Coping with complexity in food crisis management

The causes, consequences, and management of food crises are complex. Geographers with their inherent understanding of complexity can play an important part in meshing relief measures with the long-term development of famine prone areas in developing nations. For this role, they must extend their traditional undestanding of concatenation processes, phenology, semiotics, contingency approaches to warning systems, and the concept of comparative evaluation. These geographical ideas are essential elemnts in the training of key food crisis managers. (AU)