Famine Scales - Livelihoods Strategies

Livelihoods Strategies

The FSAU system is one of several recent systems that draws a distinction between "saving lives" and "saving livelihoods". Older models concentrated simply on the mortality of famine victims. However, relief agencies gradually realized that the means by which families and individuals supported themselves were threatened first.

Previously famines had been perceived as a threat to individuals, even large numbers of individuals. Inherent in the livelihoods strategies outlook is the conception of famine as a social problem. Populations affected by increased food stress will try to cope through market structures (i.e. selling possessions for food) and reliance upon community and family support structures. It is only when such social structures collapse under the strain that individuals are faced with the malnutrition and starvation that has commonly been viewed as "famine".

During the 1980s and 1990s, studies of the process by which populations adapted to food stress as food security worsened received much attention. Four stages of the process were identified:

1. Reversible strategies, in response to 'normal' food stress, such as rationing food or diversifying income
2. Irreversible strategies in response to prolonged food stress, such as selling breeding livestock or mortgaging land, which trade short-term survival for long-term difficulty
3. The failure of internal coping methods and total dependence on external food aid
4. Severe malnutrition leading to weakened immune systems, illness and death, in the event of the failure of the first three levels of coping. Death caused directly by starvation forms a fraction of deaths in a famine.