A researcher at the International Famine Centre at UCC has been speaking about a threatened famine in Malawi, his native country.
Mr Sibo Banda, a PhD candidate in the department of law at UCC, recently visited his homeland, where mass evictions are being reported of tenant farmers from estates, and where as many as 18 former smallholders are starving to death daily.
He says that not many months ago the government there had denied there was any problem. Now, since shortages have become acute, the authorities have declared a state of emergency and appealed to the international community for help.
There are reports that up to 100 people are dying each day from lack of food. Malawi is one of the poorest nations in the world.
The famine now threatening Malawi has echoes here. Agriculture is run mainly by a tenant-farmer class who are subject to the evictions and abuse which still linger in the folk memory from the time of the Great Famine in Ireland. The Tobacco Tenants and Allied Workers' Union, an umbrella organisation for the impoverished farmers, is in its infancy, and trying with modest aid from organisations such as Trócaire to establish agrarian reform and basic rights for those who have trying to make a living and who are now starving.
Mr Banda worries that international aid will be slow to arrive.The immediate need is for food. In the long term, the need will be for land tenure rights and a move away from the preoccupation with independent, smallholder farming. The fledgling union is attempting to address these problems, but for now the issue is getting enough food to the people.
Landlocked between Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania, Malawi has a population of 10 million and an annual per capita income of $170. Infrastructure, such as it is, is breaking down, and HIV/AIDS is a growing problem. The tenant farmers live mainly on the tobacco estates - the country's industrial backbone - which provide the bulk of foreign exchange earnings. At least 86 per cent of the country's 3.5 million-strong labour force is engaged in agriculture. Their voices are only now being heard because they are crying out for food.
UCC says that while the core mission of the famine centre is to commemorate the one million Irish who died and the two million who were forced into exile during the Great Famine, it also "energetically undertakes research, advocacy, teaching, training and action in, and on, countries threatened by famine", bringing together relief and development practitioners as well as academics.
It encourages networking between private and public groups whose resources could be pooled in the fight against hunger.