Famine, Geography of

Anyone attempting to define famine must be aware of the significant challenges involved. Definitions involve distinctions, but in the case of famine, such distinctions are especially fraught, not just because relief operations require “definitional clarity” but because the capacity to assign and apply meaning can be a powerful tool used to obscure or deny the violence done unto others. Indeed, some of the most destructive famines have been mystified, concealed, and disclaimed by making false and fallacious claims about the precise nature and cause of the disaster.

The definition and meaning of famine have changed with time. In the 18th century, demographer and economist Thomas Malthus argued that because the food supply was relatively inflexible, natural tendencies would increase the population at a much faster rate than the rate at which food could be produced. This propensity for the population to outstrip subsistence could only be avoided through preventive checks (i.e., late marriages, celibacy, abortion, and infanticide), by which human populations proactively limited their own progeny, or through what Malthus described as positive checks (war, famine, pestilence), which keep population numbers in proportion to the means of subsistence. Malthus's “population principle,” as it became known, established an enduring association between food [Page 1083][Page 1084]availability and famine while implying that famines operated as a natural check on human improvidence. Moreover, because only the most advanced European societies were capable of voluntarily restricting population growth, famines would remain an important natural check, especially for subaltern populations lacking social maturity and moral training.

Table 1 Number of people living on $1 or $2 per day, 1981–2001. The bench levels of $1 or $2 per day are commonly used measures of extreme poverty that point to populations most susceptible to famine.

Sources: World Resource Institute (WRI) in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme, and World Bank, 2005; World Resources Institute. (2005, September). The wealth of the poor-managing ecosystems to fight poverty. Washington, DC: Author.

Figure 1 World map of famine-prone regions. Countries in which famine is most common are those with impoverished populations, common malnutrition, and vulnerability to humanly induced or naturally created disasters such as war or drought.

Source: The U.N. World Food Programme.

In his groundbreaking book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, published in 1981, the Indian economist Amartya Sen directly attacked Malthusian food supply arguments for failing to consider how available foods might be unequally apportioned. Whereas Malthus emphasized “food supply,” Sen focused on the questions of distribution and “demand” within a market economy. To understand starvation, he suggested, it is necessary to analyze the commodity bundles (including foods, goods, and services) that a person can legally command by using his or her available resources and personal capacities. For Sen, famines result from entitlement failures brought about because a person's assets, capacities, or terms of exchange (within a structure of ownership) shift to such a degree that it is no longer possible for him or her to directly or indirectly obtain the means of subsistence. A dearth of food is thus only one of many possible causes of starvation. Indeed, viewed through Sen's framework, famines can occur where there is no overall decline in food availability and even in cases where there is an increase in general output—so-called boom famines—as happened in the Great Bengal Famine of 1843.

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