Book reviews 463

reached by the authors relate to quota versus non-quota countries and their abilities to oper- ate in world markets. This point is made parti- cularly strongly with respect to the Euro- pean Union.

" . . . the growing markets outside the OECD region are captured almost entirely by pro- ducers and traders in countries with market orientated production. Thus while exports of cereals, dairy products and/or meat by coun- tries in North America and Oceania are expected to grow strongly over the medium term, those of the European Union are stable or shrinking. This is the price EU farmers have to pay for support that continues to keep domestic prices for many products above those on world markets."

This is a pointed observation of the EU's poli- cies. It is also a conclusion that is clearly borne out by the OECD's and others' projec- tions. Not surprisingly the EU's own projec- tions of cereal, beef, pork, poultry and dairy product exports reach this same conclusion. Similar discussions can be had with respect to any quota-controlled product in nearly any country. Canadian dairy production is another example. The report indicates that milk pro- duction in the non-dairy quote OECD member countries is expected to rise by 14% over the projection period, while milk production in the quota countries is expected to be essen- tially flat.

Overall the publication is very well done. It is compact and easy to read and understand. It presents a fairly complete picture of the upcoming world agricultural situation, at least as most analysts view it in 1997. It should be required reading for any number of individ- uals involved in the policy development arena.

Robert E. Young H Food and Agricultural Policy Research Inst.

University of Missouri 101 South Fifth Street Columbia, MO 65201

USA

Adaptable Livelihoods. Coping with Food Insecurity in the Malian Sahei Susanna Davies Macmillan Press, London (1996)

This book pulls together the experience of a unique, decentralized approach to monitoring food security, with the aim of protecting and promoting the sustainability of people's liveli- h o o d - t h e Suivi Alimentaire Delta Seno or SADS, in the Inner Niger Delta in the Malian Sahel. To do this, Davies draws on much of the recent theoretical work on coping stra- tegies and food security, and the book is well worth reading just for this theoretical back- ground. The SADS approach is highly critical of conventional systems of famine early warn- ing: "Whereas most [early warning systems] focus on the breakdown of food systems and the failure to acquire food, SADS sought to find out how people feed themselves" (p. 2). Rather than simply responding after the fact to severe food shortages, the SADS system sought to understand the ways in which people have adapted their livelihoods to changed demographic, economic and environ- mental forces, and increased vulnerability. By focusing on the Inner Delta, itself a traditional safety net, being a seasonal wetland in the midst of the Sahel dryland, the SADS system not only monitored local conditions, but served as a sentinel listening post for a much broader area, since the delta is the place to which people from surrounding areas migrate in times of severe stress.

Following the work of Drrze and Sen (among others) on the extended entitlements approach, Davies builds a livelihood entitlements matrix conceptual framework (p. 35) which takes into consideration both the sources of and calls on entitlement. Sources of entitlement include production, exchange, and assets, as well as coping and adapting. Calls on entitlement include consumption, various other claims such as indebtedness, and future livelihood protection. This latter point, first brought to the food security literature by

464 Book reviews

the work of de Waal in Sudan, is that under enough stress, people will severely limit their own consumption in order to protect the long- term viability of their livelihoods--a crucial point if monitoring consumption is to be used as an indicator of food security. The challenge was to elaborate sources of and calls on entitlement in such a way that monitoring each in a series of sentinel sites would pro- duce interpretable data for interventions to protect or promote livelihoods, or to provide food aid as a last resort.

Sahelian livelihood systems have under- gone major changes since the droughts of the 1970s, Despite the environmental constraints that have always existed in the Sahel, the mix of livelihoods in the delta were once charac- terized by low sensitivity (not subject to intense change as a result of a "shock"), and by high resilience (the ability to bounce back quickly). Now, however, these livelihoods, including cultivation, pastoralism, fishing, and various combinations of these, have become much more vulnerable, and are characterized in nearly the opposite manner: high sensitivity and low resilience. As a result, strategies that were once relied on to make it through the worst times of the year, or the worst periods of drought, have become an everyday means of getting by. Coping strategies have become permanent, or to use Davies' terminology, coping strategies have become adaptive strat- agies: " . . . . coping strategies are activities which are reserved for periods of food stress, which permit people to cope with disruptions in their normal bundle of entitlements, such that they can minimize the degree of disrup- tion (sensitivity) and maximize bounce back (resilience) to their habitual pattern of activi- ties once the period of food stress is o v e r . . . but since the drought of the mid-1980s, when they failed to permit producers to bounce back, they have become part of the normal cycle of activities. Their use is reduced--but not altogether suspended--in abnormally good years. In abnormally bad years, the only option for producers is to intensify existing

normal activities and not to resort to strategies reserved as safety nets". (p. 262). However, the original conception of the SADS systems was that monitoring the intensity of coping strategies, rather than simply monitoring rain- fall, agricultural production estimates, and prices, would make for a better indicator of food stress. The realization that coping stra- tegies have become permanent parts of the entitlement of most households makes this task considerably more complex, but that is nevertheless the strategy that Davies pro- poses. She describes in detail the various pit- falls of monitoring coping strategies: a)they can be so broadly defined as to be indis- tinguishable from general patterns of decision-making; b) they can be based on the false assumption that people do cope, i.e, they "get by" somehow; c) reinforcing coping stra- tegies as part of food security intervention runs the risk of trapping people permanently in coping mode; d)patterns of taking up coping strategies are highly variable, and it is not usually possible to identify a representa- tive pattern to monitor for general signs of food stress; and e)the complexity of these patterns of coping strategies make the collec- tion and interpretation of coping strategies information very complex.

In addition to monitoring various other sources of and calls on entitlement, ~ the chal- lenge for SADS was to produce interpretable data on coping/adaptive strategies. Their means of doing so was to consider the inten- sity of usage, the sustainability of the stra- tegies, the motivation for their use, and their effectiveness of meeting food and livelihood needs. Considerable effort in field work was required for this, and Davies makes no bones

~Though it is somewhat aside from the point of analyzing coping/adaptive strategies, Davies also strongly argues for analyzing not food prices as the indicator of exchange entitlements, but rather terms of trade: a much more sens- ible argument, but one which famine early warning sys- tems rarely use, simply because it requires a much greater knowledge about what people are trading. In other words, the premium on good knowledge of practices is not lim- ited to monitoring coping strategies per se.

Book reviews 465

about the fact that, given the amount of data required, they put greater stock in an indica- tive, sentinel-site approach rather than in rep- resentative sampling. Based on this field work, they were eventually able to monitor some 40 different strategies, each classified into one of the categories: production-based; common-property resource (CPR) based; reciprocally based; asset-based; labor-based, exchange-based; migration-based; and con- sumption-based.

The final chapter discusses how the system can be made to work to produce high quality information that both provides information about impending food crises (the standard purpose of famine early warning systems), but also provides means of non-crisis intervention planning, reinforcing livelihoods in ways that make them less vulnerable in the longer term; that is, to use Drrze and Sen's terminology again: either livelihood provisioning (food aid); livelihood protection (shock mitigation); or livelihood promotion (rehabilitation and development). The implication of this approach is clear: whereas traditional famine early warning systems placed the premium on predicting and intervening in food crises, this system puts the premium on how food and livelihood systems work, so that their long- term vulnerability can be reduced, and short- term interventions can be incorporated. In other words, the emphasis should be on saving livelihoods, not just on saving lives. Davies is very explicit that this is not an easy task: it cannot be carried out by remote sensing, or quick and dirty market surveys. However, the greater in-depth work that is required to pro- tect and promote livelihood security, " . . . is not a luxury, but a necessity if widespread hunger on a hitherto unseen scale is not to be the future of the Sahel and other famine-prone parts of Africa" (p. 310).

This book would appeal to anyone with an interest in hunger, and the ways in which our understanding of the term "hunger" has changed since the televised famines of the 1970s and 1980s. It is "must reading" for

people with an interest in food security moni- toring, coping strategies, and "informal" safety nets.

Dan Maxwell University of Wisconsin

Land Tenure Centre 1357 University Avenue

Madison, WI 53715 USA

Structural Changes in Japan's Food System Edited by Food and Agriculture Policy Research Centre, Tokyo vii + 104 pp (1997)

The past decade in Japan has seen quite dra- matic changes in what people eat and in how they acquire their food. Prior to this, despite the miraculous growth of the economy in the years since World War II and the consequent transformation of living standards and life- styles, the 'food system' had remained in many ways an element of stability. Although consumption of meat and dairy products did increase, reflecting some degree of "West- ernisation" of the diet, meals of rice with fish or vegetable side-dishes, using fresh ingredi- ents purchased and prepared at the cost of considerable female labour, remained at the centre of Japanese family life. Small-scale specialist food retailers, operating within the protection of a highly regulated structure, con- tinued to supply the fresh produce consumers demanded in regular small quantities. Imports supplied a growing proportion of the value of food consumption, but mainly took the form of grains (feed grain and wheat) and soya beans, with domestic farmers continuing to produce the bulk of the livestock products, fruit, vegetables, and, of course, rice, that Japanese consumers ate.

In the mid-1980s however, the food system of the economic miracle period entered a per-