ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the question of how famines and cross-cultural migrations are related. It discusses the social changes resulting from cross-cultural migrations at the micro, meso and macro levels. Cross-cultural migration as a coping strategy in times of undernourishment and famine has often led to social change, because it has brought migrants into contact with different customs, norms, techniques and worldviews. The chapter focuses on politically engineered famines in the twentieth century, often perpetrated by totalitarian regimes, which fit within the dystopian Sorokin frame. Most of these famines resulted in various forms of cross-cultural migrations, but nearly always in an abortive form, and led to mass starvation. The chapter concludes that globally, famine mortality, which in all cases was caused by political decisions, has dropped considerably, falling from a level of 16 million per decade in the mid-twentieth century to under 1 million since the 1980s.
