Facts about Famine
The specter of famine recurred only in the early 1970s, when Ethiopia and the west African Sahel suffered drought and famine.
The devastations brought on by famines are not accountable to one single event in a region.
The Codes listed three stages of food insecurity: near-scarcity, scarcity and famine, and were highly influential in the creation of subsequent famine warning or measurement systems.
Under-nourished people are naturally more susceptible to these diseases and this only adds to the many factors which cause death and suffering in famine stricken regions.
Famines continued in the Soviet era, the most famous one being the Holodomor in Ukraine (1932-1933) which also involved a significant part of the population of Russia.
Droughts and famines in Imperial Russia are known to have happened every 10 to 13 years, with average droughts happening every five to seven years.
Observations by the Famine Commission of 1880 supported the notion that food distribution was more to blame for famines than food scarcity.
The solution to famine, therefore, can be seen to lie in a change in human nature, rather than in external factors.
The second Soviet famine happened during the collectivization in the USSR.
The 1960s also marked a time of specific, ethnomusicological research, conducted by Alice M. Moyle and Trevor A. Jones, who later published many articles on aboriginal music and the didgeridoo in particular.
The most serious famines have been caused by a combination of drought, misguided economic policies, and conflict.
AIDS is also having long-term economic effects on agriculture by reducing the available workforce, and is creating new vulnerabilities to famine by overburdening poor households.
The famine continued for seven years until the summer of 1322, when the weather pattern returned to more favorable conditions.
The vulnerable agricultural sector experienced a massive failure in 1995–1996, expanding to full-fledged famine by 1996–1999.
Owing to its almost entire dependence upon the monsoon rains, India is liable to crop failures, which upon occasion deepen into famine.
The four famines of 1810, 1811, 1846, and 1849 are said to have killed not less than 45 million people (Ferreyra 2004).
Many areas that suffered famines in the past have protected themselves through technological and social development.
The great famine that afflicted Ethiopia from 1888 to 1892 cost it roughly one-third of its population (Wolde-Georgis 1997).
Famines not only kill masses of people, they also destroy livestock, which people depend upon as food and for their livelihood, extending the impact.
The Netherlands was able to escape most of the damaging effects of the famine, though the 1590s were still difficult years there.
The famine was brought on by collaboration between the Japanese who had entered Vietnam in 1940 and its French colonialists.
The largest famine of the twentieth century, and almost certainly of all time, was the 1958–1961 Great Leap Forward famine.
A prominent economist on the subject, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, has noted that no functioning democracy has ever suffered a famine.
Famine is associated both with natural causes, such as crop failure and pestilence, and artificial or man-made causes including war and genocide.
The last major famine to afflict India before its independence, was again mainly in the region of Bengal between 1943 to 1944.
China's Qing Dynasty bureaucracy, which devoted extensive attention to minimizing famines, is credited with averting a series of famines following El Niсo-Southern Oscillation-linked droughts and floods.
Chinese scholars kept count of 1,828 rampages by the famine since 108 B.C.E.
The resulting famine and civil strife is believed to have been a major cause of the collapse of the Old Kingdom.
In biological terms, a population beyond its regional carrying capacity causes famine.
Famines continued to persist in Colonial India until independence was gained in 1947.
About 200,000 Kazakh nomads fled to China, Iran, Mongolia, and Afghanistan during the famine.
The Ethiopian famine of that time was closely linked to the crisis of feudalism in that country, and in due course helped to bring about the downfall of the Emperor Haile Selassie.
A number of countries saw famines in the nineteenth century, and famine still occurred in eastern Europe during the twentieth century.
Ironically in the initial year of the famine, although potato crops had failed, Ireland’s British lords were producing grain for export.
Within six months there were large scale food shortages and by the following year, 1846, famine was a full grown epidemic throughout the land.
The first famine in the USSR happened in 1921-1923 and garnered wide international attention.
The destruction of crops, coupled with the spread of pests in the fields, forced the famine to reach as far as north Vietnam causing its peak in early 1945.
Floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and other such disasters are part of the “natural” causes which are out of human control and oftentimes can lead to famines.
Today, famine strikes African countries the hardest, but with ongoing wars, internal struggles, and economic instability, famine continues to be a worldwide problem with millions of individuals suffering.
The Sahelian famine was associated with the slowly growing crisis of pastoralism in Africa, which has seen livestock herding decline as a viable way of life.
Possible reasons for this include greater female resilience under the pressure of malnutrition, and that women are more skilled at gathering and processing wild foods and other fall-back famine foods.
Famines therefore leave the reproductive core of a population—adult women—less affected compared to other population categories, and post-famine periods are often characterized a "rebound" with increased births.
A famine is a phenomenon in which a large percentage of the population of a region or country is so undernourished that death by starvation or other related diseases becomes increasingly common.
The closest India has come to a famine was in 1966, in the region of Bihar.
On the other hand, wars, civil strife, government’s poor management of resources, and other similar events are viewed as the “artificial” causes which may also aid towards developing famine within a region.
Of greater long-term demographic impact is emigration: Ireland was chiefly depopulated after the famine of the 1940s by waves of emigration.
A plentiful harvest throughout Western Europe became a necessity in order to avoid large scale famines.
Actual famine did not occur, for the Amsterdam grain trade guaranteed that there would always be something to eat in the Netherlands although hunger was prevalent.
Perhaps the worst famine since 1600, the great famine in Finland in 1696, killed a third of the population.
By the 1620s, the economy was even more developed, so the country was able to avoid the hardships of that period of famine with even greater impunity.
Famine struck North Korea in the mid-1990s, set off by unprecedented floods.
Prior to the Great Famine, Europe had faced many cases of food shortages in local regions which led to the deaths of some local inhabitants.
One of the earliest were the Indian Famine Codes devised by the British in the 1880s.
The immediate causes of this famine lay in Chairman Mao Zedong's ill-fated attempt to transform China from an agricultural nation.
The 1590s saw the worst famines in centuries across all of Europe, except in certain areas, notably the Netherlands.
When the leadership did become aware of the scale of the famine, it did little to respond.
Vietnam experienced famines on a comparatively smaller scale in the mid-1980s and the 1990s.
Famine in Deccan killed at least 2 million people in 1702-1704.
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) with emergency status in July of 2005, as well as Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia, and Zimbabwe.
A consistent demographic fact is that in all recorded famines, male mortality exceeds female.
Famine can be defined as the catastrophic disruption of the social, economic, and institutional systems that provide for food production, distribution, and consumption.
Local food shortages, however, were vastly different in nature and impact compared to the famines that hit Western Europe in the fourteenth century.
The most significant famine which occurred in Vietnam was the Vietnamese Famine of 1945.
Famines can be exacerbated by poor governance or inadequate logistics for food distribution.
Political instability was a driving force in the famine of Karamoja, Uganda in 1980.
The Irish Potato Famine was the culmination of a social, biological, political, and economic catastrophe.
China has not experienced a major famine since 1961 (Woo-Cummings, 2002).
The Great Famine of Estonia (1695–1697) was responsible for the death of 70,000 to 75,000 people, approximately 20 percent of the population of what was at that time Swedish Estonia.