Adaptable livelihoods

This books explains how food and livelihood insecurity can be predicted in order to identify ways of mitigating the threat of famine. The starting-point is the way in which different people in the Inner Niger Delta and surrounding drylands in Mali have adapted their livelihoods to confront successive droughts, creeping impoverishment and food insecurity. Data are derived from a local food monitoring system which challenges conventional approaches to famine early warning, by focusing on how people feed themselves, rather than how they fail to do so. Livelihood systems have undergone a…