Conceptualizing Hunger in Contemporary African Policymaking: From Technical to Community-Based Approaches Christopher B. Barrett and Joanne Csete Barrett is an assistant professor of economics at Utah State University. This paper was written while he was a doctoral candidate in the Departments of Agricultural Economics and Economics at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Previously he worked for four years as a development economist monitoring African economies for an international institution in Washington. His research focuses on agricultural development strategies and rural poverty alleviation. Csete is an assistant professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, currently on leave with the Nutrition Section of UNICEF. She worked for seven years in Africa on community nutrition research and practice and has since done extensive work on nutrition program and policy development and evaluation in a number of African countries. ABSTRACT This paper explains and offers a criticism of the technical solutions that have been proposed in recentyears to address Africa's hunger problems, summarizes selected results of some of these approaches, and suggests a more useful conceptualization of African hungerfor policymakers. Hunger is a problem with multifactorial causality. As such, it is not given to solution by the sequence of reductionist approaches that have been applied in recent years. Widespread adoption by African governments of ultimately unsuccessful reductionist conceptualizations of hunger has had much to do with foreign aid dependency, the general absence from central policymaking circles of senior government officials with responsibility for hunger-related policies, and political preference for centralized bureaucracy. The paper concludes with some recommendations for community-based strategies of hunger alleviation. In no region of the world is hunger a more perva- sive and apparently intransigent feature of the human landscape than in sub-Saharan Africa. Recent United Nations estimates indicate that from 1969 to 1990, marked success in reducing the prevalence in chroni- cally undernourished persons (i.e., undernourished in energy and protein) was enjoyed in Asia (from 40% undernourished to 19%), Latin America (19% to 13%), and the Near East (22% to 12%) (FAO/WHO, 1993). In the same period, however, the percentage of the popu- lation of Africa estimated to be chronically undernour- ished remained steady at about 33 %. Micronutrient or vitamin and mineral deficiencies are also estimated to occur in sub-Saharan Africa with much higher inci- dence than in other regions. The 1980s, characterized by some as a decade of lost development for Africa after the modest promise of the 1970s (Grant, 1989), was particularly devastating for food and nutrition outcomes on the continent. 38 Although nutritional outcomes are clearly influ- enced by other variables (e.g., health status, energy expenditure in work), insufficient nutrient intake, or "hunger",1 plays an indisputably large role in the nutritional tragedies of Africa. Indeed, the phrase"food crisis" figures prominently in many discussions of modern Africa. Although failures of food production in Africa are frequently analyzed in policy terms, nutritional outcomes are less commonly understood as failures of policy. Rather, undernutrition in Africa is seen as a problem given to technical solution. The objectives of this paper are to explain and offer a criticism of the technical solutions that have been proposed in recent years to address Africa's hunger problems, to summarize selected results of some of these approaches, and to suggest a more useful concep- tualization of African hunger for policymakers. Our contention is that hunger is a problem with multifactorial causality. The prevailing programmatic