Understanding Famine: Causes, Effects, and Historical Context

1. Famine

3. A famine is a widespread scarcity of food that may apply to any faunal species, which phenomenon is usually accompanied by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality. In many regions of the world as of 2009, there is ongoing famine among a considerable fraction of the human population.

4. Food shortages in a population are caused either by a lack of food or by difficulties in food distribution; it may be worsened by natural climate fluctuations and by extreme political conditions such as tyrannical government or warfare.

5. Large historical famines • the famine of 1958-61 in China • 1942-1945 disaster in Bengal • in China in 1928 and 1942 • a sequence of famines in the Soviet Union, including the Holodomor, Stalin's famine inflicted on Ukraine in 1932–33 • in Cambodia in the 1970s • the Ethiopian famine of 1983-85 • the North Korean Famine of the 1990s

7. Holodomor • The term Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор; translation: death by starvation) is the name used by Ukrainians for the famine of 1932–1933 in the Ukrainian SSR during which millions of people starved to death as a result of the economic and trade policies instituted by the government of Joseph Stalin. The famine was a part of wider Soviet famine of 1932–1933. There were no natural causes for starvation and in fact, Ukraine—unlike other Soviet Republics—enjoyed a bumper wheat crop in 1932.[1][2] Millions of inhabitants died of starvation in an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe in the history of Ukraine.Estimates on the total number of casualties within Soviet Ukraine range mostly from 2.6 million to 10 million.

8. Effects of famine • The demographic impacts of famine are sharp. Mortality is concentrated among children and the elderly. A consistent demographic fact is that in all recorded famines, male mortality exceeds female, even in those populations (such as northern India and Pakistan) where there is a normal times male longevity advantage. Reasons for this may include greater female resilience under the pressure of malnutrition, and the fact that women are more skilled at gathering and processing wild foods and other fall-back famine foods. Famine is also accompanied by lower fertility. Famines therefore leave the reproductive core of a population—adult women—lesser affected compared to other population categories, and post-famine periods are often characterized a "rebound" with increased births.

10. Be gone Blithe and fickle one, did I feel you in the night, Or glimpse you laughing in the morning?You flirt! Stop winking at my need. There you are again; small, pale oneI thought I saw you, hunger, then you'd gone,In your playful, tickling candour;Hugging my ribs and glossing my eager tongue.Oh, mischief-loving child,Be gone.But no, you do not fool me; you are just a ghost,Existing everywhere and nowhere, hiding Fast your ravenous greed, in a dying mask.In that other screaming world you torture, beat and killThe children hanging at the edge of death.Raking out the souls of mothers, lost in dust of breath,Swelling empty bellies carved as bowls of emptiness.Oh, savage reaper of the weak,Be gone.

12. The Black Horse of Famine When a living creature summons The rider on the black horse toCome, he rides silently across The stage carrying a balance or scale. The black horse and the scale denotes Famine which follows war. The famineWas so great, that a man might liveIn semi-starvation, but no more. Wheat and barley was measured andWheat sold at $6.40 a bushel, and Barley about $2.00 per bushel, Twelve times the normal price. A day’s wages for a man was 20 cents.While there was a shortage of grain,There was superabundance of wineWhich was not a necessity. When food was scarce and hungerWas stalking the land, there wasNo room for a luxury-lovingMinority to withhold grain. Rex Henderson