Show Summary Details

Page of

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Food Studies. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

Subscriber: Google Scholar Indexing; date: 13 February 2025

The History and Future of Famineunlocked

The History and Future of Famineunlocked

  • Alex de WaalAlex de WaalTufts University

Summary

Famines are shapeshifters. They have changed over human history and will continue to do so in the future. Potential causal elements of famine include food supply disruption, failure of market or welfare entitlements, and political agency that creates starvation. Famines have affected societies over the ages from prehistoric times, through ancient, medieval, and early modern agrarian societies, to the age of imperialism and the short 20th century of total war and totalitarianism. In the 21st century, calamitous famines that kill a million or more people have disappeared, but protracted, complex humanitarian emergencies persist. The immediate threat is posed by starvation crimes committed by armed actors at scale with impunity, and the longer-term threat is a state of permanent humanitarian emergency as governance and economic systems buckle under the pressures of the climate crisis and contested adaptations to it.

Subjects

  • Food History and Anthropology
  • Food Politics and Policy

Introduction

After several decades in which mass starvation had become vanishingly rare, famine has returned as an issue of global concern. In 2022, United Nations (UN) Secretary General António Guterres said, “we face a real risk of multiple famines this year, and next year could be even worse”1 Since 2016, the UN has spoken of famine, near-famine or immediate threat of famine in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, the Gaza Strip, Madagascar, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Yemen. In 2022, the UN classified between 691 and 783 million people as being “food insecure,” with the numbers “in need of humanitarian assistance and protection” upward of 300 million in 2023 and 2024, double the number in the mid-2010s.2 There is also concern over potential famine in Gaza caused by Israel’s military actions.3

Nonetheless, Guterres’s warning does not point to catastrophes of the scale of the 20th century. Mass starvation remains at a historic low in comparison with any previous decade for which we have data, and the chance of a human being perishing of famine has been lower than at any time in history.4 From the 1960s to around the 2010s, the trend in the number and lethality of famines dramatically dropped. About 116 million people died in famines in the 140 years from 1870 to 2010, in famines that killed more than 100,000 people each (see figure 1).5

Figure 1: Mortality in great and calamitous famines by decade, 1870-2010

Source: World Peace Foundation (nd.)

The great majority of those who died in these famines did so on account of political or military action. Factors beyond immediate human control, such as climatic anomalies or pest infestations, rendered populations poorer or more vulnerable to hunger, but the proximate cause of mass starvation in the 20th and 21st centuries has almost invariably been reckless or deliberate decision by governments. Mass starvation in Europe and Asia during the two World Wars, and the ones caused by Josef Stalin (Ukraine’s Holodomor) and Mao Zedong (the “Great Leap Forward” of 1958 to 1961), account for most 20th-century famine deaths. Starvation is a time-honored weapon of war, and conflict famines are as old as historical records. For earlier centuries, however, there is strong evidence for correlation between harvest failures and famines and, going back further, between ecological and climatic changes and population declines.

Definitions, Measurements, and Debates

Until the 21st century, most definitions of famine served as a pithy description of indisputable instances.6 Journalists, politicians, and scholars assumed that famine could be recognized as being like a flood or fire. Only with the establishment of the “humanitarian international” and the professionalization of emergency relief did the need for a definition and metric for famine arise.

Defining and measuring famine is not straightforward. The starting point is to distinguish it from hunger and malnutrition. A famine is an event, a calamity, or an aberration from a norm. Hunger and malnutrition may be enduring conditions. The boundary between the two may be fuzzy. Moreover, the definition of famine by those who suffer it may differ from outsiders who seek to measure it. Local definitions, drawing on social memory, may be subtler and more informative than metrics but by the same token pose potentially insuperable challenges for comparison and quantification.7

Contemporary Metrics and Definitions

At the turn of the millennium, as part of the professionalization of humanitarian action, international relief agencies needed an agreed-upon diagnostic tool. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), developed in the early 2000s and utilized by the UN, has five levels for grading food insecurity. These range from normal, through stressed, crisis and emergency, to catastrophe and famine. Phase five (famine) is defined as the absolute inaccessibility of food to an entire population or subgroup thereof and is measured by evidence for three key outcomes, namely mortality (crude death rates above two per 10,000 per day), global acute malnutrition rates among children of 30 percent or higher, and a near-total food consumption gap for one in five households in the designated area.8

This has the virtue of being an independent, technical definition, and thus avoiding the hazards of subjective diagnoses, which are invariably influenced by political considerations. Some may want to cry “famine” in response to observed suffering, while others may want to reject it. The IPC’s definition provides objective indicators and a process for making this determination. However, there are two sets of difficulties. The first is technical: The template is designed for an agrarian society and does not easily transfer to an urban environment. Relatedly, by using small, local geographical units, it provides granularity at the risk of missing a bigger picture. The IPC phase four (emergency) and even phase three (crisis) may include increased hunger and elevated mortality, which, aggregated over a large area and a long time period, may add up to very large excess mortality. Two examples illustrate this. In South Sudan, between 2014 and 2018, demographic data indicated that about 190,000 people perished from hunger and disease, of whom just 1,500 died in the two counties in which “famine” was identified using the IPC criteria.9 In Nigeria, between 2016 and 2019, a median estimate of excess deaths amounts to 490,000, with a small number retrospectively attributed to areas in IPC stage five.10

The second difficulty is that a government, determined to avoid the embarrassment of a famine determination, can block or manipulate data gathering or release. This happened in the Tigray region of Ethiopia in 2021. Following a clear forecast of mass starvation, the Ethiopian Government prevented data collection and then insisted that data necessary for determining famine did not exist.11 Subsequent investigations estimate excess mortality attributable to starvation and related causes in Tigray during this period at about 300,000.12

In Yemen, these two difficulties converge, with scanty data available on which to estimate excess deaths. A compilation of estimates in late 2021 projected deaths from hunger and disease to be reaching 250,000, without any identified areas in IPC phase five.13

An alternative metric for defining famine is the overall level of excess deaths in a hunger-related crisis.14 Thus, 100,000 deaths in excess of the baseline is considered a “great famine” and one million a “calamitous famine.” This scale is the only option for examining historical famines for which IPC data or similar statistics do not exist, but applying it in practice faces enormous methodological problems.15 The further back in time one looks, the data becomes less reliable. Moreover, the thresholds are absolute numbers rather than ratios to the overall population. A “minor” famine afflicting a small population can be proportionately more devastating than one with a much higher number of deaths in a larger country.

All metrics for diagnosing famine, based on data for malnutrition and mortality, face the problem that historical background levels of hunger and life expectancy may be far worse than in the 21st century, so that (for example) “normal” rates in 19th-century colonial India or feudal Russia would likely qualify as “famine” by 21st-century standards. It is also worth noting, in passing, that the principal demographic impact of famine is not mortality but migration. Distress migration is one of the clearest indicators of famine, but it is not included in any definition.

The study of famine has struggled with the development of theory, and most theorizations are a catalogue of different explanations placed in historical and political-economic context.16 This is perhaps inevitable, as famines are not natural occurrences but constructs of circumstance.

Schematically, it may be helpful to posit a framework of three potential proximate factors, of which one or more may cause a famine. The first, most intuitively straightforward one is food supply, consisting of production, storage, and transport. English speakers may call a shortage of any commodity a “famine”—for example, a “book famine.” The second is the capability of those who need food to acquire it through their own labor, purchase it in the market, or receive it as a gift. Sen calls this entitlement to food, and he shows empirically that some major modern famines have occurred with a collapse in food entitlement for particular segments of the population, even when food is available.17 The third is political or military action, which purposefully deprives people of food or renders it impossible for them to eat.18 Such actions can include reducing either or both food availability and food entitlement and thus overlap with the first two factors.

Defining starvation adds another set of complications. The verb “to starve” refers both to the experience of suffering acute hunger and the act whereby one person inflicts hunger on another. The war crime of starvation is defined as the deprivation of objects indispensable to survival.19 This obviously includes food but may also be water, medicine, shelter, cooking fuel, or maternal care for infants. This definition was first formulated in the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions in 1977—Article 54 of Protocol 1 and Article 14 of Protocol 2—and then adopted in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court—Article 8(2)(b)(xxv). Starvation crimes may also be perpetrated outside the context of armed conflict, for example against prisoners or a subjugated population. These may qualify as crimes against humanity if committed systematically, on a wide scale, and by a state or other organized entity.

The crime against humanity of extermination includes “the international infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population” (Rome Statute, Article 7(2)(9)(b)).20 The Genocide Convention, Article II(c), contains similar language, differing depending on the intent of the perpetrator.

Faminogenic actions and policies are not necessarily criminal. David Marcus has categorized four levels of human proximate responsibility for famines. A first-degree famine crime is committed by an authority determined to exterminate a population through starvation or force it into unconditional submission. These are acts of genocide or extermination. Second-degree famine crimes are characterized by recklessness committed by an authority pursuing policies that have already proven their faminogenic tendencies. War crimes of starvation may often qualify under this heading. The third degree of culpable famine causation is when public authorities are indifferent to suffering, and fourth-degree famines are pure natural disasters, which authorities are incapable of preventing.21

As combination of a threefold classification of causative elements (food supply, food entitlement, and political or military agency) with Marcus’s categorization is a useful lens for tracking the history and future of famine.

Debates

The most influential writer on famine is the Reverend Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) posited that human reproduction led to population increase at a geometric rate while food production could expand only according to an arithmetic rate. It followed that, unless numbers were limited by war, disease, or practices to limit births, the population would grow to a point at it exceeded food supply. In Malthus’s famous formulation,

The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable Famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.22

His theory caught hold in the popular imagination of Western publics, before he conducted any empirical research into famines. In later, much revised editions of the Essay, he dropped the claim that “gigantic inevitable Famine” had ever acted in this manner because he could identify no such event in the historical record.23 There is evidence for population crashes associated with food scarcity among neolithic populations, but from medieval times onward, with very few exceptions (the example in Ireland, 1845–1851), famines did not permanently reduce population numbers and most often, they merely set back population growth by a few years.24

One important line of critique of Malthus derives from Ester Boserup, who made the case that increasing pressure on limited land has led to innovations in agricultural production, overcoming Malthusian constraints.25 A second line is political economic analysis, including scholars in the Marxist tradition such as Amrita Rangasami and Michael Watts, as well Sen.26 They identify famine as a process of deprivation afflicting the poorest and least advantaged. Famines have their beneficiaries, and starvation has its purposes.27

The history of famines validates Malthus for the earliest periods only. Thereafter, technological innovation and power relations determine who starves, when, and why. This does not invalidate the insight that human society cannot exploit the planet’s natural resources indefinitely—only that it has not done so in the past. In the Anthropocene, characterized by economic activities transgressing the boundaries of societal and planetary sustainability, the future of famine will be different.

A Short History of Famine

Historians have compiled rich comparative histories of famines including insights into causes, the depths of human suffering entailed, and impacts.28 There is no aspect that is not controversial.

The Longue Durée

The dominant narrative of the long arc of history is that human ancestors were initially hunter-gatherers, living in small and often mobile bands, numbers constrained by available food resources and rudimentary technologies. The subsequent invention of agriculture and the domestication of livestock enabled an enormous increase in food production and thus larger, settled populations and the beginnings of human civilization.29 Although the meta-narrative is one of progress, the development of agriculture and cities also came with steep costs to human well-being, among them dietary deficiencies on account of overdependence on a limited basket of staple foods, much greater exposure to waterborne and infectious diseases, and especially spillover of pathogens from livestock into human populations, and, no less significant, the emergence of hierarchical societies with refined instruments of organized violence and repression.

This story of linear development has been challenged by archeologists, anthropologists and historians, including most prominently James Scott and David Graeber and David Wengrow.30 Vantage-point biases have obscured some realities. Hunter-gatherer societies could be relatively prosperous and well-fed and could have made a choice to follow this mode of livelihood in preference to agriculture. For example, Native American societies in the Pacific Northwest had plentiful supplies of food from fishing and gathering and had expertise in farming, as they cultivated tobacco. Societies moved in and out of sedentary cultivation, pastoral nomadism, and hunting and gathering over millennia.

In premodern times, there is strong archeological evidence for population booms and busts among peoples practicing all forms of livelihoods.31 While the proximate reasons for sharp population falls are not known, these events correlate with reduced variety and quantity of food. While the obvious inference is that a collapse in food supply caused starvation, it is also possible that rival groups used starvation as a weapon in armed conflicts.

Agrarian societies in much of Asia, Europe, parts of the Americas, and Africa expanded in population size after adopting agriculture. Over approximately thirty centuries until the beginnings of the era of European colonialism, overall stability masked fluctuations. Year on year, the annual harvest was the heartbeat of the agrarian economy, and for most societies, a sequence of failed harvests spelled hunger. Occasionally, the impacts were greater. The great European famine of 1315 to 1317 not only killed as much as 10 percent of the population of northern Europe but also set in train a generation of stagnation, prior to the Black Death of the mid-century.32 The relative roles of population, land, and feudalism in that calamity have been hotly debated.33 Throughout these centuries, armies pillaged peasantries, and scorched earth and siege were favored military tactics, with the destruction of Carthage and the (possibly apocryphal) seeding of its fields with salt as a classic example.

The 14th century can also be seen as the inflection point between the warmer years of the Medieval Climate Anomaly, which saw both agriculture and population expand, and the subsequent Little Ice Age that saw farming contract and populations stagnate, ultimately leading to the end of the feudal order.34 The transition to the modern era, of capitalism and empire, was marked by huge wars in Europe, conquest of the Americas, and colonial domination of Asia. These wars, like their predecessors, directly inflicted famine on hapless communities. However, one analysis of a dataset of famines in Europe from 1250 onward locates the transition from crises caused by population pressure on agricultural resources to those caused by human political agency in the early 18th century.35 The last great famine in Europe and North America triggered by climatic anomaly followed the eruption of the Indonesian volcano of Tombora in 1815, causing “the year without a summer.”36

Imperial Famines

The world history of famines from the 1490s to World War I largely consists of the history of European colonialism in its various forms. Localized agrarian famines continued, especially in the earlier part of this period and in China, but increasingly, imperial conquest was the immediate cause of starvation or provided the underlying conditions that left societies vulnerable.

Starvation was a tool of conquest. European settlers in North America starved Native Americans to compel them to leave their lands.37 The French conquest of Algeria was accomplished by using famine as a weapon. Elsewhere in Africa and on the British imperial frontier in South Asia, the doctrine of “small wars” required army officers to burn villages, seize livestock, and use measures that would “shock the conscience of the humanitarian” to subjugate the residents.38 The Germans in southwest Africa favored starvation in the genocide of the Herero and Nama.39 Hunger was also widely used by the French in Asia and Africa.40 Subaltern empires, including the Egyptians in the Upper Nile Valley (Sudan and South Sudan) and highland Ethiopian armies campaigning to conquer the south of that country, also routinely starved the resisting locals.41

Famine was a byproduct of colonial extraction, disrupting both food supply and entitlement, compounded by a lack of concern for ameliorating hardship or providing relief. An exemplary case followed the British East India Company’s conquest of Bengal in the 1770s. Bengal possessed wealth comparable to England, which is why the company wanted it. The pillage and extraction made fortunes in Britain but caused a famine that killed as much as a third of the population.42 In contrast to Indian rulers, who suspended tax collection during years of scarcity and provided relief (often modest) from their own granaries, the East India Company mercilessly continued to extract taxes and tribute, at the point of a gun. A century later, the “Late Victorian Holocausts” killed millions across South Asia due to a combination of colonial economic policies, drought related to El Niño, and an official relief system that was so parsimonious that the rations allocated to the working destitute compared to those provided in Nazi concentration camps. The US army occupying the Philippines exploited hardship due to drought to intensify its lethal suppression of resistance.43

The Great Hunger in Ireland of 1845 to 1851 killed a larger proportion of the overall population than any other large-scale famine on record.44 The immediate cause was potato blight that destroyed the staple crop of the rural poor who had come to rely on this as their major source of nutrition over the previous century of population growth and economic stagnation. In response, the British government was infamously indifferent, mounting meager and cruel means-tested relief programs and the continuing export of staple foods even in the depths of famine. Combined with mass emigration, especially to North America on what were known as “coffin ships,” many parts of rural Ireland have never recovered their population.

Malthusian arguments were appropriated by the British imperial government as an alibi for inaction in the face of famine in India and Ireland. Mass starvation was seen as the work of providence, punishing the poor for their irresponsibility in having children.

Agrarian famines were not entirely supplanted, especially in isolated areas and during years of extreme natural adversity. The fate of the Viking settlement in Greenland, which disappeared in the 15th century, remains a mystery. It is probable that the drop in global temperatures of that period, which was especially pronounced in the North Atlantic, contributed to the settlers’ demise.

Total War and Totalitarianism

In the short 20th century, powerful states of all political leanings deployed the instruments of war, economic control, and repression to cause the most lethal famines in the historical record. An arsenal of tools for mass starvation, fashioned over the previous centuries during imperial conquests, were not only deployed in the colonies but were also used against European populations. In the global count of famine fatalities in the 20th century, Asia ranks first and Europe second.

The British imposed a ring of steel on Germany and Austria-Hungary during World War I, blatantly violating the rules for naval warfare drawn up just a decade earlier (which Britain had refused to ratify at the last moment). Starvation not only helped bring the central powers to their knees but also led aggrieved German nationalists to plan for shifting the burden of starvation to conquered peoples in the next war, appropriating a mix of Malthusian and Darwinian arguments in support of exterminating other peoples.45 Germany also unleashed unrestricted submarine warfare against Britain with the aim of starving it into submission, but the British blockade was more effective. The war against the Ottoman Empire saw famines in Persia and the Levant, while starvation and starvation-related disease were the major causes of death in the Ottoman genocide inflicted on the Armenians.

In the Russian civil war of 1919 to 1921, millions perished as the armies rampaged through the breadbasket of the collapsing empire.46 In consolidating the grip of the Communist Party, Stalin imposed titanic socio-economic engineering, including a calamitous collectivization program. When this caused famine across Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and southern Russia, Stalin changed course within Russia but intensified the measures to confiscate food and suppress resistance elsewhere.47 In Ukraine, perhaps three million died, and this event is remembered as the Holodomor. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” regarded the Holodomor as a paradigmatic case of genocide by starvation.48

World War II reprised mass starvation crimes on an even greater scale.49 The Nazi Hungerplan for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union envisaged starving as many as thirty million “useless eaters” to death, to seize their food stores and land.50 This turned out to be slower and less efficient than the Nazi leadership had anticipated.

The Allies used starvation too. They blockaded occupied Europe, contributing to famine in Greece.51 The US encirclement of Japan through naval blockade and mining harbors was candidly named “Operation Starvation.” British war finance relied heavily on shifting the burden of taxation and inflation to India, contributing to famine in Bengal.52 Chinese nationalists destroyed the dams on the Yellow River, hoping that the floods would impede the Japanese advance. The action appears only to have drowned and starved their own people, the first act in a sequence of wartime famines across China. More widely, Japan’s war effort required occupied territories to feed the occupier, contributing to mass starvation in Burma, Indonesia, and Vietnam.53

Remarkably, the most severe famine of the century was yet to come. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” of 1958 to 1961, a Stalin-like experiment in collectivization and village-level industrialization, directly caused the deaths of at least thirty million people from starvation.54 Comparable programs of societal transformation in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge killed over a million.55 North Korea’s famine of 1995 was more the outcome of failed collectivization than its ruthless implementation, but the death toll was comparable.56

The post-World War II decades also saw counterinsurgency starvation imposed by retreating colonial powers, notably by the French in Algeria. Britain’s campaign in Malaya included its own “Operation Starvation.” These tactics were adopted by newly independent nations, including Nigeria in suppressing rebellion in Biafra and Pakistan in attempting to do so in Bangladesh.

Complex Emergencies

In the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, the trajectory of famines changed. They became fewer and less lethal. Most cases of famine were in sub-Saharan Africa, especially the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. While public narratives often focused on drought, in fact, most of these famines were war-related. The concept of “complex emergency” was coined, first of all with reference to the humanitarian crisis in Mozambique in the 1980s, to refer to the intersection of armed conflict, forced displacement, crises of livelihoods, and climatic adversities.57 The protracted and systemic nature of these crises, and the way in which aid programs too often were incorporated into the political management of social breakdown rather than serving as a respite to allow a return to a supposedly “normal” trajectory of development, contributed to a concept of a “permanent emergency” characterized by “the North's institutional accommodation with unresolved political crisis in the South.”58

The most lethal and highest profile famine of this era was the 1983 to 1985 famine in Ethiopia, which was the occasion for an outpouring of Western charity spurred by Bob Geldof’s BandAid. That famine, which killed between 600,000 and one million people, was caused by a combination of poverty, drought, poor agricultural policies, and, above all, the use of hunger as a weapon in counterinsurgency.59 A contemporaneous famine in Sudan was caused by a combination of drought and government economic policies that treated rural people as expendable laborers.60 These were followed by a protracted war famine in southern Sudan and a famine that accompanied state collapse in Somalia, in which rival militias rampaged through rural and urban areas, systematically looting the local populations.61 The Sudanese government’s murderous campaign in Darfur from 2003 to 2005 also caused starvation, though under strong international pressure, it agreed to a large humanitarian program and international peacekeepers. Most of these qualify as “category two” famine crimes under Marcus’s definition—reckless conduct by authorities aware of the consequences but unconcerned by them—with elements of deliberate starvation in order to subjugate a population regarded as an enemy.

The 1990s saw the return of hunger as a weapon to Europe. The Bosnian Serb siege of Sarajevo did not kill large numbers of people through starvation. For that reason, prosecutors at the International Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia chose not to press charges for the war crime of starvation, although there is no requirement of death by starvation in order for the crime to be proven.62

The closing years of the 20th century saw the development of a large, institutionalized and increasingly professional international humanitarian system. There had been major relief efforts before, notably Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration for Europe in the aftermath of World War I, which then continued operations in Russia during the civil war and Red Cross and private initiatives for the Middle East, Greece, Biafra ,and Bangladesh.63 But the scale, reach, and systematization of humanitarian action following the end of the Cold War had no precedent. The humanitarians’ philosophies varied widely, ranging from simply providing aid where it was most needed, to following faith-based moral codes that might or might not involve proselytizing, to advocating for the dispatch of troops. Bernard Kouchner, the French doctor who fiercely criticized the Red Cross during the Biafra war because of the organization’s cautiously neutral stance, went on to found Médecins Sans Frontières and became an outspoken advocate for humanitarian intervention.64 Many people owe their lives to humanitarian agencies, but the bigger story is that the growth of the international relief system followed the decline of great famines, rather than being its cause.

The End of Great Famines?

The single biggest reason why famines declined in number and severity was the disappearance of famine from Europe and East Asia (with the sole exception of North Korea). In Europe, the reason for this was the end of total war and totalitarianism after 1945. In Asia, these endings came more slowly, and other contributory reasons included rising incomes, cheaper food, and more capable states that were usually responsive to the political pressures for famine prevention and relief. In the case of India, the independent press, along with political parties seeking the votes of rural people, created a strong political incentive to end famine.65 India also entered its postcolonial period with widespread awareness that famine was a political issue because this had been a campaigning issue for the independence movement. China, lacking a free press and competitive elections, suppressed any public discussion of the Great Leap Forward famine, and it was left to the unspoken doctrine of officialdom that such a catastrophe should not be permitted to happen again.

A different version of an “antifamine political contract” was in force in Ethiopia from 1991 to 2018. Having emerged from a humanmade war famine, the leaders of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front adopted a national security strategy with famine prevention and poverty reduction at its heart. This was remarkably effective: Most of Ethiopia, despite being recurrently subject to drought, suffered no famine during that period. (The black spot was counterinsurgency starvation in the Somali-speaking region in 1999.) However, famine prevention was a technocratic party doctrine, not a popular contract enforced by democratic process, and it did not survive the dissolution of the group in 2019.66

When the leaders of the world convened to adopt the United Nations Millennium Development Goals in 2000, there was a goal for reducing hunger (number one) but no mention of famine. There was no need: All signs were that it had been consigned to history and would not recur.

The Future of Famine

The 2010s and 2020s have seen a return of famine, albeit not on the same scale as previous ones. In 2011, famine struck Somalia. It arose from multiple intersecting causes.67 There was armed conflict between the federal government of Somalia, which at the time did not hold the capital Mogadishu, supported by a coalition of African armies, against the Islamic militant group al-Shabaab. The government was corrupt and incapable, al-Shabaab was efficient and ruthless in extracting resources from the local population. On top of this came drought. An imminent famine was accurately forecast by humanitarian agencies, but the US administration of President Barack Obama strictly enforced the provision of the PATRIOT Act prohibiting any assistance, material or nonmaterial, deliberate or inadvertent, to a group designated as terrorist. This stalled relief operations for a critical few months until the UN issued its first-ever famine declaration, whereupon the US Department of Justice found the political will to adopt a humanitarian workaround that enabled aid to flow. An estimated 255,000 lives were lost. When Somalia faced a similar crisis five years later, international agencies adopted the principle of “no regrets” in their aid programming, arguing that it was far preferable to save lives and later find that they had done so inefficiently than to be scrupulous and slow.

The New Atrocity Famines

Where such political will was lacking, famines returned in the years 2016 and 2017. The UN spoke of “four famines” in that year.68 In Somalia, it would be more correct to say that major famine was prevented, though there is evidence for up to 40,000 excess deaths.69 In South Sudan, a major relief effort had a notable impact but did not prevent famine conditions in two counties.70 In northern Nigeria, war between the government and the extremist group Boko Haram caused a localized famine that was diagnosed only in retrospect.71 In Yemen, there were fears of major famine due to the war between the country’s recognized government, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and the Houthis, compounded by a strict economic and humanitarian blockade.72 Data collection was not sufficient to prove whether or not there was a famine.73 Syria did not make the list, despite the military policy of “kneel or starve” by the government of Bashar al-Asad, which caused an unknown number of starvation deaths.74

For humanitarian agencies such as the World Food Programme, the crises of 2016 brought to the fore their longstanding challenge of how best to operate in a war zone. Although in theory protected by the Geneva Conventions, relief workers and the aid commodities they sought to deliver are strategic resources for warring parties. From 2013 to 2022, more than one hundred aid workers were being killed, deliberately or inadvertently, every year.75 Food, medicine, and assets such as vehicles were being stolen or blocked from reaching their intended recipients. It was also clear that a narrow humanitarian agenda of providing relief was insufficient. UN staff worked with diplomats and lawyers to develop a resolution at the UN Security Council that would underscore the relevant international law and operationalize humanitarian principles.76 Resolution 2417 on armed conflict and hunger was adopted unanimously by the Security Council in May 2018. Rather than creating new law, it established UN mechanisms for reporting on humanitarian crises caused, or threatened, by armed conflicts. The following year, an amendment to the Rome Statute of the ICC closed a loophole in international criminal law by extending the prohibition on the war crime of starvation to conflicts not of an international nature, adding article 8(2)(e)(xix).77

However, the crises of 2016 appear also to have taught a lesson to those political leaders who consider starvation to be a cheap and effective tool. By concealing or manipulating information and by further politicizing the conflict in question, they could stall attempts to apply the law.

A notably egregious case was in Ethiopia from 2020 to 2022, taking the form of a campaign of starvation conducted by the combined forces of the Ethiopian army, allied militias, and the Eritrean army against the people of Tigray region. In the first eight months of this war, this campaign included comprehensively destroying, removing, or rendering useless objects indispensable for the survival of the civilian population, including food and agriculture, health facilities, water infrastructure, and industry and services.78 Widespread and systematic rape and sexual torture was not only a crime in itself but prevented women and girls from providing for themselves and their families during the crisis and, for survivors of rape, into their future lives. This war of starvation was followed by a comprehensive siege of the region, shutting all communications, banking, commerce, and movement, as well as blocking humanitarian aid. The starvation operation was remarkably successful in gaining the consent, mostly tacit and sometimes explicit, of key international actors. Resolution 2417 was rendered a dead letter by UN inaction.

Russia’s military tactics during its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 included sieges of cities on the frontline, notably Mariupol, which caused civilian deaths from starvation though not on a scale sufficient to qualify as a famine.79 Russia also attacked Ukraine’s agricultural economy, through destruction of farming infrastructure, theft of food and equipment, and a blockade of wheat exports through Black Sea ports.80 These actions, though reprehensible and likely criminal, did not cause famine in Ukraine or globally, despite a spike in the price of grain on world markets.

The Israeli siege of Gaza from 2007 to 2023, depriving residents of essential items, loosened and tightened at the discretion of the occupier, also met the definition of the war crime of starvation, even though starvation deaths were not confirmed.81 Israel’s military operation and siege that began in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack and massacre by Hamas rapidly created a severe food emergency.82 In considering South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, the Court quoted senior humanitarian officials describing how Gaza was becoming uninhabitable and its people exposed to hunger and disease, alongside senior Israeli officials publicly expressing their determination to deny the people of Gaza the essentials of life.83 The court issued provisional measures including specific reference to Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention, instructing Israel to “take all measures in its power to prevent the commission of acts… [of] deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”84

Among other contemporary cases of food emergency caused deliberately or recklessly by conflict and deliberate deprivation are Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Haiti, Mali, and Sudan. The increased perpetration of starvation crimes intersects with adverse shifts in two other principal contributory factors to famine, namely food supply and food entitlement.

Food Supply

There is no reason to doubt that the corporate-neoliberal world food regime can grow and transport sufficient food to feed the world’s human population, and indeed support a substantially larger number of consumers.85 Since World War II, global food prices have gradually decreased, so that even recent peaks during the “world food crises” of 2008, 2011, and 2022 are relatively low in comparison to historic levels. Industrial farming of staple foods has proved remarkably resilient, with its production base sufficiently distributed across continents and hemispheres to maintain supply levels. A straightforward Malthusian shock is not in prospect. However, there are many reasons to fear that the food regime is fragile in the short term and unsustainable in the future.86

Climate change is a clear and immediate danger to food production, through drought, flood, and fire. Industrial agriculture is vulnerable to zoonotic disease, such as bird flu, to microbial antibiotic resistance and pest infestations. Food production and prices are also subject to turmoil on financial markets, subsequent on financial instruments inverting the traditional task of hedging (to protect food commodities from risk) to speculation (amplifying market fluctuation in pursuit of profit for speculators). As the role of industrial farming in generating carbon dioxide and methane becomes more fully appreciated, alongside the ecological devastation it commonly entails, pressure will mount for an agricultural transition to parallel the energy transition from fossil fuels. Just as capitalist society is addicted to fossil fuels, it is also addicted to cheap processed food, with the result that many of contemporary malnourished people suffer from the peculiarly modern syndrome of obesity. Meanwhile, China, India, and Russia, among other countries seeking to challenge the global hegemony of the US economic and financial regime, are moving toward dismantling the corporate-neoliberal food regime in favor of national food sovereignty. It is notable that the first collaboration announced among the BRICS club of countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) was on food security.87 The global food regime faces several simultaneous transitions, which are likely to be traumatic for those most dependent on imported food grains. This also places pressure on the international food aid regime, funded mostly by the United States and Europe, with a sharp contraction in humanitarian funding in 2023.

Food supply chains, from fertilizer and other inputs through to shipping, marketing, and retail, have all been exposed as unexpectedly fragile. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed this. Additionally, while wealthy developed countries were able to use their financial capabilities to fund a safety net and other compensatory responses, poorer countries were not only unable to do this, but they also faced sharply increased costs of borrowing and pitifully small concessionary loans and grants. Before low-income food-insecure countries were able to reap the long-promised benefits of globalization under a neoliberal economic regime, they faced the shock and cost of deglobalization. This was accentuated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The immediate impact of the disruption of the Black Sea grain trade and the export of fertilizers from Russia and Belarus was higher prices, especially for countries reliant on existing contracts for wheat imports that could no longer be honored. This is hastening the BRICS-led trend toward economic nationalism as a geostrategic adjustment.

The biggest shocks are yet to come, as the most powerful nations and corporations contest the actions necessary for adapting to climate crisis. Without doubt, the burden of hardship will be shifted to those least able to stake their economic and political claims.

Food Entitlement

Characteristic of famines in market economies is a price scissors effect whereby food prices increase at the same time as real wages and benefits (entitlements) shrink. Mass starvation can, however, arise from one blade acting alone. The prospect of large-scale food entitlement collapse should not be ruled out. Indeed, insofar as one of the early indicators of entitlement collapse is distress migration, it may already be occurring in many countries.

In developed nations, the debate over the future of work has paid relatively little heed to the prospect that large populations in the Global South face a future with no prospect of earning a living wage in the formal sector. Traditional livelihoods in agriculture, livestock herding, fishing, retail, and artisanal employment are also under pressure, while opportunities in the informal sector are precarious. State-based entitlement systems, including pensions, benefits, subsidies for essential items including staple foods, and public food distribution systems, are also under severe strain. The international humanitarian system relies on a crude system of annual appeals and discretionary budgets and is perennially underresourced.88 Restrictions on migration by high income countries are squeezing the options for the poor to follow the migration of capital.

Famine Crimes

For the governments of poor countries trying to eke out a living on the margins of an unforgiving capitalist economy, also subject to the diktat of more powerful nations’ security strategies, the margin for policy discretion is small indeed. Unable to satisfy the aspirations of their populace, the most that leaders can do is hone their skills of practicing transactional politics so as to stay in power. Critical media interest in famine is declining. The political incentives for famine prevention are diminishing in favor of indifference and impunity. There is an association between economic precarity, political turbulence, and armed conflict, including a permissive environment for starvation crimes.89

If this is correct, we can expect first- and second-degree famine crimes to become more frequent. As the underlying precarity of populations increases, starvation becomes a more rapid and efficient weapon of war. As domestic mechanisms for holding rulers to account weaken and international norms lose their purchase, the constraints on using such a weapon are reduced. Governments under threat will be tempted to use starvation to compel their adversaries to accept unconditional political subjugation. Those fighting wars will have fewer restraints on their reckless conduct of faminogenic military operations.

The broader phenomenon is the rise of a politics of indifference. National governments may be ready to tolerate mass hunger, provided that they have a sufficient security apparatus to suppress urban demonstrations and food riots. The international dimension to indifference is that aid donors may be ready to ignore a crisis or make only symbolic gestures when a national government is culpable, indifferent or incapable.

Conclusion

Over the millennia, famine has been a shapeshifter, changing its character as human societies have changed in their relationship with the natural environment, the means of food production, distribution, and entitlement, and power relations. As those relationships shift in the current era, famines too will change.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine caused massive disruption to the supply of wheat from Ukraine and southern Russia to international markets and to the World Food Programme. In the months that followed, the UN convened a special session of the Security Council and a summit meeting on global food security. The focus of Secretary General Guterres and Western leaders was overwhelmingly on food supply with secondary attention to food entitlement and passing mention of international humanitarian law.

The challenge is more fundamental. Drawing on Duffield, scholars can describe the predicament of poor populations in many parts of the Global South as a permanent, escalating emergency.90 The combination of food supply shocks, food entitlement precarity, and a more permissive political space for starvation crimes increases the risk of famine in the near term. In the longer term—which may arrive more quickly than anticipated—the traumas of climate change and the contested responses to it may amplify these stresses and their calamitous outcomes.

Further Reading

  • Aid Workers Security Database. “Major Attacks on Aid Workers: Summary Statistics,” 2023.
  • Applebaum, A. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. New York: Penguin Random House, 2018.
  • Alfani, G., and C. Ó Gráda. “The Timing and Causes of Famines in Europe.” Nature Sustainability 1, no. 6 (2018): 283–288.
  • Arnold, D. Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.
  • Benthall, J. “Le sans-frontierism,” Anthropology Today 7, no. 6 (1991): 1–3.
  • Benvenisti, E.The International Law of Prolonged Sieges and Blockades: Gaza as a Case Study.” University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 22/2021. 2021.
  • Boserup, E. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1965.
  • Boserup, E. “Environment, Population, and Technology in Primitive Societies.” Population and Development Review 2, no. 1 (1976): 21–36.
  • Brenner, R.“The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism.” In The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Edited by T. Aston and C. Philpin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
  • BRICS Information Centre.BRIC's Joint Statement on Global Food Security,” 2009.
  • Callwell, Colonel C. E. Small Wars: Their Principle and Practice. 3rd ed. Lincoln: Bison Books, 1996 [1906].
  • Cameron, S. The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.
  • Caulk, R. “Armies as Predators: Soldiers and Peasants in Ethiopia c. 1850-1935.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 11, no. 3 (1978): 457–493.
  • Checchi, F., C. Jarvis, K. van Zandfoort and A. Warsame. “Mortality among Populations Affected by Armed Conflict in Northeast Nigeria, 2016 to 2019.” PNAS 120, no. 30 (2023): e2217601120.
  • Checchi, F., A. Testa, A. Warsame, L. Quach, and R. Burns. “Estimates of Crisis-Attributable Mortality in South Sudan, December 2013-April 2018: A Statistical Analysis.” London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 2018.
  • Clarke, D., and S. Dercon. Dull Disasters: How Planning Ahead Will Make a Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
  • Colledge S, Conolly J, Crema E, and Shennan S. “Neolithic Population Crash in Northwest Europe Associated with Agricultural Crisis.” Quaternary Research. 92, no. 3 (2019): 686–707.
  • Collingham, L. The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food. New York: Penguin, 2012.
  • Conley, B., and A. de Waal. “The Purposes of Starvation: Historical and Contemporary Uses.” Journal of International Criminal Justice 17, no. 4 (2019): 699–722.
  • Cribb, J. The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
  • Curtis, K.The ‘Four Famines’ Explained.” UN Dispatch, March 17, 2017.
  • D’Alessandro, F., and M. Gillett. “The War Crime of Starvation in Non-International Armed Conflict.” Oxford: Blavatnik School of Government, Working Paper, BSG-WP-2019/031. 2019.
  • Daschuk, J. Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. Regina, Canada: University of Regina Press, 2013.
  • Davey, E. “Beyond the ‘French Doctors’: The Evolution and Interpretation of Humanitarian Action in France.” Overseas Development Institute, Humanitarian Policy Group Working Paper, 2012.
  • Davis, M. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nińo Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso, 1999.
  • DeFalco, R. “The Right to Food in Gaza: Israel’s Obligations under International Law.” Rutgers Law Record 35 (2009): 11–22.
  • Devereux, S. Theories of Famine. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
  • De Waal, A. Evil Days: Thirty Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia. New York, Human Rights Watch, 1991.
  • De Waal, A. Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984–1985. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989.
  • De Waal, A. Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine. Cambridge, Polity, 2017.
  • De Waal, A. “Memory and the Social Meaning of Famine.” Third World Quarterly 45, no. 2 (2023): 439–443.
  • De Waal, A. “Starving Out the South, 1984-9.” In Civil War in the Sudan. Edited by M. Daly and A. Alsikainga, 202–233. London: British Academic Press, 1993.
  • Dikötter, F. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1968–1962. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.
  • Donets, A., and A Prezanti. “Hostage City: Hunger, Disease, and Inhumanity in Russian-Occupied Mariupol.” Texas International Law Journal 58, no. 3 (2023): 99–118.
  • Duffield, M. “Complex Emergencies and the Crisis of Developmentalism.” IDS Bulletin 25, no. 4 (1994): 37–45.
  • FAO. “Hunger and Food Insecurity,” 2023.
  • Franklin-Lyons, A. “Modern Famine Theory and the Study of Pre-Modern Famines.” Crisis alimentarias en la Edad Media. Modelos, explicaciones y representaciones, Barcelone (2013): 33–45.
  • Friedmann, H. “The Political Economy of Food: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar International Food Order.” American Journal of Sociology 88S (1982): 248–286.
  • Graeber, D., and D. Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, Macmillan, 2021.
  • Hariri, Y. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper, 2011.
  • Hermann, R. No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.
  • Hionidou, V. Famine and Death in Occupied Greece 1941–1944. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
  • Howard-Hassman, R. State Food Crimes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
  • Howe, P., and S. Devereux. “Famine Intensity and Magnitude Scales: A Proposal for an Instrumental Definition of Famine.” Disasters 28, no. 1 (2004): 353–372.
  • Huff, G. World War II and Southeast Asia: Economy and Society under Japanese Occupation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
  • IPC. “IPC and Famine.” 2023a.
  • Jordan, W. The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
  • Jordash, W., C. Murdoch, and J. Holmes. “A Comprehensive Review of Existing IHL and ICL As It Relates to Starvation.” In Accountability for Mass Starvation: Testing the limits of the law. Edited by B. Conley, A. de Waal, C. Murdoch, and W. Jordash, 107–154. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
  • Kanfash, M., and A. Aljaseem. “Starvation as Strategy in the Syrian Armed Conflict: Siege, Deprivation, and Detention.” In Accountability for Mass Starvation: Testing the limits of the law. Edited by B. Conley, A. de Waal, C. Murdoch, and W. Jordash, 195–216. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
  • Keen, D. The Benefits of Famine: A Political Economy of Famine in Southwestern Sudan 1983–1989. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
  • Keen, D. Complex Emergencies. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
  • Kiernan, B. “The Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia: The Death Tolls in Cambodia, 1975-79, and East Timor, 1975-80.” Critical Asian Studies 35, no. 4 (2003): 585–597.
  • Lemkin, R. “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine,” in Roman Serbyn, “Lemkin on the Ukrainian Genocide,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 7 (2009): 123–130.
  • Lieberman, B., and E. Gordon. Climate Change in History: Prehistory to the Present. 2nd ed. London, Bloomsbury, 2022.
  • Loewenberg, S. “Famine Fears in North-East Nigeria as Boko Haram Fight Rages.” The Lancet 389, no. 10067 (2017): 352.
  • Malthus, Thomas R. An Essay on the Principle of Population. 6th ed. London: Ward, Locke and Co., 1890 [1826].
  • Malthus, Thomas R. First Essay on the Principle of Population. London: Macmillan, 1926 [1798].
  • Marcus, D. “Famine Crimes in International Law.” American Journal of International Law 97, no. 2 (2003): 245–281.
  • Maxwell, D., and N. Majid. Famine in Somalia: Competing Imperatives, Collective Failures, 2011–12. London: Hurst, 2016.
  • McLane, J. Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  • McMichael, P. “A Food Regime Analysis of the ‘World Food Crisis.’” Agriculture and Human Values 26 (2009): 281–295.
  • Natsios, A. The Great North Korean Famine: Famine, Politics and Foreign Policy. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 2001.
  • Newton, C.“‘Not Never Again, But Next Time’: Armed Conflict and Mass Starvation in South Sudan 2013-2019.” In Accountability for Mass Starvation: Testing the Limits of the Law. Edited by B. Conley, A. de Waal, C. Murdoch, and W. Jordash, 155–194. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
  • Nyssen, J. et al. “Documenting the Civilian Victims of the Tigray War.” YouTube. January 19, 2023. Video, 56:54.
  • Ogbu, T, Rodriguez-Llanes, M. de Almeida, N. Speybroeck, and D. Guha-Sapir. “Human Insecurity and Child Deaths in Conflict: Evidence for Improved Response in Yemen.” International Journal of Epidemiology 51, no. 3 (2022): 847–857.
  • Ó Gráda, C. Famine: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
  • Ó Gráda, C. The Great Irish Famine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
  • Ó Gráda, C. The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Patenaude, B. The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
  • Patnaik, U. “Mr Keynes and the Forgotten Holocaust in Bengal, 1943–44: Or, the Macroeconomics of Extreme Demand Compression.” Studies in People’s History 4, no. 2 (2017): 197–210.
  • Post, J. The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
  • Rangasami, A. “Failure of Exchange Entitlements Theory of Famine.” Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 41 (1985): 1748.
  • Rubin, O. “The Precarious State of Famine Research.” Journal of Development Studies 55, no. 8 (2019): 1633–1653.
  • Sarkar, A.“‘Once We Control Them, We Will Feed Them’: Mass Starvation in Yemen.” In Accountability for Mass Starvation: Testing the Limits of the Law. Edited by B. Conley, A. de Waal, C. Murdoch, and W. Jordash, 217–259. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
  • Sarkar, A., B. Spatz, A. de Waal, C. Newton,and D. Maxwell.“The Political Marketplace Framework and Mass Starvation: How Can Humanitarian Analysis, Early Warning and Response Be Improved?” Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, no. 3 (2021): 43–55.
  • Sen, A. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.
  • Sen, A. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.
  • Schaller, D. “From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa.” In Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History. Edited by D. Moses, 296–324. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.
  • Scott, J. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.
  • Serels, S. Starvation and the State: Famine, Slavery, and Power in Sudan, 1883–1956. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
  • Shennan, S. The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
  • Slobodkin, J. The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France’s Colonies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023.
  • Sorokin, P. Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1975 [1922].
  • Spoorenberg, T., and D. Schwekendiek. “Demographic Changes in North Korea: 1993-2008.” Population and Development Review 38, no. 1 (2012): 133–158.
  • UNOCHA. “Global Humanitarian Overview 2024.” 2023b.
  • Vanhaute, E. “From Famine to Food Crisis: What History Can Teach Us about Local and Global Subsistence Crises.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 1 (2011): 47–65.
  • Warsame, A., S. Frison, and F. Checchi. “Drought, Armed Conflict and Population Mortality in Somalia, 2014–2018: A Statistical Analysis.” PLOS Global Public Health 3, no. 4 (2023): e0001136.
  • Watkins, S., and J. Menken. “Famines in Historical Perspective.” Population and Development Review 11 (1985): 647–676.
  • Watson, A. Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I. New York: Basic Books, 2017.
  • Watts, M. Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
  • Wheatcroft, S. “Eastern Europe and the USSR.” In Famine in European History. Edited by G. Alfani and C. Ó Gráda, 212–239. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
  • World Peace Foundation. “Famine Trends, Dataset, Tables and Graphs.” Accessed February 23, 2024.
  • Zappalà, S. “Conflict Related Hunger, ‘Starvation Crimes’ and UN Security Council Resolution 2417 (2018).” Journal of International Criminal Justice 17, no. 4 (2019): 881–906.

Notes