A crisis in which large numbers of people in an area cannot obtain enough food to sustain themselves. The situation often leads to excess mortality from either starvation or illness and disease caused by a lack of food. The distinction between the extreme event of famine and chronic hunger or malnourishment can be arbitrary; by some definitions, famines must involve at least 1000 deaths and mortality rates of at least 1/10,000 per day. Even this definition leaves open the question of the relevant spatial and temporal scale. It is not necessarily the case that everyone in an area suffers equally; some social groups, defined, by gender, age, ethnicity, and so forth, may be more vulnerable than others. The geographical analysis of incidence within regions can be also reveal differences, for example, between rural and urban areas. Beyond this, definitions of famine have often proved controversial because of disagreements about cause and whether it is a singular event or a collection of symptoms. In recent years, geographers have focused less on famine specifically and more on food security and vulnerability more generally. Even international relief organizations avoid the term, often preferring ‘food crisis’.

Famines have been identified in historical records since the 5th century bc. In the 20th century it is estimated that there were some 70 million deaths caused by famine, almost half in China between 1958 and 1962. All the major famines of the last century were located in Asia, the USSR, or Africa, but, aside from the unusual case of North Korea, contemporary famine seems confined to Africa.

Most debate over famine concerns its cause. Malthusian arguments attributing famine to natural disaster, crop failure, or overpopulation are less commonly made, although some commentators predict catastrophic famines for the mid-21st century induced by shortages of water, food, land, and energy. The idea that Food Availability Decline (FAD) is the prime cause was largely overturned as a result of work by Amartya Sen. His studies of, among others, the 1943 Bengal and 1973–4 Bangladesh famines revealed that people starved even when food was readily available. In Sen’s view they lacked ‘entitlement’ to food, i.e. the socially sanctioned legal right to food. By this he meant more than income alone, but all the assets a person can make use of. Sen’s argument that famine is caused by demand rather than supply-side problems is widely accepted, although not necessarily regarded as complete. Political economic perspectives seek to address why some people have less entitlement than others, shifting attention to longer-term or structural features such as the incorporation of peasant societies into either imperial or capitalist relations (Davis 2001, Nally 2008). Other analysts stress the role of war and conflict or government failure; UN sanctions on Iraq 1990–2003 arguably brought about famine there. More recent research has argued that, at least in the case of southern Africa, the increased vulnerability of households to famine has been caused by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The leading geographical contribution to this debate was made by Michael Watts and Hans Bohle. They conceptualized a ‘space of vulnerability’ defined by the relations between entitlement, empowerment, and political economy. It seems safe to say that there is no single or universal cause of famine. The 2011 food crisis in Somalia and the Horn of Africa was ascribed to a combination of drought, warfare, poor government, and misguided land redistribution policies, for example. While the term has some emotive power to mobilize aid in emergencies, most researchers are careful to avoid its connotations as an exceptional state related to some natural disaster.

Davis, M. (2001), Late Victorian Holocausts.Find this resource:

Nally, D. (2008), ‘“That coming storm” the Irish Poor Law, colonial biopolitics and the Great Famine’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98: 714–41.Find this resource:

Sen, A. (1981), Poverty and Famine.Find this resource:

Watts, M. and Bohle, H. (1993), ‘The space of vulnerability: the causal structure of hunger and famine’, Progress in Human Geography 17: 43–67.Find this resource: