The sweep of perpetual famine?

The media is presenting us with images of the mother of all famines, stretching from Yemen to Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR) and northern Nigeria. There have been bad famines in the not-so-distant past, such as the Ethiopian one in 1985 that triggered rock star Bob Geldof to organize a global popular response.

In 1974 at the World Food Conference, there was a feeling that the world was running out of food and dramatic new policies must be put in place by the richer countries. They were, and much progress was made.

Between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of the world’s children under five who were malnourished fell from 25 percent to 14 percent. People who are still underfed are less severely so. Their average shortfall in calories fell from 170 a day in 1990 to 88 a day last year.

Increased food production is happening all over the place. In Rwanda, peasant farmers in 2015 produced 792,000 tons of grain, more than three times as much as in 2000. In Ethiopia, cereal production tripled between 2000 and 2014. Over the past decade, Cameroon, Ghana, Zambia, Nigeria and Kenya have increased their harvest by 50 percent.

If one deducts from the African statistics the famine in parts of eastern and northern Nigeria, then African progress looks especially good. West Africa in particular has shown rapid improvement in food production.

In Nigeria, for all its economic woes and almost zero growth rate, agriculture is growing far faster than the population. It is more important than the oil sector in terms of value, but oil remains the biggest filler of government coffers, so it gets all the politicians’ and media’s attention.

Growth in national income in sub-Saharan Africa is slowly but surely accelerating. Africa, like most parts of the world, has been hit by the Great Recession, but most countries have dealt with falling agricultural commodity prices and smaller foreign markets with some success.

It is in a strong position to take advantage of the present world recovery. Some African countries continued to grow all along at around 5 percent year, some at 7 percent, including Tanzania, Rwanda and Ivory Coast.

Agriculture for the foreseeable future will employ a majority of workers. It is mainly peasant agriculture working poor soil in difficult and uncertain weather conditions. Africa does not have the great fertile river basins of Asia, whose fertility comes from the silt washed down through the ages from areas where tectonic activity produced mountains rich in nutrients. Nor does it have a water table near the surface, making bore holes more difficult. Much of the interior of Africa is barely worth farming. Only about 4 percent of arable land is irrigated.

The Green Revolution has made inroads, but much more slowly than it did in Asia, which only has two main crops: Rice and wheat. Africa has a dozen food crops, and each has needed its own specialist development, along with the fight against plant and animal diseases that are much more prevalent than elsewhere. Nevertheless, one sees these days a fairly rapid dissemination of improved seeds.

Other aspects of technology are also making an impact. The mobile phone is foremost among them. Some African countries have as many phones per head as the US. It is estimated that within three years, smart phone penetration will rise from 20 percent today to 50 percent.

Kenya, which has pioneered applications that rich countries have followed belatedly, has long used phones for peasants to purchase credit for fertilizer and other inputs to receive information on market prices, thus cutting down the influence of middlemen; for migrants in the cities to send money home for investment; for nurses to reach remote patients; for consumers to pay with electronic money; and, as in India, for subsidies to the poor to be distributed directly without the graft of middlemen.

Perhaps the greatest single aid to improving agriculture and increasing national income is to diminish war. Between 1970 and the end of the century, war was all-consuming in many countries. These days there are remnants of war in eastern Congo, a terrorist war in Somalia and civil war in South Sudan. Overall, there is little war today.

More peaceful land is more productive. That is why the upcoming elections in Kenya are being watched nervously. The violence in earlier elections threw the rural economy off course. Few want to see the rapid progress made in recent years thrown to the wind by new electoral violence. The poor are not running to stay still, they are running to make progress.

• Jonathan Power is a British journalist, filmmaker and writer. He has been a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune for 17 years.