Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Vietnamese famine of 1944, 1945 resulted from French economic policies, Japanese military occupation, and severe weather events. France imposed price ceilings that forced farmers to sell grain at low rates while market prices soared. Japan seized food supplies and ordered the cultivation of industrial crops instead of rice.
Estimates for deaths during the Vietnamese famine of 1944, 1945 range between 400,000 and two million people. Governor-General Jean Decoux wrote that about one million northerners perished while Ho Chi Minh quoted a figure of two million deaths on the 2nd of September 1945. A French official estimated half-a-million deaths in October 1945 and twenty thousand additional deaths occurred from disease outbreaks.
Economic conditions leading to the Vietnamese famine of 1944, 1945 worsened significantly by June 1944 when rice prices climbed to between 6 and 7 piastres per 10 kilograms. The crisis gradually eased only after June 1945 when food consumption demand dropped sharply due to mass deaths. Catastrophic rainfall struck northern Vietnam during August and September 1944 contributing to crop failures between 1943 and 1945.
Diplomat Bui Minh Dung stated that the Japanese occupation systematically played a role greater than any other factor in the starvation. France returned to its policy of economic protectorate after the Great Depression in the 1930s and monopolized natural resources to serve war needs. Only the French minority, a small group of Vietnamese elites, and some urban Hoa people benefited from these arrangements while peasants suffered.
The Vietnamese famine of 1944, 1945 devastated northern provinces where harvests collapsed completely while populations remained dependent on those same fields. Starving bodies filled the streets of Hanoi and required cleanup by local students. Survivors like Di Ho witnessed Japanese soldiers stealing grain in Phat Diem within the Red River Delta region.