This finding underlines the importance of combating the root causes of poverty in any famine-prevention strategy and confirms the need for effective targeting of the absolute poor by relief interventions. The locations of the food-insecure, their resource endowments, employment categories, and demographics are helpful criteria for vulnerability identification and mapping. Further, although the details of response strategies vary from one region to another, broad commonalities emerge in the type and sequence of responses adopted across most localities. The pattern of household response generally involves a succession of stages along a continuum that runs from long-term risk management to crisis damage containment to the extreme instance of household collapse. Each response, at best, delays the onset of the next stage, unless conditions change or external help arrives.
Famines are entirely preventable through changes in policy.
But current needs are so extreme that the food-security policies now in place will have to be totally redesigned in the context of comprehensive macroeconomic reform. Technological innovations have to some extent been promoted in Ethiopia and Sudan. Analyses have shown that households participating in projects with a technology promotion component had substantially higher agricultural yields than nonparticipating households and got through the famine period with less stress. Public works projects that provide employment have played an important role in supporting the purchasing power of people who have become dependent on the labor market due to drought. Such projects, which involve the building of infrastructure such as roads and bridges upon which further development depends, prevent migration to camps or cities.