Famine

• 1. Introduction

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  A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, and across human history every inhabited continent has lived through one. An account from Egypt's First Intermediate Period puts the horror plainly: "All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and people were eating their children." That line, written more than four thousand years ago, names a pattern that recurs in Finland and Bengal, in Shanxi and Ireland, in the Congo and Gaza. The factors shift. War, drought, crop failure, poverty, economic collapse, the choices of governments. But why did famine deaths fall sharply after the 1970s, and why have they not vanished? Why was the Netherlands eating steadily in the 1590s while the rest of Western Europe starved? And what does it actually take, in technical terms, before officials are allowed to say the word famine out loud? The answers run from medieval grain prices to a death rate of two people per ten thousand per day.

• 2. Declaring The Word

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  Two people per ten thousand, per day. That is one of three thresholds the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification uses to define a Phase 5 famine of acute food insecurity. The other two: at least 20% of households facing extreme food shortages with limited ability to cope, and acute malnutrition in children exceeding 30%. All three must hold at once. If only the first is met, an area can be described as Phase 5 Catastrophe, yet it cannot be officially declared a famine. The United Nations World Food Programme frames the same idea more simply. Famine is declared when malnutrition is widespread and people have started dying from starvation through lack of access to sufficient, nutritious food.

  The declaration itself carries no binding obligations on the UN or its member states. It exists to focus global attention on a crisis. Once a situation is technically classified, governments and international agencies can declare it formally. In complex humanitarian crises that step is fraught. The technical criteria are strict, and the political implications of saying the word are heavy. Scholars have offered their own definitions, from Blix's widespread food shortage raising regional death rates to Cuny's set of conditions producing widespread acute malnutrition. Behind every one of them sits a harder question the next chapter takes up: is famine really about how much food exists, or about who can reach it?

• 3. Food Or Access

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  Until 1981 the standard answer was the Food availability decline hypothesis, known as FAD. The assumption was simple. The central cause of all famines was a decline in how much food was available. The problem with FAD is that it could not explain why only certain people starved. An agricultural laborer might die while others around him were insulated from the crisis. That gap pointed to a different theory: the failure of exchange entitlements, or FEE. A person owns commodities that a market lets them trade for what they need. A laborer's primary entitlement is labor, exchanged for rice. When his employment turns erratic or disappears, the exchange breaks, and starvation follows even where food sits nearby.

  The Famine Commission of 1880 had already glimpsed this. Examining British India, it found that every province, including Burma, held a surplus of foodgrains, with an annual surplus of 5.16 million tons. At the same time India was exporting roughly one million tons of rice and other grains each year. The commission concluded that distribution, not raw scarcity, was more to blame. Oxfam International later stated the case bluntly, commenting on a Famine Early Warning Systems Network report: "Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political failures." Thomas Malthus had argued the opposite, that famines flow from populations outgrowing a region's carrying capacity. Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, refutes that view, pointing to political factors as the major cause of famines over the last 150 years. Politics, then, is where the story turns next.

• 4. How Famine Retreated

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  Holland fed itself through the 1590s while a general outbreak of famine swept Western Europe. By then the Netherlands ran one of the most commercialized agricultural systems in Europe, growing industrial crops like flax, hemp and hops. The efficiency of Dutch farming let cities grow faster there than anywhere else on the continent, and a steady food supply held. The roots reached back into the 16th and 17th centuries, when the feudal system broke down and prosperous farmers enclosed their land to sell surplus for profit. They paid laborers in money. Taxes owed in cash pushed even subsistence peasants to grow crops for market. By 1650 English agriculture had commercialized on a wide scale, and by the end of the 17th century it was the most productive in Europe.

  England's last peacetime famine came in 1623-24. There were still hungry years afterward, as in the Netherlands, but no more famines. In both countries the population stabilized between 1650 and 1750, the very span when farming was transformed. Eastern Europe was a different world, with famines recurring as late as the twentieth century. Scott and Duncan record more than 150 famines in Eastern Europe between 1500 and 1700, and Russia counting 121 famine years between 971 and 1974. The work of holding famine at bay did not stop with better farms. It moved into the hands of governments learning, slowly and unevenly, how to intervene.

• 5. Government Hands

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  In pre-industrial Europe, keeping food flowing was a chief concern of governments, because famine could spark revolt. Their tools were weak. Trade, infrastructure and bureaucracy rarely stretched far enough to deliver real relief. The Industrial Revolution changed the arithmetic, opening price controls, large-scale food imports, stockpiling, rationing and charity. The Great Famine of 1845 in Ireland was among the first to feature such intervention, though the response was often lackluster. Facing crop failure in the autumn of 1845, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel secretly bought £100,000 worth of maize and cornmeal from America, with Baring Brothers & Co acting as his purchasing agents. Weather delayed the first shipment until the start of February 1846, and the maize was resold for a penny a pound. When Peel moved to repeal the Corn Laws that year, the measure split the Conservative Party and brought down his ministry.

  His successor, Lord John Russell, fared worse. By December 1846 Russell's public works employed some half million Irish and proved impossible to administer. A laissez-faire belief that the market would provide led the government to halt food and relief works, turning instead to workhouses under the Poor Law and outdoor relief through soup kitchens. The British Raj built a more systematic framework in the 1880s. An Indian Famine commission produced a set of guidelines called the Famine Code, passed into law in 1883 under Lord Ripon. It introduced the first famine scale, defining near-scarcity, scarcity and famine. Scarcity meant three successive years of crop failure with yields at a third or half of normal. Famine added food prices above 140% of normal, people on the move searching for food, and widespread mortality. The Code traced famine to lost wages among laborers and artisans, and answered with open-ended public works. That instinct, to read famine as a failure of policy, would be tested most savagely in the century to come.

• 6. The Engineered Hungers

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  Mao Zedong tried to turn China from an agricultural nation into an industrial power in one leap, and the result was the largest famine of the 20th century. Party cadres ordered peasants off their farms onto collectives and into small foundries, often melting down farm tools to make steel. Collectivization gutted incentives to invest labor in agriculture, communal dining halls encouraged overconsumption, and unrealistic plans drained needed labor. Pressure on cadres to report only good news suppressed word of the disaster so completely that the scale of it became widely known only twenty years later. Estimates of deaths during 1958-1961 range from 18 million to at least 42 million, with a further 30 million births cancelled or delayed. Mao reversed collectivization only when the famine had done its worst, and the policies were finally dismantled in 1978.

  In 1975 the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia under Pol Pot, who wanted an agrarian utopia. The regime emptied the cities, abolished currency and private property, and forced the population into slavery on communal farms. In less than four years it executed nearly 1.4 million people, and as many as one million more died from starvation, disease and exhaustion when the agrarian reforms failed. By the time Vietnam invaded in 1979 and removed the Khmer Rouge, about a quarter of Cambodia's population had been killed. The Bengal famine of 1943 wove together many such failures, with the Japanese occupation of Burma cutting grain imports, neighboring provinces imposing transport embargoes, merchants hoarding, and a Delhi administration that prioritized supplying the British Indian Army over the wider populace. An estimated 2.1 million Bengalis died. Some 20th-century famines, the source notes, served the geopolitical purposes of governments, traumatizing distrusted ethnic populations and shifting the burden of shortage onto regions where suffering posed a lesser political risk.

• 7. Television And Relief

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  On the 23rd of October 1984, BBC newsreader Michael Buerk described what he saw in Ethiopia as a "biblical famine." His commentary carried footage of starving Ethiopians around a feeding station near the town of Korem to screens around the world. The reports stirred the first mass movements to end famine globally. They prompted the Band Aid single, organized by Bob Geldof and featuring more than 20 pop stars, and then the Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia. Hundreds of thousands died within a year despite the effort, but the publicity pushed Western nations to release enough surplus grain to end the immediate hunger crisis in Africa. The famine itself, one of the largest the country had seen, traced to droughts of the mid-to-late 1970s, made worse by the Ethiopian Civil War and a Communist government that censored the emerging crisis. Over a million Ethiopians died, and more than 22 million people suffered.

  The long arc bent toward fewer deaths. The World Peace Foundation reported that from the 1870s to the 1970s, great famines killed an average of 928,000 people a year. Since 1980 that annual figure dropped to about 75,000, less than 10% of the earlier toll, even with roughly 150,000 lives lost in the 2011 Somalia famine. The 2011 East Africa drought, after two consecutive missed rainy seasons, was among the worst in the region in 60 years, killing an estimated 50,000 to 150,000 people. Yet in 2017 the UN declared famine had returned to Africa, with about 20 million people at risk in northern Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen and Somalia. By November 2021 the World Food Programme counted 45 million people teetering on the edge of famine across 43 countries, up from 27 million in 2019, with Afghanistan becoming the world's largest humanitarian crisis.

• 8. Starvation As Weapon

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  In August 2024 famine was declared in Sudan, where refugee camps displaced by the civil war faced severe conditions and the IPC found over 24 million people in acute food insecurity. UN experts accused the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces of using starvation tactics against civilians, saying, "Never in modern history have so many people faced starvation and famine as in Sudan today." One year later, in August 2025, famine was declared in Gaza, the first time a famine has been officially confirmed in the Middle East region. More than half a million people were trapped in it. In July of that year, more than 12,000 children were identified as acutely malnourished, the highest monthly figure ever recorded and a six-fold rise since the start of the year. The new assessment marked the most severe deterioration since the IPC began analyzing the Gaza Strip.

  The scale climbs in the projections. The number of children expected to be at severe risk of death from malnutrition by the end of June 2026 tripled from 14,100 to 43,400, and estimated cases among pregnant and breastfeeding women rose from 17,000 to 55,000. About 98 percent of cropland in the territory is damaged or inaccessible, nine of ten people have been serially displaced, and most UN aid trucks have been looted. Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said Israel's restrictions on aid may constitute starvation as a weapon of war, which would be a war crime. The Israeli government has denied using starvation as a weapon and called the genocide arguments "wholly unfounded." The same fault lines, conflict and access rather than the sheer absence of food, run through the warnings about what climate change and falling water tables may bring. Evan Fraser, a geographer at the University of Guelph, frames it as three lines of defense, the ecosystem, the household, and a society's formal institutions, and finds that famine arrives only when all three give way at once.