Four Famines (Take 2)

Argh! I stuffed up the post schedule meaning a half-baked post was published AND emailed. Sorry about that, here’s the real deal:

A few months ago I went to a talk by Tom Kenealy (a reasonably famous Australian author who writes about a book a year) on his latest book Three Famines. The book is, as expected, a comparative historical study of three famines combined with an examination as to their causes, features and so forth. I haven’t read the book yet, but still, that was packed with some very interesting observations — Kenealy’s conclusion is that famine is pretty much always a man-made event, whether through gross malice or (more commonly) gross incompetence tinged with a twist of malice.

The first famine discussed is the Irish potato famine which most readers would probably know. Widespread, systematic reports of the famine made to British government departments were not believed. Kenealy found this to be one of the common feature of famines — there is a huge amount of denial and cognitive dissonance within governments. Famine seems to result when the government sees it as a problem of shame as opposed to harm. Which makes sense: if you’re ashamed then the easiest solution is to suppress reports of the famine and not actually do anything. However, citizens can also be in a staggering bog of denial — for an example see my post on the Holodomor.

The Irish famine was also marked by a standard progression in famine-stricken areas. As people run out of food, thousands start to forage the countryside looking for any semblance of nutrition. This is when objects like bark and grass start to be eaten. In Ireland people descended on the coastline to look for oysters and anything else with a bit of protein. However there is never enough since obviously a society that lives on agriculture cannot survive on foraging since the calories per square kilometer available is a fraction of what you have in farming. So people start to waste away, which takes away their energy to keep looking for food, creating a spiral of decline.

The second famine is one most people haven’t heard of. This was a famine in East Bengal in 1943 where several million people starved. You might think that this famine happened because it was overshadowed by the war — and to an extent this is true. However, it was also a famine that Winston Churchill deliberately allowed to continue because he thought the Indians were an inferiour race. He deliberately withheld food aid ships in favour of stockpiling the food for “other purposes”. For instance, Australian food ships would pass by India to store grain in Europe. He also feared the Japanese would land on the coast and so had the coastline scorched around the time of famine, destroying ships and seizing rice. More in this BBC article — this has also been covered by Andrew Sullivan.

During this famine, India exported tens of thousands of tons of food to overseas markets. This is something else that happens routinely. During the Holodomor, Stalin exported loads of grain from Ukraine to the west. This is probably the most clear and consistent element of famines being man-made. Kenealy also spoke of the religious element in the East Bengal famine: many upper caste women for instance died because they couldn’t bring themselves to beg from lower castes or share food with them.

The third famine was another famous one: the 1985 Ethiopia/Eritrea famine that had Bob Geldoff’s Live Aid activism. There, the main thing Kenealy learned was how easy it is for well-meaning people to try assist in a very naive way. I guess part of it comes from how hard it is for someone living a comfortable well-fed life in an industrialised country to even imagine that someone wants a certain race/tribe/ethnicity to stave. Or will at least actively prevent aid like Mengistu did for this particular famine, letting the Live Aid goods go only so far (the more remote regions got shafted). Another shocking example of this I found in Wikipedia when getting the link for the Irish Famine above:

In 1845, Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid declared his intention to send £10,000 to Irish farmers but Queen Victoria requested that the Sultan send only £1000, because she herself had sent only £2000. The Sultan sent the £1000 sterling but also secretly sent three ships full of food. The English courts tried to block the ships, but the food arrived at Drogheda harbour and was left there by Ottoman sailors.[Source]

Kenealy ends in a reasonably hopeful note. It seems we are much better at responding to famines these days both in terms of international will and actual aid effectivess. Furthermore, there hasn’t been a wide-scale famine for a while — I guess most starvation today is in smaller pockets that don’t make such a news impact since it’s not an entire region. Furthermore, as he notes there’s never been a famine in a liberal democracy (although I think that has it backwards — the types of countries wealthy enough not to be at risk of famine had an easier path to liberal democracy).

Despite all this, I saw a recent documentary on the hidden famines in North Korea — it is mostly in countries with this level of dictatorship that such a classical famine can happen. The usual features are all there — government shame and denial, suppression of information over aid, keeping capital cities well fed while the provinces starve. Here’s the video.