famine

/fam"in/, n.

1. extreme and general scarcity of food, as in a country or a large geographical area.

2. any extreme and general scarcity.

3. extreme hunger; starvation.

[1325-75; ME < MF, deriv. of faim hunger ( < L fames); see -INE²]

Syn. 2. dearth, paucity, poverty, meagerness, scantness.

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Extreme and protracted shortage of food, resulting in widespread hunger and a substantial increase in the death rate.

General famines affect all classes or groups in the region of food shortage; class famines affect some classes or groups much more severely than others; regional famines affect only a particular region of a country. Causes may be natural or human. Natural causes include drought, flooding, unfavourable weather conditions, plant disease, and insect infestation. The chief human cause is war; others include overpopulation, bad distribution systems, and high food prices. Several severe famines occurred in the 20th century, including those in China (1928–29, 5–10 million dead; 1958–62, up to 20 million), Russia (1921–22, 1.25–5 million; 1932–34, 6–8 million), India (1943–44, 1.5 million), Cambodia (1975–79, 1 million), and sub-Saharan Africa.

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Introduction

 severe and prolonged hunger in a substantial proportion of the population of a region or country, resulting in widespread and acute malnutrition and death by starvation and disease. Famines usually last for a limited time, ranging from a few months to a few years. They cannot continue indefinitely, if for no other reason than that the affected population would eventually be decimated.

Conditions associated with famine

      Famines, like wars and epidemics, have occurred from ancient times, achieving biblical proportions not only in biblical times but throughout history. Examples from the 20th century include the Chinese famine of 1959–61, which resulted in 15–30 million deaths, the Ethiopian famine of 1984–85, which caused approximately 1 million deaths but affected more than 8 million people, and the North Korean famine of roughly 1995–99, which killed an estimated 2.5 million people.

  Many famines are precipitated by natural causes, such as drought, flooding, unseasonable cold, typhoons, vermin depredations, insect infestations, and plant diseases such as the blight that caused the Irish Potato Famine (1845–49). Although natural factors played a role in most European famines of the Middle Ages, their chief causes were feudal social systems (structured upon lords and vassals) and population growth, which extended many common food shortages into malnutrition, widespread disease, and starvation. Medieval Britain was afflicted by numerous famines, and France suffered the effects of 75 or more in the same period. Nor was Russia spared; some 500,000 Russians died of starvation in 1600.

      The most common human cause of famine is warfare (war). In addition to destroying crops and food supplies, warfare disrupts the distribution of food through the strategic use of siege and blockade tactics and through the incidental destruction of transportation routes and vehicles. The famines that plagued eastern Europe between 1500 and 1700, for example, were chiefly the result of human rather than natural causes, as the warring countries of the region interfered with and often prevented the production and distribution of basic foodstuffs. The deliberate destruction of crops and food supplies became a common tactic of war in the 19th century, employed by both attacking and defending armies. The “scorched-earth” policy adopted by the Russians in 1812 not only deprived Napoleon's armies of needed food but also starved the Russian people who depended on the land.

      Famines generally strike in poor countries; they have been endemic in some sub-Saharan African countries and widespread in South Asia. But they are not totally unknown to prosperous, industrialized countries. In 1944–45, for instance, a famine struck The Netherlands with ferocity. The result of a temporary food embargo by German occupation authorities as well as harsh winter weather that impeded food shipments, the hongerwinter (“hunger winter”) claimed between 20,000 and 30,000 lives there at the end of World War II.

      Over the course of centuries, rulers and governments have managed, mismanaged, documented, and analyzed famines in numerous ways. An early concern with famines appears in an ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, the Artha-shastra (Artha-śāstra), by the Hindu statesman and philosopher Kautilya. Written during approximately the 3rd century BCE and combining the modern and the quaint, the Artha-shastra classified famines as “calamities due to acts of God.” (Other miseries and problems categorized in this way included fire, floods, and epidemics as well as “rats, wild animals, snakes, and evil spirits.”) It pointed out that all calamities “can be overcome by propitiating Gods and Brahmans (Brahman)” (the highest ranking caste in Hindu India)—a shrewd piece of advice, given that Kautilya himself was a Brahman. But the Artha-shastra also contained sophisticated prescriptions, stressing the king's responsibility to act and recommending that in the event of a famine he “distribute to the public, on concessional terms, seeds and food from the royal stores [and] undertake food-for-work programs such as building forts or irrigation works.”

Historical responses to famine

      The British government wrote the first modern codification of responses to famine during its occupation of India. The highly detailed Indian Famine Code of 1883 classified situations of food scarcity according to a scale of intensity, and it laid out a series of steps that governments were obligated to take in the event of a famine. The code continues to influence contemporary policies, such as food-for-work programs and what the code called “gratuitous relief” for those unable to work.

      Despite the development of many detailed antifamine programs, famines have persisted. One reason for this is that until the 1980s the underlying causes of most famines were poorly understood. Despite some awareness to the contrary through the ages, there has been an overwhelming tendency to think that famines are primarily caused by a decline in food production. The result has been that famines that are not accompanied by such shortages are usually not recognized as famines until well after they have occurred. The Bengal famine of 1943, for example, was greatly worsened by the government's failure to declare a famine and thereby secure the official responses that would have been dictated by the Indian Famine Code.

Entitlement failure

      In the late 20th century the work of the Indian economist Amartya Sen (Sen, Amartya) led to a major reorientation in the study of famines. In works such as Poverty and Famines (1981), Sen challenged the prevailing “FAD hypothesis,” the assumption that total food-availability decline (FAD) is the central cause of all famines. Sen argued that the more proximate cause is so-called “entitlement failure,” which can occur even when there is no decline in aggregate food production.

      According to Sen, in every society each person can be thought of as having an “entitlement” to all possible combinations of the goods and services to which he has access. An entitlement is a collection of alternative bundles of goods and services from which the person in question is free to choose. A resident of a homeless shelter, for example, may have an entitlement consisting of exactly one bundle: a tray of food and a ration of clothes. But a cotton farmer, who grows sack-loads of cotton each year, can keep the cotton or sell it and buy various combinations of other goods. All these options constitute his particular entitlement.

      A person's entitlement can change for a number of reasons—for example, variations in the prices of goods and services, the implementation of new rationing rules, infestations of a farmer's crops by pests, or the disruption of food-distribution channels by war. These examples demonstrate how some segments of the population can perish because of hunger despite there being no overall shortfall in food production. If, because of an international glut, the price of cotton collapses in a given year, a village of cotton growers can suddenly find that their entitlements of food have failed, and they can face starvation.

      A good example of an entitlement-based famine without a commensurate shortfall in food production is the Bengal famine of 1943, which happens to be one of the most intensively studied famines. Although food production did fall slightly in 1943 compared with previous years, it was still 13 percent higher than in 1941, when there was no famine. One phenomenon that did distinguish the year 1943 was inflation, a common consequence of war. Yet, amid rising commodity prices, the wages paid to agricultural labourers stagnated. Between 1939 and 1943, food grain prices rose by more than 300 percent, slightly outstripping the rate of inflation, whereas the wages of agricultural labourers rose by only 30 percent. Agricultural labourers, as a class, were badly hit, which resulted in many deaths. Yet, even as rural Bengal was being ravaged by famine, the West Bengal capital city, Calcutta (now Kolkata), was hardly affected. Research has shown that famine-related deaths in Calcutta occurred primarily among migrants who had come from the villages in search of food and alms.

The role of policy

      Many factors can contribute to entitlement failure. For example, slight imbalances in production can lead to large increases or declines in price. But government policies can also cause entitlement failures. It can be argued, for example, that the Bangladesh famine of 1974, which was precipitated by the effects of widespread flooding, would have been less severe if the state's food- rationing system had not been in place. The rationing system was flawed because it provided subsidized, rationed food to only the country's urban population. In 1974, despite higher-than-usual rice production, there was a slight shortage of per capita food availability, because the United States temporarily halted routine food aid over its objections to Bangladesh's trade with Cuba. If the shortage had been shared out across the country, there would have been little hardship. But the rationing system kept the supplies of food in the urban centres, thereby affecting the entitlements of rural Bangladeshis and ultimately causing famine and some one million deaths.

      During the Ethiopian (Ethiopia) famine of 1973, the country's overall food productivity did not decline—in other words, according to the FAD hypothesis, there should not have been a famine. Yet, in the province of Wollo and to a lesser extent in Tigray, residents suffered famine exacerbated by entitlement failures that were made worse by the poor system of transport between regions.

      A less proximate cause of famines can be the nature of a country's political system. As Sen pointed out, democracy serves as a natural bulwark against famines. In a democratic system coupled with a free press, the occurrence of a famine will inevitably reduce the popularity of the government; thus, the fear of being voted out of power motivates democratic governments to take measures to prevent or at least mitigate famines. In the western Indian state of Maharashtra (Mahārāshtra), for example, droughts in the early 1970s severely affected a large area with a population of about 20 million. The resulting food shortages would have caused a famine if the government had not intervened by delivering food (from buffer stocks) and initiating massive employment-relief programs. Although there was a small rise in mortality, there were no recorded “starvation deaths.” In contrast, it is arguable that the catastrophic kind of famine that occurred in China in 1959–61 could not have happened in a democratic country. Chinese censorship prevented the world (and the Chinese people themselves) from understanding the enormity of the famine until well after the tragedy had occurred. Even decades later, mortality statistics continued to be disputed.

 It should be noted that statistics on famine mortality are always difficult to establish, because, contrary to a widely held view, in most famines only a small proportion of deaths are the direct result of starvation. The chief cause of death is usually disease, which can continue long after the famine has officially ended. In the Bengal famine, for example, deaths from starvation occurred between the critical months of March and November 1943, but the overall death rate did not peak until later—in the period from December 1943 through December 1944, when most deaths were caused by cholera, malaria, and smallpox.

Prevention and control

      In order to be effective, policies designed to prevent or control famines must be based on a sound understanding of the relationship between markets and food shortages. According to two traditional but opposing views, food markets exacerbate food shortages and therefore should be carefully controlled, or they naturally alleviate food shortages and therefore should be completely unhindered. Both views are flawed: both have caused governments to act in ways that made famines worse. In many cases, for example, the first reaction of governments has been to prevent the movement of food between regions, since such activity is frequently associated with speculation and profiteering. Yet this restriction on trade reduces the inflow of food into famine-affected regions, despite the fact that scarcity will have driven up food prices—a consequence that typically attracts more suppliers wishing to sell. The reduced flow of food caused by trade limitations may well contribute to more suffering and starvation. The aim should therefore be not to curb profits by restricting trade but to maximize the flow of food to the regions and population groups hardest hit by shortages.

      Equally faulty, however, is the view that problems will be resolved if the market is left fully to its own devices. It is based on the assumption that those who need food badly will be prepared to pay higher prices; if there is no government intervention, therefore, food will reach those who need it most. This argument makes the fatal mistake of presuming that all people have the same income. In reality, when people panic about food shortages, the wealthier in society tend to hoard food for themselves, thereby driving up food prices to levels beyond what the poor are able to afford.

      Contemporary research has shown that famines are best prevented and controlled when markets are allowed to function but when governments also intervene in appropriate ways. Private traders should be permitted to move food into affected regions; at the same time, governments should shore up the buying power of the poor through direct relief or employment-relief (food-for-work or cash-for-work) programs.

      There is continuing debate about whether relief is better provided in the form of food or cash. The answer is not obvious. Some have argued that if equivalent amounts of food and cash are being compared, then from the point of view of survival it does not matter which is given. In most cases, however, the answer depends on how well the relief system works or on how broadly it covers the population it is supposed to help. A cash-based program makes sense only if steps are taken to ensure that all those affected by the food shortage obtain relief. This is especially important in view of the fact that the wide distribution of cash will be likely to cause food prices in the affected region to rise. In the most acute situations of famine, therefore, it is usually far more effective to give relief in the form of food.

Kaushik Basu

Additional Reading

Historical perspectives on famine are presented in W.R. Aykroyd, The Conquest of Famine (1974); and William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (1996).The thesis of entitlement failure is presented in Amartya Sen, “Famines as Failures of Exchange Entitlements,” Economic and Political Weekly, 11(31–33):1273–80 (August 1976), and his Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981, reissued 1999). Additional economic analyses are offered in Kaushik Basu, “Relief Program: When May It Be Better to Give Food Instead of Cash,” World Development, 24(1):91–96 (1996); Martin Ravallion, “Famines and Economics,” Journal of Economic Literature, 35(3):1205–42 (September 1997); and Meredith Woo-Cumings, “The Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons” (2002), no. 31 in the Asian Development Bank Institute Research Paper Series. Three essays in Jean Drèze, Amartya Sen, and Athar Hussain (eds.), The Political Economy of Hunger: Selected Essays (1995), are particularly useful: N. Ram, “An Independent Press and Anti-Hunger Strategies,” chapter 2, pp. 178–223 (1995); Jean Drèze, “Famine Prevention in India,” chapter 4, pp. 69–177 (1995); and S.R. Osmani, “The Food Problem of Bangladesh,” chapter 6, pp. 332–371 (1995).A number of regional studies have contributed to a broader understanding of famine as experienced in various parts of the world. These include B.M. Bhatia, Famines in India: A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India with Special Reference to Food Problem, 1860–1990, 3rd rev. ed. (1991); and John C. Caldwell and Pat Caldwell, “Famine in Africa: A Global Perspective,” in Etienne van de Walle, Gilles Pison, and Mpembele Sala-Diakanda, Mortality and Society in Sub-Saharan Africa (1992), pp. 367–390.Kaushik Basu

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