While more must be done to address the unique situations these invisible groups face, great progress has been made. Yet we are often so focused on the problems of the present, it is easy to overlook vast changes that have occurred over the long term. For example, the historic declines in all kinds of violence (Pinker 2012) and the reduction in the frequency and lethality of armed conflict (Human Security Report Project 2013) are often obscured by crises of the moment.
Much the same is true for famine. Indeed it is all too easy to overlook historic, but unheralded achievements of the last 50 years: the elimination of calamitous famines (those that cause more than 1 million deaths) and the reduction almost to a vanishing point of great famines, or those that cause more than 100,000 deaths (Howe and Devereux 2004).
Until the middle of the 20th century, the drumbeat of starvation was constant, with millions dying every decade. Between 1870 and 2014, 106 episodes of famine and mass starvation each killed 100,000 people or more (Mallory 1926; Newman 1990; Devereux 2000; Dyson and Ó Gráda 2002).
The trends are striking (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). During the 20th century, the death toll from great famines zigzagged, ranging from a 10-year high of 27 million in 1900–1909; to more than 15 million in each of the 1920s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s; to a low of 1.4 million during the 1990s. In the 21st century thus far, the death toll is near 600,000.
Taking a closer look at the history behind the graphs, we see famines associated with the Age of Empire from the 1870s to World War I (Hobsbawm 1989). Famines killed tens of millions in South Asia and China, millions in Africa, and smaller numbers in Brazil. The causes: drought and havoc wreaked by imperial conquest and predation, including practices such as dismantling local production systems and imposing a regime of forced labor to produce export crops such as rubber and cotton. With the passing of the most ruthless era of imperial expansion, these famines, also known as “Late Victorian Holocausts,” ceased (Davis 2002).
During what historian Eric Hobsbawm (1996) called the “Age of Extremes” from World War I to the end of the Cold War, calamitous famines were caused by totalitarian systems: German and Japanese militarism, Stalinism, and Maoism. Wartime leaders routinely used starvation as a weapon.
Forced collectivization in Ukraine and southern Russia in 1932– 1933—a possibly genocidal campaign known to Ukrainians as the “Holodomor”—was perhaps the most terrible example of famine as state policy (Conquest 1987). Had the Nazi Hunger Plan to starve 20–30 million Belorussians, Poles, and Ukrainians been fully carried out, it would have been worse still (Lowe 2012). Asian war famines killed many millions from 1936 to 1945 in Bengal, China, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
After World War II, Communist policies caused horrific famines. Thirty million people died in the Chinese famine of 1958–1962, caused by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward (Becker 1996). The Khmer Rouge starved 1.5 million Cambodians in the 1970s (Kiernan 2008). These calamitous famines ended along with “faminogenic” regimes, such as totalitarian governments and wars of extermination (Marcus 2003). The last great Communist famines were in Ethiopia in 1983–1985, when collectivization and hunger as a weapon of war collided with drought, killing up to 1 million (de Waal 1997), and in North Korea in 1996–1997, when a food crisis killed 500,000– 600,000 (Goodkind, West, and Johnson 2011).
In the 20th century, Europe and Asia accounted for the vast majority of famine deaths (Figure 3.2, right). Only two African famines in the last 100 years—Biafra and Ethiopia—have killed as many as 1 million each. Since famine has disappeared from Europe and mostly vanished from Asia, it has lost most of its menace.
And finally, the downward slope of the famines graph (Figure 3.3, below) contrasts with the upward slope of world population, which rose from about 1.7 billion in 1900 to 7.3 billion today. This surely refutes the pessimism of the early 19th century scholar and cleric Reverend Thomas Malthus, who feared that world population was outpacing the food supply. More than two centuries ago he wrote that “gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear [of population growth], and with one mighty blow, could level the population” (Malthus 1798, 140). In fact, the converse is actually happening.