Famine Studies

A large literature is now devoted to the demographic crises, experienced by the USSR between 1920 and 1947. This  literature more often attempts to make a global estimate of the losses of the soviet people. In this article, we present
a more precise overview of such approaches, putting the stress on the geographic disparities and the important contrasts between generations, led by these crises. For this aim, in a fi1'st part, the censuses and their comparison with incomplete data of the civil registration lead us to present a regional geography of demographic crises. Such a reconstruction is therefore used as a basis of a comparison between soviet
crises and those experienced during the XIX century Russian Empire. In a second part, the different age structures presented in the 1897 to 1989 censuses are corrected to obtain exact annual age structures. The use of a specific statistical method helped us to give precise reconstructions. It is therefore possible to describe in detail the future of all the generations who have experienced these critical years. Moreover, our reconstruction gives the indispensable basis of a critical study on the soviet demographic dynamic reconstitution, which have been done by rather different autho7'S. It finally gives interesting precisions on the last evolutions, and, especially, on the degradation of infant mortality from the 70s.

Explanations for the causes of famine and food insecurity often reside at a high level of aggregation or
abstraction. Popular models within famine studies have often emphasised the role of prime movers such
as population stress, or the political-economic structure of access channels, as key determinants of food
security. Explanation typically resides at the macro level, obscuring the presence of substantial within-
country differences in the manner in which such stressors operate. This study offers an alternative
approach to analyse the uneven nature of food security, drawing on the Great Irish famine of 1845–1852.
Ireland is often viewed as a classical case of Malthusian stress, whereby population outstripped food
supply under a pre-famine demographic regime of expanded fertility. Many have also pointed to
Ireland’s integration with capitalist markets through its colonial relationship with the British state, and
country-wide system of landlordism, as key determinants of local agricultural activity. Such models are
misguided, ignoring both substantial complexities in regional demography, and the continuity of noncapitalistic,
communal modes of land management long into the nineteenth century. Drawing on
resilience ecology and complexity theory, this paper subjects a set of aggregate data on pre-famine
Ireland to an optimisation clustering procedure, in order to discern the potential presence of distinctive
social–ecological regimes. Based on measures of demography, social structure, geography, and land
tenure, this typology reveals substantial internal variation in regional social–ecological structure, and
vastly differing levels of distress during the peak famine months. This exercise calls into question the
validity of accounts which emphasise uniformity of structure, by revealing a variety of regional regimes,
which profoundly mediated local conditions of food security. Future research should therefore consider
the potential presence of internal variations in resilience and risk exposure, rather than seeking to
characterise cases based on singular macro-dynamics and stressors alone.

From the very beginning of time, space, reality itself in which we exist God the designer, the grand architect of energy and matter foresaw all that would happen.  He knew before his voice called the stars and planets into existence that a redeemer would be needed for a wayward mankind.

Last year Frank Dikötter won the prestigious BBC Samuel Johnson prize for his book ‘Mao’s Great Famine’. The jury was impressed yet stunned that they didn’t know the full scale of the atrocities committed during the Great Leap Forward. Dikötter knocks Mao off his pedestal and reveals what he really was; a brutal and violent dictator. After the publication of his book the author received daily hate mail for over a year. In our interview he explains how his opponents’ arguments are the same used to deny the Holocaust.

Ganyu labour, a longstanding form of ad hoc casualized rural labour, has come to the fore in recent years as the major coping mechanism for the rural poor to combat food insecurity in Malawi. This chapter explores ganyu in light of long-term trends in Malawi’s local rural economies and the shocks of famine and the HIV/AIDS pandemic experienced at the outset of the 21st century. It is argued that ganyu, evolved from balanced to negative reciprocity over the past hundred years. During Malawi’s 2001-02 famine, with many rural families adversely affected either directly or indirectly by HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality, ganyu labour increasingly altered in character in terms of: growing inequalities of rural asset holdings, labour exchange negotiated under extreme duress, growing labour negotiations between members of the famine-affected rural areas with non-kin from outside of the local community, a diminishing ethical foundation to labour contractual terms and, in the case of women, sometimes the necessity of morally degrading sexual compromise for the sake of securing vital food supplies or cash.

In last 500 years, India experienced severe famines due to various reasons such as monsoon failures. wrong policies, lack of transportation and infrastructure and diversion of foods from surplus regions to deficit regions. The millions of the Indians perished that forced many to migrate to distant lands that after several generation make up the successful Indian Diaspora.

FEWS-NET is an assemblage of agencies and private sector companies that monitor and address conditions that may lead to hunger and famine throughout the world. As nations continue to enter into the global economy, reciprocity among its citizens is becoming the manner in which the world does business. Trade agreements among countries promote a more even distribution of goods and services which is enabling societies to advance and prosper. The applications of open competition, cutting edge research in science and technology, the rules of law and individual property rights, modern medicine, a consumer society, and an insatiable work ethic have been the applications that have propelled western civilization. Cooperative arrangements among nations developed through national and international agencies will enable a more open and fair market system that will enhance worldwide enterprise. The planet has a finite reserve of resources and they are not evenly distributed. The rapid growth of emerging nations will require those that have an abundance of a particular resource to share or trade to even out the distribution for all concerned.

The thesis of this Case Study is to present an argument that famine is possible in what many in the United States perceive as the wealthiest, most prosperous nation in the world. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports the following statistics. Our fifteen year olds rank 17th in the world in science and 25th in mathematics. We rank 12th among developed countries in college graduates (we were number one for decades). Our infrastructure is ranked 23rd in the world, and well behind every other advanced economy. Studies by the World Health Organization and OECD place the United States 27th in life expectancy and first in obesity. We are also number one in possessing the most guns, highest crime rate among rich countries, and having the distinction of accumulating the highest amount of dept in the world. Consider these statistics, the impact they will have on the many factors that can contribute to the vitality of a nation and its ability to grow; and it will become brutally apparent that world resources can shift, even within the richest country in the world!

This article interrogates the management of Fort Garry by Hudson Bay Company clerk Francis Heron during a year of famine (1825-1826). I argue that Heron’s post journal reveals concerns about race, self-management and subsistence. Taken together these concerns can be read as a nascent form of colonial liberalism. The articles focuses on two themes that surface in Heron’s account. First, I note that Heron chastises Settlers, ‘Canadians’, and ‘Half Breeds’ for failing to make appropriate plans for the winter, and Heron’s own managerial techniques to teach them ‘prudence’. While Heron problematizes these sections of the population, indigenous people, who feature in his text as ‘starving Indians’, are excluded from his discourse on self-management. There is no attempt in Heron’s narrative  to ‘improve’ or ‘rehabilitate’ indigenous people as he attempted to do with the settlers at Red River Colony.  In Heron’s attempts to manage the famine indigenous people are excluded from liberal despotic techniques of improvement. Second, the article explores how nature is constructed in Heron’s account as a site where settlers can test their conduct and their prudence. I suggest this Heron's conceptualization of nature departs from the representation of nature in the eighteenth century as an arbiter of natural laws between subsistence and population and recasts nature as a ‘colonial space’ where the liberal self was tested and consecrated.