ABSTRACT

The greatest famines in history have taught us this most bitter lesson. In our own day, a combination of drought, disease, armed conflict, and poor economic policies have put millions at risk of starvation throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Between 1958 and 1961, the collectivization program of Mao Zedong during the so-called “Great Leap Forward” in Communist China starved approximately 30 million of its own citizens, while in the 1920s and 1930s, a similar effort under Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union did the same to as many as 10 million peasants in the Ukraine. Both tragedies would seem to qualify as “purely manmade” famines, which the historian Robert Conquest alleges was deliberate state policy in Russia. Further, between 1845 and 1849, Ireland suffered from a potato famine that killed off approximately a million persons, largely owing to diseases such as typhus fever that ran rampant in the overcrowded conditions created by masses of people seeking relief from their “great hunger.” Ironically, the very belief that humans do not have a role to play in famine-as was the policy of the British government in response to Ireland’s plightis itself held responsible for helping to create one, for which England’s prime minister apologized in 1997.