Famine remains one of the worst calamities that can befall a society. Mass starvation--whether it is inflicted by drought or engineered by misguided or genocidal economic policies--devastates families, weakens the social fabric, and undermines political stability. Cormac Ó Gráda, the acclaimed author who chronicled the tragic Irish famine in books like Black '47 and Beyond, here traces the complete history of famine from the earliest records to today. Combining powerful storytelling with the latest evidence from economics and history, Ó Gráda explores the causes and profound consequences of famine over the past five millennia, from ancient Egypt to the killing fields of 1970s Cambodia, from the Great Famine of fourteenth-century Europe to the famine in Niger in 2005. He enriches our understanding of the most crucial and far-reaching aspects of famine, including the roles that population pressure, public policy, and human agency play in causing famine; how food markets can mitigate famine or make it worse; famine's long-term demographic consequences; and the successes and failures of globalized disaster relief. Ó Gráda demonstrates the central role famine has played in the economic and political histories of places as different as Ukraine under Stalin, 1940s Bengal, and Mao's China. And he examines the prospects of a world free of famine. This is the most comprehensive history of famine available, and is required reading for anyone concerned with issues of economic development and world poverty.
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Famyn schal a-Ryse thorugh flodes and thorugh foule wedres.
—William Langland, Piers Ploughman
And lo a black horse . . . and he that sat on him had a pair of scales in his hand . . . a quart of wheat for a day’s wages.
—Book of Revelation 6:5
IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD, famines no longer capture the headlines like they used to. Billboard images of African infants with distended bellies are less ubiquitous, and the focus of international philanthropy has shifted from disaster relief to more structural issues, particularly those of third world debt relief, economic development, and democratic accountability. Totalitarian famines of the kind associated with Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and their latter-day imitators are on the wane. Even in Africa, the most vulnerable of the seven continents, the famines of the past decade or so have been, by historical standards, “small” famines. In 2002, despite warnings from the United Nations World Food Programme and nongovernmental relief agencies of a disaster that could affect millions, the excess mortality during a much-publicized crisis in Malawi was probably in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As for the 2005 famine in Niger, which also attracted global attention, experts now argue that it does not qualify as a famine by standard criteria. Mortality there was high in 2005, but apparently no higher than normal in that impoverished country.1
Writing about famine today is, one hopes, part of the process of making it less likely in future. The following chapters describe its symptoms, and how they have changed over time; more important, they explain why famines happened in the past, and why—since this is one of the themes of this book—they are less frequent today than in the past and, given the right conditions, less likely in the future. Research into the history of famine has borrowed from many disciplines and subdisciplines, including medical history, demography, meteorology, economic and social history, economics, anthropology, and plant pathology. This book is informed by all of them.
So is it almost time to declare famine “history”? No, if the continuing increase in the number of malnourished people is our guide; yes, perhaps, if we focus instead on malnourished people’s declining share of the world population and the characteristics of famine in the recent past. And if yes, has this been due to economic progress in famine-prone countries? Or should the credit go to the globalization of relief and better governance where famines were once commonplace? How have the characteristics and incidences of famine changed over time? Are most or all modern famines “man-made”? Can the history of past famines help guard against future ones? This book is in part an answer to such questions.
Famines have always been one of the greatest catastrophes that could engulf a people. Although many observers in the past deemed them “inevitable” or “natural,” throughout history the poor and the landless have protested and resisted at the approach of famines, which they considered to be caused by humans. The conviction that a more caring elite had the power and a less rapacious trading class had the resources to mitigate—if not eradicate—disaster was usually present. This, after all, is the message of Luke’s parable about Dives and Lazarus.2 It is hardly surprising, then, that famines have attracted both the attention of academics and policymakers as well as the indignation of critical observers and philanthropists. In today’s developed world the conviction that famines are an easily prevented anachronism, and therefore a blot on global humanity, is widespread and gaining ground. That makes them a continuing focus for activism and an effective vehicle for raising consciousness about world poverty.
Economist and demographer Robert Malthus was one of those who regarded famine as natural. In 1798, he famously referred to famine as “the last, the most dreadful resource of nature,”3 and indeed other natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and even volcanic eruptions tend to be more local and short-lived in their impact. The impact of famines is also more difficult to measure. We measure the energy expended in earthquakes on the Richter scale, volcanic eruptions by a Volcanic Explosivity Index, and weather by rain precipitation, temperature, humidity, and wind speed, but how can we measure famine? Excess mortality is an obvious possibility, but besides being often difficult to measure, it is as much a function of the policy response to famine as of the conditions that caused the crisis. The Indian Famine Codes, introduced in the wake of a series of major famines in the 1870s, defined famine by its early warning signals. These signals—rising grain prices, increased migration, and increased crime—dictated the introduction of measures to save life.
A recent study in this spirit defines the transition from food crisis to famine by rises in the daily death rate above one per ten thousand population, the proportion of “wasted” children (that is, children weighing two standard deviations or less below the average) above 20 percent, and the prevalence of kwashiorkor, an extreme form of malnutrition mainly affecting young children.4 By the same token, “severe famine” means a daily death rate of above five per ten thousand, a proportion of wasted children above 40 percent, and again, the prevalence of kwashiorkor. The first two of these measures could not have been implemented in India a century ago, but the swollen bellies and reddened hair associated with kwashiorkor are age-old signs of crisis.5 In what follows, famine refers to a shortage of food or purchasing power that leads directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger-induced diseases.
The etymology and meaning of words signifying famine vary by language. The Roman orator Cicero (106–43 BC) distinguished between praesens caritas (present dearness or dearth) and futura fames (future famine) or deinde inopia (thereafter want of means), and Roman sources employed several synonyms for both (e.g., difficultas annonae, frumenti inopia, and summa caritas).6 In Italian the word for famine, carestia, is derived from caritas, and signifies dearness. This suggests one measure of a famine’s intensity since, usually, the greater the increase in the price of basic foodstuffs and the longer it lasts, the more serious the famine. In medieval and early modern England, dearth signified dearness, but meant famine. For economist Adam Smith, however, dearth and famine were distinct, whereas by John Stuart Mill’s day “there is only dearth, where there formerly would have been famine.”7 Famine, in turn, is derived from the Latin fames. In German, Hungersnot connotes hunger associated with a general scarcity of food. The most common terms for famine in the Irish language are gorta (starvation) and, referring to the infamous 1840s, an drochshaol (the bad times). In pharaonic Egypt, the standard word for famine (hkr) derived from “being hungry,” but that signifying plague (i:dt) also connoted famine, highlighting the symbiotic relationship between famine and disease.
Many individual famines are remembered by specific names that only sometimes hint at their horrors. Examples include la famine de l’avenement (the famine of the Accession of Louis XIV) in France in 1662, bliain an áir (“the year of the slaughter”) in Ireland in 1740–41, the Chalisa (referring to a calendar date) and Doji Bara (“skulls famine”) in India in 1783–84 and 1790–91, the Tenmei and Tempo (Japanese era names) in Japan in 1782–87 and 1833–37, the Madhlatule (“eat what you can, and say nothing”) famine in southern Africa in the 1800s, Black ’47 in Ireland in 1847, the Mtunya (“the scramble”) in Kenya in 1917–20, Holodomor (“death by hunger”) in the Ukraine in 1932–33, Chhiyattarer Manvantar (the Great Famine of the Bengal year 1176) and Panchasher Manvantar (“the famine of fifty,” a reference to the Bengal year 1350) in Bengal in 1770 and 1943–44, manori (etymology unclear) in Burundi in 1943–44, and nạn đói
t Dậu (“famine of the
t Dậu Year”) in Vietnam in 1945.
In any language, however, the term famine is an emotive one that needs to be used with caution. On the one hand, preemptive action requires agreement on famine’s early warning signs; the very declaration of a famine acknowledges the need for public action, and may thus prevent a major mortality crisis. On the other hand, the overuse of the term by relief agencies and others may lead to cynicism and donor fatigue.
In the recent past, definitions of famine have included events and processes that would not qualify as famine in the catastrophic, historical sense. Some scholars have argued for a broader definition that would embrace a range extending from endemic malnutrition to excess mortality and its associated diseases. In...
