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Measuring famine
00:09:56
How do you measure a famine? Following the UN’s recent announcement that famine have...
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A
Thank you for downloading from the BBC. For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to bbcworldserveys.com podcasts. You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is more or less the mathematical icing on the cake of life. We make an edition of the program for BBC Radio 4, but this is a download of a special edition broadcast on the World Service. Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. And I'm Tim Harford. This week, we fight the good fight to slay an urban legend.
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B
Oh, a beautiful punch there.
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A
But first,
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C
Today, the United nations had some very. It announced that famine conditions in Somalia have officially ended, mainly because of an exceptional harvest and food deliveries by aid agencies.
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A
But that news got us thinking. More or less, how do you measure a famine? And when a famine is declared over, does that mean everything's fine? Charlotte MacDonald's here. What have you discovered, Charlotte?
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C
Well, Somalia may be technically out of the famine, but the situation is still bad. The UN uses a scale of food Scarcity with levels 1 to 5, called the Integrated Food Security Phase classification, more simply referred to as the IPC scale. Anyway, level five equals famine. Now, most of the regions in Somalia have fallen to level 2, 3 or 4, and 4 is still classed as a humanitarian emergency.
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A
What needs to be happening on the ground to justify this Level 5 famine designation?
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C
Well, there are three indicators that need to be present. Granja Maloney, chief technical advisor of the UN body monitoring the food situation in Somalia, spoke to me from neighbouring Kenya.
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D
The first is a certain proportion of children need to be malnourished. It's basically comparing the child's weight against what weight they should be at that height. So, for example, in the UK, an average 1 year old weighs 12 kilos. When you have a malnourished child, they would weigh about nine kilos. And we need at least 30% of children between six months and five years to be at this level. The second outcome that we need to have present is an excess mortality, which means that we have a much higher level of deaths happening in the total population that we would normally expect. And the definition that we use is at least two deaths per 10,000 population per day. And that's about three times above what we would normally expect in a country like Somalia. And then the third outcome has to be that at least 20% of the population in an area are suffering severely from a massive food deficit. They don't have enough to survive long term on.
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C
Now, just because it's not famine doesn't necessarily mean that the mortality rate has dropped. It has done for almost all of Somalia, but for one area in the capital, Mogadishu, while two of the indicators have fallen, the the death rate is still reaching 2 in 10,000. Somalia's daily death rate is normally about 0.7 per 10,000, which itself is at least twice the rate of a developed country. Now, this 1 to 5 scale was developed by the UN in 2004 and is used by aid agencies to measure emerging crises and put a label on the severity. Since the scale was created, this is the first famine that has been declared using it.
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A
So this is new. I suppose that means we're not going to have a historical data series on famines.
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C
No, but other people with other definitions have been counting, and I should say there is an ongoing debate about how you should define it. I've been speaking to Professor Stephen Devereux of the Institute of Development Studies. Now, the UN has based their scale on his work, and with a colleague, he's also created another scale to measure the severity of famines based on how many people die since 2000. He considers, though of course others may not agree, that there have been four famines in Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger and now Somalia. In terms of size, a rough estimate for the recent one in Somalia suggests that tens of thousands of people may have died, which Professor Devereux would class as a major famine, with two lesser levels below that. But there are two levels of famine worse than that in Ethiopia. In 1984, he estimates 600,000 people died, classing that as a great famine. But above that is a catastrophic famine when more than a million people died, which is what happened in the Irish potato famine in the 19th century. But by far the worst famine of the 20th century was the famine in China in the 1950s, where it's estimated that 30 million people died. However, Professor Devereux, speaking from South Africa, explains that having this sharp statistical division between famine and not famine can cause problems.
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E
It's extremely important that we have an operational definition of famine, and the recent development of the IPC has shown how important that is. Because once the famine was declared in Somalia in July last year, we immediately saw a massive increase in food aid pledges and donor commitment and media attention. I think one of the questions that I would have, however, is at what point does a famine end? If you see famine as a process rather than an event, then the recovery part of the process is also very important. And people are going to need support in Somalia for at least another year or two years while they rebuild their livelihoods. And so the fact that the UN has now downgraded the, the famine to a humanitarian emergency is obviously correct in a technical sense. I'm just hoping that it doesn't lead to a drop off in the commitment of donors and charities and NGOs in their support for Somalia, because the support shouldn't stop just because we have decided that it's no longer technically a famine.
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A
Professor Stephen Devereux and our own Charlotte MacDonald. This is quite a common situation in more or less the experts use a familiar word like famine, and they have a technical definition in mind. The rest of us just make our own assumptions. And the media reporting often fails to bridge the divide. Now, at the beginning of February, news broke that Muhammad Ali's legendary trainer, Angelo Dundee had died at the age of 90. He worked alongside the boxing star for 20 years and is credited with helping him achieve his greatest victories. We're a program about numbers, not sport, but we try to spare time for both. And we've discovered that one of these great victories does offer up a little numerical intrigue. It's the 1963 fight between Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, and the British boxer Henry Cooper.
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Just seconds left of this fourth round and it's Clay poking up. One, two, left hand. And then getting a good left hand from Cooper in return. A very solid one there by Cooper into Clay's face. Now Clay tries to come back, the left foot. And Clay is down. Cooper has downed him. Oh, a beautiful punch there.
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Henry Cooper was one of just four people who ever managed to floor Muhammad Ali, which is notable. But what happened immediately after Ali fell to the floor right at the end of the fourth round has become the stuff of legend.
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Now all the gloves burst. Clay's left glove has burst. I say, now, that is an extraordinary thing.
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The story has circulated ever since that fight that Angelo Dundee either tore Ali's glove or made an existing tear worse in order to buy Ali time to recover while the tear was examined. Or in some versions of the story, while a replacement glove was found. As the BBC website put it, the trainer then made a tear in one of his fighter's gloves, delaying the start of the next round and allowing Ali to regain his senses. He went on to win the next round and the fight. In other words, he cheated. Now, you might think this isn't obvious, more or less territory, and you may be right, but we couldn't resist fact checking this. Now infamous tale using one of the most technical tools in the More or Less Arsenal. Counting, we all sat around to listen to the audio recording of the fight with a stopwatch in hand. The gap between rounds one and two was exactly one minute. The gap between rounds two and three was again exactly one minute. Same again for rounds three and four. But the gap between rounds four and five, the moment of the torn glove incident was precisely one minute and six seconds. So there you have it. The torn glove bought Cassius Clay an extra six seconds. Not enough, I suspect, to have made much difference to the final outcome of that historic bout. If there's a statistical claim you want us to investigate, email more or less BBC.co.uk and you can download our podcast via our website, bbcworldservice.com moreorless there's just time for an update on the big contest between man and computer staged here on More or Less. A few weeks ago, the BBC's Ferrari Mangazi was bold enough to think he could predict the results of the Africa cup of nations better than a statistics munching supercomputer. Ferrari.
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Hello there.
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All your teams are out. Indeed, they're out. You said the computer was drunk and its top pick, the Ivory coast, is in the final. Looks like it was you who was drunk. Yeah, it does look that way, doesn't it? The computer certainly knew something that I didn't.
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All hail the supercomputer, then.
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Well, very good of you to admit it. All's well that ends well. Although what the computer was doing picking Burkina Faso as a decent contender remains a mystery. Thank you, Ferrari. Until next week, Goodbye. More or Less was presented by me, Tim Harford, the Financial Times undercover economist. The producer was Ruth Alexander and the editor, Richard Varden. There are dozens of different podcasts now available from the BBC, including news, documentaries, science, business, arts and sport. The details of them all go to bbcworldservice.com podcasts.