willy-nilly but rather, as Harriss (1982) posits for Tamil Nadu, that development of commodity markets may fail to transform production or expand output when commercialisation results from a change in command over food from those who consume it directly to those (merchants, kulaks) who do not.9) The role of what Torry curiously refers to as "traditional" (unchanging? static?) or "tribal" relations and institutions is central and hence the social context - in this case an indigenous crop advance system, patterns of patronage and labor obligation - is anything but neglected. Yet somehow dependency explanations "argue that tribal (sic) customs [do] not compound the risks of personal harm connected with drought" (Toffy, p. 12). This indeed is not

one of my arguments as it is not for Jodha (!975), Vaughn (1987), and many of the other dependency analysts.

Famine, Politics and Scholarship

After much huffing and puffing, Torry's contribution has almost nothing to offer. The very building blocks of his "dependency explanations" are so structurally flawed, so wracked with conceptually sloppiness, that no intellectual edifice can be supported upon them. Devoid of constructive critique, Torry reveals shlipshod reading and a most ephemeral grasp of famine theory. Torry's work devalues s~me particularly seminal contributions and forces a critical burden upon a body of work which ironically appears, at the end of his article, to be "absolutely indispensable". Perhaps this sort of unhelpful intervention is the result of the insertion of the religion of the market into academia. It is also rather irresponsible.

But this is not what I find most disquieting about Torry's intervention. It is rather its crude political and ideological mandate. Confronted with a highly productive phase of broadly Marxist influenced political economy - which has in my opinion been a breath of fresh air in Third World studies - Torry feels compelled to provide a defensive reaction to the advances provided by dependency analysis. Fearing an indictment of capitalism, Torry must indict communism and this is undertaken by an idiotic carricature of an altogether heterogeneous body of work. Toffy creates what Lipietz (1987) calls a Beast of the Apocalypse, a body of theory constituted by rigid, theological laws which naturally "are of weak help when it comes to analyz- ing the complexity of particular events" (Lipietz, p. 10). The Beast is, however, entirely of Torry's creation; there is no unity in this body of work and he has, to boot, grossly misrepresented many of its spokespersons.

One of Marx's great insights was to establish the importance of grasping the liks between theroy and society and to this extent an understanding of the politics of theory is both neces- sary and worthy. But Torry has simply provided us with ideology and this rarely makes for good scholarship and rigorous argument. Any body of theory demands constructive critique but what Torry has provided could not be graced with such an appellation. There is indeed a wide, open terra incognita in our understanding of famine. Questions of gender, intra-household dynamics, fertility changes and recovery, supra-local response systems, and careful modelling of famine dynamics all demand careful empirical documentation and theorising. Doubtless these endeavours will throw up new theoretical challenges which require fresh vision and insight, and rigorous constructive critique. Unfortunately, these are all the qualities absent in Torry's misguided contribution.

Notes

1) See for example the review/bibliography by Leftwich and Harvie (1986) and also the two volumes published by the Cambridge African Studies Centre (Seeley 1986). Important new studies include Sen (1981), Richards (1987), Conquest (1987), Vaughn (1987), Cutler (1986), Clay (1985), McCann (1987)

2) Torry uses my own work (Watts 1983) as the primary source for his criticism since he believes that it represents a "model of the dependency approach" and offers "interpretations displaced throughout this body of literature" (Torry 1986: 5). My commentary appears as a testy personal defense which I would rather have avoided altogether. But I wish to direct the particu-

GeoJournal 17.1/1988 149

3)

4)

larities of my response to the larger questions of how one approaches famines theoretically and the assumptions contained within Torry's critique of "dependency approaches".

As a matter of debate, I would very much like to know what responsibility Torry assigns to the Tigrean or Mozambican peasants and pastoralists who starved to death in 1984.

Contra Torry's suggestion, I do indeed talk of colonial relief efforts which, unlike Tanganyika (Bryceson 1980), failed to "regularise the producive base of pre-capitalist modes of produc- tion in transition" (Ibid., p. 91). The colonial state in northern Nigeria recognised that a famine greatly exceeded their capacity in terms of grain supplies (ef. the 1927 Famine Relief program) yet continued to exacerbate (through new forms of taxation, tax collection etc.), the vulnerability of many peasants who already bore the burdens of land shortage, market fluctuations and high indebtedness. I suggest that the behavior of the state with respect to famine relief reflected not a congenital madness, ignorance or a technical-administrative incapacity to understand the issue, but reflected the political and economic contradictions it faced in trying to meet the multiple and conflicting demands

of local elites, European merchants, political stability and the British Colonial Office.

5) It is entirely possible of course that social development may lead to a situation in which there is indeed a deterministic relationship between say market perturbations and starvation (Harriss 1983). This is an empirical question and must be theorised but there is no a priori reason, as Torry implies, to relegate such a possibility to the trashcan of history.

6) But the broad outlines of my argument has been supported in other work on N Nigeria: see Shenton (1985).

7) Gill (1987) provides as excellent discussion of how the Heritage Foundation influenced Reaganite foreign relief assistance.

8) I find this internal-external epistemology singularly unhelpful; it has much more in common with early dependency theory and has been roundly critiqued in development theory.

9) The history of the Punjab shows how the growth of agricultural marketables surpluses was not predatory in this sense (Pacey and Payne 1985, p. 170)

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