Does population growth lead to hunger and famine? The chart shows the rate of famine deaths globally, expressed as the number of people dying each year per 100,000 people of the world population. Nowadays, crop failure is better understood as an important contributing factor rather than a sufficient cause of famine: food crises due simply to localized drops in production do not tend to develop into full-blown famines with high excess mortality unless exacerbated through more overtly human influences. Here we look into the relationship between population growth and famine, as well as that between population growth and hunger more generally. Within the USSR, some regions (e.g. Since the pandemic struck, Elsemore said, No Kid Hungry has been working with all hands on deck, donating $27 million to schools and community programs so far. All the software and code that we write is open source and made available via GitHub under the permissive MIT license. 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. Life expectancy at birth (years), for males and females, and whites and nonwhites. Two apt examples are the famines inthe Democratic Republic of Congo, which took place amidst the Second Congo War beginning in 1998, and that of North Korea from 1995 to 1999. What this chart doesnt show however is the significant uncertainty that surrounds many of these estimates. The last was in 1741-2 which was brought on by an extreme short-term weather anomaly of at least three-years duration that affected much of northwest Europe, causing an even more severe famine in Ireland. Students at American University and in particular those in the health studies, who are studying nutrition education, public health and health promotion, are committed to addressing social justice issues, she says. Thus the absence of markets, or presence of badly functioning markets, can be a key part of why people are not able to obtain enough food. The estimates were based on retrospective mortality surveys in which interviewers asked a sample of respondents to report the number of deaths that had occurred within their household over a given period. It is important to note that there is no institutionally-agreed classification of famines in terms of magnitude. that food was not able to move to those regions where it was in highest demand, and thereby lower local price differences. The investigators found that approximately 245,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 were attributable to low levels of education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual-level poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty. This corresponds to households experiencing food consumption gaps with high or above usual acute malnutrition or thosemarginally able to meet minimum food needs only with accelerated depletion of livelihood assets that will lead to food consumption gaps., And along this dimension, the numbers are, according to FEWS, unprecedented in recent decades.44. The IPC Manual ver. However, if we look at the number of individuals in Phase 3 (Crisis) or worse food insecurity, we see not only a deterioration in the country as a whole (45.2 % of the population in May compared to 32.3% in January), but even in Unity State itself (with 58.7% and 54.7% respectively). This school year, those numbers will increase. Even larger crises, such as the Great Leap Forward, or the spike in mortality in Mauritius in the late 1920s,74 translate into very small changes in overall population trends, if at all. The analogy to other living organisms can obscure what is different about the human species. For our table we decided to exclude this famine given such uncertainty. The two classifications are linked by the fact that the categorization of households along this dimension forms the basis of the first threshold criterion of the area classification of food insecurity:A key criterion forthe Area classification is that 20 percent of the population must be in that Phase or worse based onthe Household Group classification. Grda (2007) Famine: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. This definition is adapted from that given in Grda, Making Famine History. IDS Working Paper 105. 1, In Honour of Ann K. S. Lambton (1986), pp. "Since the COVID-19 pandemic. It is thought to have reduced the population by about one quarter in its immediate effects: one million perishing and a further million emigrating. Famine Prevention in India. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Accessed 19 Jan 2018. Making Famine History. However the key results are robust to omitting these countries altogether. While in earlier periods Asia suffered heavily from major famines, this came to a halt over the mid-20th century. Ukraine) are classified as a colony, and for those famines that are attributed to these specific regions, it is recorded as such. Notably, we chose to excluded the EM-DAT figure for 1965: such a high mortality seems questionable given the absence of other corroborating references. Inevitably though, this meant us taking a position in some controversial cases, discussed in detailhere. no exceptional mortality was recorded or no one died of starvation.86. Unemployment has soared, and now more than 54 million people across the nation are facing hunger. According to the IPC, in order for a food insecurity situation to be declared a famine it must meet three specific criteria: Whilst providing a more objective, and hence de-politicized, benchmark for declaring a famine vital for eliciting a timely humanitarian response a key aspect of the IPC classification is to provide a graduated system that fits the reality of food crises better than a binary famine or no-famine approach. This leaves only the three democracy famine events discussed above. As we discuss further intheData Quality and Definitionsection, other definitions are possible, including those that would not see excess mortality as a necessary condition. In 2018, a total of 21,467 deaths occurred in children under 1 year, which was 868 fewer infant deaths than in 2017. They also argue that the survey data on which the IRC estimate is based is, for some periods at least, unrepresentative of the country as a whole a perennial issue in famine demography, given the typically patchy availability of data.North Korea, 1995-1999 Upper-bound mortality estimate: 240,000 (Spoorenberg and Schwekendiek, 2012)) Lower-boundmortality estimate:600,000 (Goodkind, West and Johnson, 2011))The number of people that died in the North Korean famine remains highly uncertain, largely due to the closed nature of the country. In our data, these are represented by upper- and lower-bound estimates, with the mid-point being shown in the visualization above. We have not simply taken the highest and lowest figures published in the public domain, given that more accurate estimates often emerge with time. Alongside a significant jump in death rates, there was also a large fall in births a trend very typical of famines.65. Most of the visualisations in this entry are based on the Our World in Data-Dataset of Famines assembled by us.Our dataset is based on four main sources: Additional sources used in assembling the table below are as follows: Kumar and Raychaudhuri [Eds.] Where this is below the threshold level but the under five death rate is above its threshold, famine should only be declared following consultation with an Emergency Review Committee. 1990. See Famine in the Twentieth Century, Stephen Devereux (2000) for a good summary of recent famine scholarship. For instance, Goodkind and West (2001)put forward 600,000-1 million, with a subsequent study by Goodkind, West and Johnson (2011) suggesting a mortality towards the lower end of that range. And this is exactly what happened in South Sudan over the course of 2017. 49, No. She is a senior research manager at Feeding America, the nations largest domestic hunger relief organization. This constitutes quite a considerable downward revision to the figure we published prior to 2 March 2018, in which we made use of the 3.5 million figure as our upper bound. And yet, the crisis was far from over. They showed that 11,446 children under the age of 1 had died in 2016 a 30 percent increase in one year as the economic crisis accelerated. Brighton: Institute for Development Studies. Grda (2009) gives the example of the siege of Leningrad in which few of Leningrads 0.8 million or so victims perished of contagious diseases, noting that the number of people dying from the main infectious diseases were actually lower in 1941 amidst an overall vast increase in excess mortality than they had been in 1940 before the blockade began.34. It was on this basis that that country was no longer officially in famine. More than 10 million American children did not have enough food on a daily basis. 3. We can also look at the experiences of individual countries, rather than just at the global level. As such, lack of overall food availabilityper seplays a less prominent role in causing famine today than it did historically. Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: An ongoing crisis. III (1907), Maharatna (1992). Here also we can see that the secular decline in death rates follow a reduction in its volatility. For our table we use the midpoint between the lowest and highest estimates given in our main sources, 15 million being the lower bound given by Grda (2009) and 33 million being the upper bound given by Devereux (2000). The authorss sources for the famine chronology table are: Ogashima, M. 1894. In 2017 . As de Wall explains, acontinued decline is by no means assured: the future of famine will depend largely on the nature and prevalence of war. It is the presence of conflict, or abuses of political power that can block food supplies reaching populations which represents the most pertinent trigger of death-dealing famines today.5. In 1707, the Kingdom of Great Britain was . Before 1550 there were more than 10 famines per 50 year-interval and since then famines have became less and less common in Japan. Thus any distinction between famine and episodes of mass intentional starvation seems to be a matter of degree, and as such there appeared no clear reason not to include the latter in our table. Exactly what assumptions are made about such under-registration have consequences for the ultimate mortality estimate produced. 183-192. Pp. Vol. You can see that the decline in average mortality rates in both countries was preceded by a reduction in the spreadaround the average i.e., the number and extent of crises of high mortality.71, However, when such spikes were common, they in fact played a relatively small part in keeping average mortality rates as high as they were. Some districts are using school buses as mobile food delivery units. Jean Drze and Amartya Sen. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Emergency food aid provided by relief agencies continues to play a crucial role in preventing loss of life, and the international relief community has recently developed much better monitoring systems, such as the Famine Early Warning System, that has allowed for greater preparation and more timely interventions. The excess mortality estimate is taken from the World Peace Foundation list of famines. Loveday (1914) Loveday, Alexander. Food insecurity is an extension of many inequities that result from numerous longstanding, systemic injustices.. Annual number of deaths from protein-energy malnutrition per 100,000 people. Whilst poverty certainly increases the vulnerability of a country, we should be careful not to think of it as the single, or even the most important, cause of famine, given the typically political nature of most outbreaks of famine. Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. Viewed in this way, the trend is all the more notable. This is discussed further in theData Quality and Definitionsection below. See article here, accessed 27 Jan 2018. The geographic spread of famines has also reduced over this period, as we can see in these two charts, which give two ways of visualizing famine deaths by continent. Available here. Stephen Devereux (2000), Famine in the Twentieth Century. This, however, does not imply an expectation that famine mortality would rise to the levels seen in the mid-20th Century. Vol. But since the 1960s this has been outpaced by a fall in birth rates,such that overall theglobal population growthrate has been steadily falling, and is likely to approach zero towards the end of this century. It is mainly in the context of conflict that major death-dealing famines can be expected today. They concluded that while the available data show little sign of excess mortality in Bihar, we probably cannot exclude this possibility.85 Drze (1990) similarly came to the conclusion that there is precious little evidence to support the self-congratulatory statements that have commonly been made about the Bihar famine, e.g. Famines have always occurred as the result of a complex mix of technical and political factors,4 but the developments of the modern industrial era have generally reduced the salience of natural constraints in causing famine. The IPC sets out such a Household Group Classification alongside the Area Classification outlined above. It is important to note that the coverage of the FEWS analysis is not global, and the geographical coverage can change from year to year. In The Political Economy of Hunger. The entry is based on a global dataset of famines since the mid-19th century produced by us. Nishimura, M. and I.Yoshikawa eds. For famines that straddle two decades, the number of victims are assigned to decades proportionately to the number of years falling in each decade.Famines for which no estimate for the number of victims has been found, or those below 1000 deathsare excluded.Real GDP per capita is taken from the Madison Project Database (2018). Thus, in sub-Saharan Africa where vaccination rates for measles have been relatively low, the disease has been a big killer during modern famines in the region alongside other infectious and parasitic diseases common in non-crisis times.32. We might therefore reasonably expect an upward bias in the figures for earlier famines on the record [i.e. This is the general definition offered in Grda (2007). However, in recent times, aggregate food availability per person has increased dramatically, and given the comparable ease of transportation and communication, localized shortfalls can in theory at least be met by importing food from surplus areas far quicker and at a much lower cost nowadays. (1983) The Cambridge economic history of India, Volume 2, Cambridge University Press, 1983. Sen, A, Poverty and Famines. In contrast, during the Great Depression nonwhites gained 8 years of longevity, with life expectancy increasing in nonwhite males from 45.7 years in 1929 to 53.8 years in 1933 and from 47.8 to 56.0 in females during the same period. On the other hand, where a famine affected clusters of countries of the same classification this is recorded as such. She received her MS in Nutrition Education from American University, where she focused on food justice and health communications. This chart compares the number of famine deaths per decade based on our famine dataset with the world population over the same period. Cormac Grda, Famine: A Short History (2009), Princeton University Press, p.109-121The books website is here. 647. Licenses: All visualizations, data, and articles produced by Our World in Data are open access under the Creative Commons BY license. Number of deaths: 3,464,231 Death rate: 1,043.8 deaths per 100,000 population Source: National Vital Statistics System - Mortality Data (2021) via CDC WONDER Life expectancy: 76.4 years Infant Mortality rate: 5.44 deaths per 1,000 live births 10.2307/1973458. Many of the major famine events in our table occurred as the consequence of international or civil war. The Hunger Plan pursued by Nazi Germany as part of its attempted invasion of the Soviet Union is an example of the latter. The number of famine points by half-century, 1300-1900 - Saito (2010) 15 The red bars show famine mortality relative to the growing world population over this time. Volume II, eds. Malthus T.R. We might naturally tend to associate famine with drought or other natural phenomena, and indeed most documented famines have occurred in the context of harvest failures, often due to droughts or flooding. Our visualisations show data relating to the period up to and including 2016. Repr., New Delhi: Usha Publications, 1985.As quoted in Grda (2007) Famine: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The system ranges from Phase 1 to Phase 5, with 5 corresponding to a famine situation. Thus, it seems likely that it was the promise of improved economic opportunities, rather than fear of famine which drove emigration between 1851 and 1900.70. Campbell, B. If an upper and lower figure for famine victims is shown in the table then the average is used here. The Holodomor's Death Toll The Ukrainian famineknown as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for "starvation" and "to inflict death"by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9. New York, International Rescue Committee. Even without monopoly power, where traders collectivelyexpectprices to increase, for whatever reason, it can make sense for them not to sell storable food to final consumers immediately, but rather wait for the higher prices, thereby restricting the current overall supply to consumers. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. Hake says everyone can make a difference. Ravallion, M, Markets and Famines, OUP, 1987. As noted by theWorld Peace Foundation,generally speaking, better demographic calculations lead to lower estimations of excess deaths than those provided by journalists and other contemporary observers.Rather, we have sought to select upper and lower estimates based on thebalance of opinion in commonly-cited sources, all of which are detailed (for each individual event) in our dataset of famines. But again, the height of the peaks in earlier decades are generally small relative to the overall decline. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. NBER Historical Working Paper No. Discussed further in P.Howe,S.Devereux, Famine intensity and magnitude scales: A proposal for an instrumental definition of famine. Official statistics, however, suggest very low excess mortality. However, this represents only one aspect of the complex explanation of why so many people suffer and die from undernourishment today, despite their being adequate food available for consumption globally.63. But Elsemore also holds out hope for progress. So whilst the household-level classification considers fewer outcomes (only food deficits, as opposed to nutritional or mortality outcomes), it does allow for an assessment of the magnitude of a food emergency in terms of the absolute number of people being affected at different levels of severity. Grda (2010) Famines past, Famines future. Available online here. 1936. By May the famine had apparently receded, thanks to an effective aid response that averted large-scale loss of life. The end of famine? Famine deaths have decreased, not increased, with population growth. The death toll from a Christian cult in Kenya that practised starvation has risen to 67, after more bodies were recovered from mass graves in a forest in the south-east of the country.. A major . And struggling restaurants are helping provide food. It ignores other factors like conflict, poverty, access to markets,healthcare systems, and political institutions. No estimates of excess mortality for the major food emergencies currently affectingYemen, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Ethiopia have to our knowledge been released. FEWS in fact later went on to increase its estimates for 2017 to 83 million, as shown in the bar chart. But what can we say about the impact of famines on long-term population trends more generally? Such shocks can mean that those already living close to the level of subsistence may find their exchange entitlement that which they can obtain on the market in exchange for their labour or other assets fails to provide them with enough food, even if the aggregate local supply is sufficient. I am proud to say that AU has some of the most engaged socially minded students across the country and will be the future leaders in addressing health and food equity., Health Studies webinar examines how COVID is making hunger an urgent issue for more and more Americans, Professional Studies and Executive Education. NAIROBI, April 25 (Reuters) - The death toll among followers of a Kenyan cult who believed they would go to heaven if they starved themselves has . 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. Where means of transport is lacking, trade between surplus and deficit regions can be hampered, as well as making the distribution of food aid much harder during crises. As such, the waning of the very high levels of warfare over the last decades(as seen in the reduced number of battle deaths in recent times) and the spread of democratic institutions has also played a large part in the substantial reduction in famine mortality witnessed in recent decades. Oxfam reported that 11 people die of hunger each minute, outpacing the death toll of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed around seven people per minute. From such a perspective, the provision of humanitarian aid to famine-afflicted countries, however well intended, represents only a temporary fix. We ranked the top 59 causes of death in America, as of 2017, from the CDC's selected causes. Famines tend to be thought of as acute periods of crisis, and are in that sense to be distinguished from more chronic manifestations of hunger that may in some places represent normal circumstances, despite being responsible for large numbers of deaths.57. IPC level 5) does not, therefore, straightforwardly map onto any given magnitude threshold. This is based on FEWS statement just cited. Statistically significant at the 1% level, even when controlling for GDP per capita in 2016 (using World Bank PPP data), This relationship is significant at the 1% level. The first scoring was conducted in 1992, and was then repeated every eight years with the most recent being in carried out in 2017. 45, No. Feeding America is projecting a $10 billion gap between food and need in the next year due to a long list of COVID-related issues: including food chain interruptions, smaller numbers of volunteers, and the real health dangers of close contact with people while distributing food. 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. Where poor harvests are the main cause of famine, as in Niger in 2005, relief provision tends to prevent marked increases in mortality. 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. As such, many of the famines included in our dataset are associated with a wide range of plausible mortality estimates. Here are two charts showing the historic evolution of death rates in England and Wales, and in Norway. 0.1-year increase in the 2018 life expectancy estimate for the total population results in the same estimate before the increase began (78.7 in 2010), and is 0.2 year below the peak life expectancy of 78.9 in 2014. Our World In Data is a project of the Global Change Data Lab, a registered charity in England and Wales (Charity Number 1186433). Available here. The reference is Devereux (2000) Famine in the 20th century. The population only began to grow again in the late 20th century. According to John Fitzgerald, President of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland in his May 2016 Presidential Address. 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. But does the evidence support this idea? It was awarded three hats in 2019 and 2020 . Note that, for two famines Somalia in 2011; Cambodia in 1979 listed as having an interruption in their regime status in the affected years we have listed the country as their prior regime type. As does the World Peace Foundations Famine Trends dataset. 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. COVID has become a perfect storm for creating both a public health crisis and an economic crisis. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that famines dominated to the degree assumed by some early famine scholars such as Robert Malthus, not least because normal mortality rates would have been very high anyhow. Here we use our list of famines since 1850 which can be found at the bottom of this page, and we define the political regime type according to the Polity IV score (discussed more in our entry on Democracy), collecting the various scores into three clusters: Democracy (>5), Autocracy or Anocracy (-10 to 5), and Colony (-20).
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