WFP is this year mounting its biggest operation ever, targeting million people. With sufficient funding and access, the agency said it can provide them with lifesaving food and nutritional assistance.
Skip to main content. Welcome to the United Nations. Toggle navigation Language:. Furthermore, whilst total birth rates were low in the post-famine period, the number of children being born to married couples remained high, and the rate of natural increase was highest in those parts of the country worst hit by the famine, complicating any simple explanation along these lines. Similarly, whilst the famine itself clearly provided the impetus for mass emigration, high levels of outward migration began some decades before the famine and continued long afterwards in the context of a much-ameliorated standard of living.
Thus, it seems likely that it was the promise of improved economic opportunities, rather than fear of famine which drove emigration between and But what can we say about the impact of famines on long-term population trends more generally?
What impact have such crises played in shaping population trends, relative to other global developments? Here are two charts showing the historic evolution of death rates in England and Wales, and in Norway. You can see that the decline in average mortality rates in both countries was preceded by a reduction in the spread around the average i.
However, when such spikes were common, they in fact played a relatively small part in keeping average mortality rates as high as they were. You can picture this by imagining what would happen if you took the highest points in the charts above — representing the crises in mortality — and moved them downwards towards the average for that time.
The line showing the year moving average would indeed fall, but only by a small amount compared to the overall decline. Falling death rates, and increasing life expectancy , are trends that took place first in early industrialising countries, but have been a common experience in all parts of the world as poverty has declined , and healthcare and nutrition has improved.
But since the s this has been outpaced by a fall in birth rates , such that overall the global population growth rate has been steadily falling, and is likely to approach zero towards the end of this century. The rapid growth in population witnessed since the early 20th century was due to the fall in death rates happening ahead of the fall in birth rates, generating a period of natural increase in between.
This chart shows this transition as it occurred in five very different countries. Here also we can see that the secular decline in death rates follow a reduction in its volatility. But again, the height of the peaks in earlier decades are generally small relative to the overall decline. As with any living organism, humans cannot sustain a given population without sufficient energy resources. Given this, at first glance, it does seem intuitive to assume population growth and famines to be closely linked via food availability.
The evidence discussed here and also here contradicts any simplified view of this relationship that fails to acknowledge the diverse causes of famines and population dynamics. The analogy to other living organisms can obscure what is different about the human species. We organize ourselves into complex social and political structures capable of incredible joint accomplishments — such as the eradication of diseases. But we are also capable of inflicting, or consciously allowing, unimaginable suffering — including the majority of famine deaths to date.
The capacity of the planet to feed us is not a fixed constant , imposed by nature, but rather it depends also on us: on our agricultural practices, the development and transmission of knowledge and technology, and also crucially upon our choice of diet — an inherently cultural act. The population growth rate is now declining, not, thankfully, due to more frequent crises of mortality but because people, through their own volition, are choosing to have fewer children.
This change is very much associated to rising incomes and other social developments in health and education , and has tended to happen more quickly in countries that have developed more recently. In the following we discuss how famines are defined and in particular our reasoning for how we constructed the dataset. Today the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification IPC provides a definition of 5 levels of food insecurity of increasing severity, with level 5 constituting famine.
According to the IPC, in order for a food insecurity situation to be declared a famine it must meet three specific criteria:. Notice that it focuses on the intensity of the crisis. As discussed by Howe and Devereux , this is distinct from the magnitude of the event, typically understood in terms of the total excess mortality that occurred.
It is important to note that there is no institutionally-agreed classification of famines in terms of magnitude. Indeed, for some people, a crisis that resulted in no excess mortality might still be properly considered a famine under some circumstances — there are many terrible outcomes that a severe food crisis can produce other than mortality, such as losses of livelihoods or long-term health impacts. Nevertheless, in producing our table we decided to implement a lower threshold of mortality for a crisis to be included see Famines with low mortality , below.
It is worth seeing that these two dimensions — intensity and magnitude — whilst clearly related are nevertheless independent of each other. A very high-intensity famine, resulting in high mortality rates, may only effect a very small group of people and thus represent a relatively low-magnitude event.
Or a low-intensity crisis may extend across a wide area and over a long period, resulting in a high-magnitude famine. A threshold in terms of intensity i. IPC level 5 does not, therefore, straightforwardly map onto any given magnitude threshold.
Our visualisations show data relating to the period up to and including No estimates of excess mortality for the major food emergencies currently affecting Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Ethiopia have to our knowledge been released. However, in each case, there was a crisis-level food insecurity in present also.
It is therefore possible that as any such estimates emerge, some excess mortality will be seen as having occurred in This is particularly pertinent to the case of South Sudan, an area of which was officially declared as being in famine throughout early according to the IPC system. We will update our table accordingly as more clear information becomes available.
In constructing our table of famine mortality over time, we have relied on a variety of secondary sources listed below , themselves generated from historical accounts that did not make use of such precise definitions, nor would they have been able to do so given the absence of demographic records.
It should be borne in mind that there may be many motives for different observers, record keepers or historians to intentionally or otherwise over- or underestimate mortality levels according to their sympathies with the affected population or suspected perpetrators. We might therefore reasonably expect an upward bias in the figures for earlier famines on the record [i.
The earlier back one goes though, the more one might suspect that the written historical record is incomplete. We start our table from the s. As noted above, it should be borne in mind that those dying of infectious diseases during famines are normally also included in this. Estimating the latter is far from straightforward given the paucity of reliable demographic statistics typical of even recent famines.
Niger in , which many observers at the time considered to be a famine, is an example of this. Modern definitions of famine include criteria for nutrition and mortality that would correspond to conditions typical or near-typical of non-crisis conditions in earlier periods for much of the world. Nonetheless, we decided to include these events in our table. Our reasoning here is that the excess mortality associated to many of the famines listed in Devereux would not have occurred in the absence of conflict, and many of them are not without similar controversy see below for some more discussion.
In our table we have excluded crises where reported excess mortality was lower than 1, Our reasons for doing so were twofold. Firstly, in the context of very large margins of error for many of the famines in our table with upper and lower estimates of excess mortality sometimes several millions apart , we felt that including events in which very few people are recorded as dying might give a misleading impression of the accuracy of the rest of the estimates in the table.
Secondly, for many people, excess mortality due to starvation or hunger-induced diseases would normally be seen as an integral part of what it means for a crisis to constitute a famine.
It should be noted that there might be good reasons to make use of a definition of famine that allows for zero or very low excess mortality. One of our main data sources is the International Disaster Database , which lists mortality estimates for a range of disasters. In particular, it provides data on a number of smaller-scale events often not given in the main lists of major famines we have used.
In addition, we also chose to omit two recent drought events listed in the database for China of 1, and 2, excess deaths in and respectively, having failed to find any corroborating cross-references to famine having occurred in these years. Examples of potentially controversial omissions we have made along these lines include the Highland Potato Famine in Scotland , the Bihar famine in India discussed in more detail below and Niger in Various secondary sources that we have used to compile our table listed in the Data Sources section below themselves use some excess mortality cut-off, but one typically higher than our threshold of 1, This means that there may exist records of famines of a magnitude larger than 1, excess deaths that are not included in our table if they did not appear in the International Disaster Database.
The International Disaster Database lists a drought in India in as killing 1. The only food crisis around this time that we could find cross-references for was that in Bihar, more commonly cited as occurring in Official statistics, however, suggest very low excess mortality. Indeed, the famine was sometimes invoked as evidencing that independent India had turned a corner in its development, such that it could now cope with a serious drought without sustaining major loss of life.
Dyson and Maharatna , however, regarded the official mortality data to be highly deficient. For our table we decided to exclude this famine given such uncertainty. Notably, we chose to excluded the EM-DAT figure for such a high mortality seems questionable given the absence of other corroborating references.
Similar issues surrounded the determination of an excess mortality figure for the Maharashtra crisis in This was largely due to an enormous public employment programme which at its peak employed as many as 5 million people in Maharashtra state alone.
They arrive at this conclusion based on adjusting the figures to account for systematic under-registration of deaths, the pre-crisis trend in mortality rates, inter-census population growth and the possibility of excess mortality also occurring in Nevertheless, in the absence of a specific mortality estimate for the Bihar famine it has been excluded from our list of famines. In any case, the level of uncertainty surrounding both of these famines should be borne in mind.
By far the largest single event in our table is that of China at the turn of the s associated with the economic and social campaign led by Mao Zedong known as the Great Leap Forward. In the post-Mao era of the early s, some official demographic data was newly released allowing for the first systematic investigations of the death toll.
Initial results from this suggested an excess mortality of around 30 million, and this figure gained some currency. Subsequent estimates have tended to be lower. One of the key issues is how these official data compare with UN estimates that exist for infant mortality and life expectancy for the period , which imply significant under-registration in official data.
Exactly what assumptions are made about such under-registration have consequences for the ultimate mortality estimate produced. There is necessarily a degree of arbitrariness to such assumptions, with different hypotheses often standing in contradiction to alternative sources of evidence such as historical documentation and conflicting with the demographic patterns typically observed in famines.
Whilst there is much uncertainty about the exact number of deaths attributable to the Great Leap Forward famine, it seems certain that it represents the single biggest famine event in history in absolute terms. These were then used to make inferences about the number of deaths across the country and, in conjunction with an assumed baseline mortality rate capturing the number of people that would have died anyway in the absence of the conflict, were used to generate the overall excess mortality figure.
In addition, the Report argued that the samples of respondents used in the earliest IRC surveys were unrepresentative and also too small to provide reliable estimates. In particular, it suggested that the areas visited were atypical in that many of them were selected because of there being existing or planned humanitarian operations already in the vicinity, so they were therefore likely to have higher mortality rates than the average location. Contrariwise, the IRC authors point to the fact that access to some of the most insecure zones was impossible during the surveys, suggesting a sample bias in the opposite direction.
The overall argument of the Human Security Report is that the available data is not sufficient to form the basis for a credible excess mortality estimate, and any attempt to make one is very sensitive to the choice between a range of plausible alternatives and subject to a very wide margin of error. It does produce an estimate, but only for the period between for which the surveys conducted were more representative and numerous.
However, it points out that this is very sensitive to assumptions about whether the counterfactual baseline mortality rate should be considered to have a trend. For short-lived events a point estimate for the baseline mortality rate is sufficient. To estimate the excess mortality of a long-lived event, the report argues, one should allow for the possibility that the baseline mortality rate would have changed over this period in the absence of the event being studied.
As such, the , figure that we include as a lower bound in our table should be treated with extreme caution in that it completely excludes the period prior to and also ignores the downward pre-trend in mortality rates as does the IRC estimate. As such we do not attempt to subtract violent deaths from the total. The number of people that died in the North Korean famine remains highly uncertain, largely due to the closed nature of the country which has precluded access to official data and other channels of inquiry, such as surveys.
Via a reconstruction of demographic trends between and census data, the authors deduce an estimated mortality between , and , A rough consensus seems to have emerged that the 3. Over time, estimates made via a variety of methods have tended suggest increasingly lower excess mortality.
For instance, Goodkind and West put forward , million, with a subsequent study by Goodkind, West and Johnson suggesting a mortality towards the lower end of that range. Ho Il Moon in an article for VOX argues for a figure of ,, again based on reconstruction of intercensal demographics. Pierre van der Eng collates local and international newspaper reports of a series of localized famines that may have affected specific parts of Indonesia intermittently during this period, against a backdrop of more generalized and persistent malnutrition in much of the country his paper is partly available here.
As news reports, these figures are clearly not necessarily all that reliable and naturally focus on total numbers of deaths rather than excess mortality. Nevertheless, taken together they probably do point towards some excess famine mortality. Moreover, this was a period of significant repression of press freedoms in which the Government appears to have sought to actively restrict reporting on food crises, such that the reports collated may only represent a subset of famine events that occurred.
Our dataset is based on four main sources:. Kumar and Raychaudhuri [Eds. Journal of Economic Literature. Available online here. Twentieth-century famines in china and India as economic history. Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: An ongoing crisis. New York, International Rescue Committee. Human Security Report Project. New York: Oxford University Press, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. Through Wikipedia here.
Lambton , pp. Crowell and Oozevaseuk — The St. Online here. Population growth Famine across the world since The number of famine victims by decade, ss 7 The rate of famine deaths by decade, ss 8. Increasingly limited parts of the world are affected by famine. Famines by world region, s 9. Number of deaths and duration of individual famines, s Long-run view of famine in single countries. Estimated crude rates of natural increase in England, —, with possible famines highlighted — Campbell The number of famine points by half-century, — Saito How frequent were famines in the distant past?
Why do famines happen? Madagascar is on the brink of experiencing the world's first "climate change famine", according to the United Nations, which says tens of thousands of people are already suffering "catastrophic" levels of hunger and food insecurity after four years without rain.
The drought - the worst in four decades - has devastated isolated farming communities in the south of the country, leaving families to scavenge for insects to survive. The UN estimates that 30, people are currently experiencing the highest internationally recognised level of food insecurity - level five - and there are concerns the number affected could rise sharply as Madagascar enters the traditional "lean season" before harvest.
These people have done nothing to contribute to climate change. They don't burn fossil fuels… and yet they are bearing the brunt of climate change," said Ms Thakral. In the remote village of Fandiova, in Amboasary district, families recently showed a visiting WFP team the locusts that they were eating.
She said her husband had recently died of hunger, as had a neighbour, leaving her with two more children to feed.
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