From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

4 RISK AND VULNERABILITY HUNGER AND FAMINENevertheless, the average number of food emergencies (crises thatstop short of famine) per year in Africa tripled between 1990–92 and2000–02. 40 In 2005, sub-Saharan Africa experienced a new wave offood crises. 41 One unfolded quietly and mercilessly in the Sahel formonths before it became television news; another threatenedSouthern Africa; and in early 2006 a third emerged in the Horn ofAfrica, affecting 11 million people. 42 Many more people are sufferingfrom hunger in Africa’s less publicised crises, such as in theDemocratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where 71 per cent of thepopulation is undernourished, and in northern Uganda, where 48 percent of children are stunted due to chronic malnutrition. 43BOX 4.2COPING WITH HUNGER IN DARFUR‘[T]o understand the demise of [the town of] Furawiya [in Darfur,Sudan], we must go back to the last humanitarian disaster tostrike the area, the drought and famine of 1984–1985. When thatfamine was drawing to a close, I spoke with a young woman inFurawiya called Amina. The widowed mother of three children,she harvested barely a basketful of millet in September 1984,when the third successive year of drought was devastating crops.Rather than eating her pitiful supply of food, she buried it in heryard, mixing the grains with sand and gravel to stop her hungrychildren from digging it up and eating it. Then she began an epiceight-month migration, not atypical of the journeys that ordinaryZaghawa rural people make. Amina started by scouring the openwildernesses of the Zaghawa plateau for wild grasses, whosetiny grains can be pounded into flour. Together with her mother(who was, like most older rural women, something of a specialistin wild foods), she spent almost two months living off wild grassand the berries of a small tree, known locally as mukheit and tobotanists as boscia senegaliensis. Mukheit is toxic and needs tobe soaked in water for three days before it is edible; although ithas a sour taste, it contains about a third of the calories of grain.‘Having lived solely on wild foods for eight weeks, and havingstored enough provisions for a week’s journey, Amina left hereldest daughter in the care of her mother and walked southward.She found work on farms in better-watered areas, collected225