Ratchet Effect

This is a concept introduced by Garrett Hardin, a biologist, to explain the effect of food aid in times of crisis on a nation's population. Hardin argues that food aid slows down or prevents a natural adjustment of a population to an environment that is not capable of supporting its numbers. As a result, food aid enables people to survive a crisis who otherwise would have died. They live, the size of the population "ratchet's" upward (like the gears on a wheel) and, since the ability of the environment to support this population has not expanded, another crisis is inevitable and more people will be placed at risk of death due to malnutrition or starvation because of the earlier food aid. Thus, Hardin argues, each time other countries intervene with food aid delivered to a nation in crisis, they make the next crisis larger and more devastating.

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