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 transition from the security to vulnerability since the Sahelian drought of the early 1970s. In the past, livelihoods had inbuilt safety nets which enabled people to cope with periods of drought. Nowadays a more fundamental process of adaptation is taking place. Conventional famine early warning systems are unable to detect such changes, or to signal their implications for future vulnerability to food insecurity.

The implications for national and regional food security planning and famine early warning are considerable. Food security policy in Mali has been characterised in the 1980s by liberalisation of cereal markets and famine early warning to inform about distributions of free food aid.

In between these two extremes is a gaping hole, implicit in which is the assumption either that people are at risk of the threat of famine, or that they simply require better market incentives to produce more. Nowhere is the increasing structural vulnerability of rural livelihoods addressed. The study concludes by outlining a simplified methodology for monitoring livelihood security, to be used as a basis for developing contingency plans and regional food security planning capacities and policies.