Famine

"Famines strike selectively: it is the poor and politically excluded who are its first and principal victims, commonly its only ones. Starvation relentlessly hunts out outsiders and marginalized minorities – or, to phrase it more accurately, those in power administer famines so as to target these people. In a large number of the famines in our catalogue, including all the most recent cases, the victims have been constituencies identified as subversives or enemies of the state. Today's resurgence of xenophobia and resource nationalism across the world bodes ill for the politics of faminogenesis." (Mass Starvation, Kindle Locations 2644-2649).

Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine by Alex de Waal is a difficult book to read. Human suffering, especially that inflicted by other humans, is a very difficult subject. You want to look the other way.

First, a definition:

"A famine is defined as a crisis of mass hunger that causes elevated mortality over a specific period of time." (Kindle Locations 1821-1822).

De Waal, who has been a humanitarian aid worker in Africa for many years, systematically explains what he means by a famine, in statistical a sense, in a political sense, and in terms of what it means to human beings to suffer the impact a famine. He begins with a specific idea:

"the verb ‘to starve’ should be understood primarily in its transitive sense to indicate that some (powerful) people have starved other (powerless) people, leaving them to die – from hunger, disease, exhaustion or violence. Mass starvation ranges from the outcome of recklessness (pursuing actions regardless of the known dangers) through persecution to murder and genocide." (Kindle Locations 529-532). 

Since the early 19th century, De Waal says, no famines occurred due to natural disasters alone; there were always political motives for starving a given population, sometimes taking advantage of a natural event, but not necessarily. De Waal mentions a few points about the 19th century, but provides details about the origins and results of the major famines from 1870 to the present. Some events in the history of famine that I learned in reading are these:

• "Almost half those who have died in famines since 1870 were Chinese."(Kindle Locations 2390-2391). 
• "The worst famine in recorded history, and almost certainly the most gigantic ever in terms of sheer loss of life, was Mao Zedong's ‘Great Leap Forward’ famine of 1958–62, which probably killed 25–30 million people." (Kindle Locations 2165-2167). 
• "Starvation and associated diseases were major killers in the Armenian genocide of 1915–16: of the one million victims, at least 400,000 perished this way. The Armenians’ suffering did not end there: the newly independent Armenian state was stricken by famine in 1919." (Kindle Locations 2084-2086). 
• "The Hunger Plan" -- Hitler's plan to take all the food in Eastern Europe for the Nazi project -- "is the worst famine crime in the historical record. It was the project of reducing the population of the western Soviet Union by 30 million people in the winter of 1941 by means of starvation, thereby supposedly freeing up their food and farmland to support the Wehrmacht." Hitler's Hunger plan also included quickly eliminating "useless eaters," particularly by murdering the Jews, to make more food available for his troops. (Kindle Locations 739-741). 
• "Colonial-settler genocide famines in North America and Australia deserve a special place in the history of atrocities. The use of hunger to subjugate the indigenous peoples of the Americas is rarely included in catalogues of famine." (Kindle Locations 1949-1950). 
• "Europe's most terrible famine of the Victorian era was the Irish potato famine of the 1840s." (Kindle Locations 1998-1999). 

De Waal offers a detailed discussion of recent famines in Africa and the Middle East, including a careful analysis of the extent of the lives lost in each event, the political situations and ethnic rivalries in the various countries, and the role of international aid workers in attempting to alleviate the desperate suffering of the population. I was aware of most of these events, but have never followed them in the kind of detail presented here.

Mass Starvation concludes with some predictions about the future, projecting from current trends that De Waal perceives. While he has some optimism based on international collective efforts against outbreaks of famine in the 1990s to the present, he has a warning about a trend he calls counter-humanitarianism: "an array of political and ideological practices that deny the value system of humanitarianism as such." (Kindle Locations 5189-5191)

Examples of counter-humanitarinaism are the ravages of militant groups like ISIS and several African military groups that disregard any goals -- or lives --  other than those that favor their own objectives. However, he also sees danger in some democratic societies, like ours:

"Counter-humanitarianism is also witnessed in xenophobia and hostility towards asylum seekers, refugees and migrants in general. The tightening of laws and practices concerning refugees in Europe and the United States risks creating very vulnerable populations in countries afflicted by war, transit countries and recipient countries." (Kindle Locations 5240-5242).

In the last sections of the book, De Waal attempts to apply his historic, ecological, and sociological learning to the question of whether climate change might cause massive famine. His discussion is very detailed and supported by many facts. His basic conclusion is that climate change does not mean that massive famine will occur. The reasoning for this is complex but persuasive: I suggest that you read the book to see how he supports this conclusion.

The last paragraph of Mass Starvation is cautiously optimistic:

"Over the seventy years following the end of the Second World War, the multilateral world order presided over an immense and under-celebrated achievement: the near-conquest of mass starvation. That was achieved in parallel with the eclipse of governmental attitudes that regard human life as without value. Despite the recent reverses, this achievement has not unravelled. The final end of great famines is still within our grasp. Mass starvation could be ended for good – if we decide that it is to be so." (Kindle Locations 5460-5463).  

Through my writing of this blog, I express my interests in food, food history, and the meaning of food for a variety of people and cultures. I try to read both fiction and nonfiction to obtain insights into this topic. From time to time I feel that it's necessary also to learn about the results and causes of hunger as it has affected people throughout the ages, and I try to learn more about how food can be weaponized by political and religious fanatics and others. Thus I decided to read this painful book.

A Chinese statue of Shakyamuni (the Buddha) as an Ascetic,
late 1200s-early 1300s. Detroit Institute of Arts.
Somehow my mind relates this to my reading.

Note: I find in interesting that Alex De Waal, author of this book, is the brother of Edmund De Waal, author of The Hare With Amber Eyes.