Mass hunger

The image of starving Bedouins on the border of the Ancient Egyptian state during the V dynasty (c. 2380–2350 BC) from Saqqara . Louvre ^[7]

Bible references

Joseph - the character of the Bible ( Gen. 37-50 ), whom Pharaoh turned to for the interpretation of dreams. Joseph correctly predicted 7 years of good harvest and then 7 years of crop failure and famine, advised him to save up grain for the abundant years. Pharaoh appreciated the wisdom and appointed Joseph the head of the whole household. During the famine, Joseph was in charge of selling grain. The story speaks of seven years of famine throughout the land. Because of the famine, Joseph's brothers, risking their lives, came to Egypt for bread several times.

The prophet Elijah (1 Kings 16–19 and 4 Kings 1–2 ) lived under the Israeli king Ahab , who worshiped the idol of Baal (the god of fertility and the sun ) and forced the people to do the same. Elijah came to Ahab and, in the name of God, declared to him: “for your wickedness in these years there will be neither rain nor dew, unless through my prayer.” So it happened. A terrible drought began; even the grass died, and hunger came. Elijah, by the will of God, settled in the desert by a single stream, where the crows brought him bread and meat, and he drank water from the stream. When the stream dried, God commanded the prophet to go to the pagan city of Sarepta Sidon to a poor widow and live with her. This widow, who lived with her son, had only one handful of flour and some oil. Arriving in Sarepta, Elijah told her to bake a flat cake for him and promised that the flour and butter would not decrease until the Lord gave rain to the ground. The woman believed the prophet of God and did as he told her. A miracle happened. Her flour and butter did not decrease. Soon this widow got sick and died. The prophet Elijah prayed to God three times over him, and the boy came to life. For three and a half years, hunger and drought continued until all the people of Israel fell on the ground in fear and exclaimed: “The Lord is the true God, the Lord is the true God!” After that, Elijah went to the top of the mountain and began to pray for rain. The wind blew from the sea, big clouds appeared in the sky and it began to rain.

Reports of hunger are found in the Gospel prophecies of the last days : “For the people shall rise against the people, and the kingdom against the kingdom, and will be smooth, more” ( Matthew 24: 6-8 ).

Mass hunger in Europe

Until the XIX century, mass starvation was a frequent occurrence in many countries, it was associated with crop failure and wars . In the Middle Ages , one hungry year with a high mortality rate fell out for every 8–10 years. The years 1030-1032 in France were especially heavy, 1280-1282 years in Bohemia . According to contemporaries, the famine of 1125 reduced the population of Germany by half. Satellites of hunger were disease, pestilence, robbery, murder and suicide; it came to the open devouring of children by parents (1505 in Hungary ). The usual and even legalized measure was the expulsion of the poor beyond the city limits, where they were doomed to death by starvation; in France, this measure was practiced in the XVII century.

In 1772 in Saxony, 150 thousand people died from a lack of bread. Back in 1817, famine raged in many parts of Germany; to a lesser extent, this can be said about 1847.

Mass hunger in Western Europe is gone from the middle of the XIX century due to the development of world trade and ways of communication, which made it possible to quickly ensure the supply of food to the lean regions. A global food market has emerged. Bread prices have ceased to depend directly on the harvest in the country: abundant local yields almost do not lower them, and crop failures do not increase. The incomes of the population increased, and the peasants, in the event of a poor harvest, were able to acquire the missing food on the market.

Mass Hunger in the 20th Century

Famine in Soviet Russia of 1921–1922 (better known as “Famine in the Volga Region” of 1921–1922) covered 35 provinces (Volga region, Southern Ukraine, Crimea, Bashkiria, partly Kazakhstan, Ural region and Western Siberia) with a total population of 90 million of which at least 40 million were starving (according to official Soviet data, 28 million). The number of famine victims was about 5 million.

Famine in the USSR (1932–1933) (officially called “ Holodomor ” in Ukraine) —a massive famine in the USSR on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR, the BSSR, the North Caucasus, the Volga region, the Southern Urals, Western Siberia, and Kazakhstan, which caused considerable human casualties (according to various estimates from 2 to 8, and by some estimates up to 10 million people, most estimates converge on the number of victims, about 7 million people).

Hunger in the USSR (1946-1947) - the third mass famine of the Soviet period in the history of Russia. As a result of this famine, according to various estimates, from 200 thousand to 1.5 million people died ^[8] .

A number of African countries experienced a massive famine in 1968-1973. Thus, as a result of famine caused by drought, 100,000 people died in Niger . The reasons for their death were presented in a terrible report by a medical worker, John A. Dreisbek, who lived in Niger for 30 years. In a review of the natural disasters of the National Geographic Society in 1978, Dr. Dreisbeck wrote:

I saw thousands of corpses of domestic animals ... The nomads who once owned this cattle were in rescue camps and received food sent from all over the world. We have seen people suffering from malnutrition and disease. With this weakened health, many died from pneumonia, measles and whooping cough. I almost did not see such consequences of hunger. Niger is located in the Sahel region of Africa, is the driest place in the world. When the rains do not fall, people still die here, rivers dry up, the harvest dies.

In the second half of the 1990s, North Korea, due to the collapse of the socialist system , large-scale floods and severe food shortages, experienced a massive famine among the population that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Food supplies stabilized only by the beginning of the 2000s.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in September 2010, the number of people suffering from chronic hunger was 925 million, which is 98 million more than in 2008. Of these, 578 million live in the Asia-Pacific region, 239 million in Africa (sub-Saharan Africa), 108 million in other countries. Two thirds of the hungry live in seven countries: Bangladesh , China , Democratic Republic of Congo , Ethiopia , India , Indonesia and Pakistan ^[9] .

According to the UN , as of December 2008, the number of hungry people worldwide has exceeded 960 million people. The majority of the hungry (907 million people) live in developing countries. 65 percent of them live in India, China, Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia ^[10] .

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , in 2002–2004 ^{[11] the} following countries had more than 5 million hungry people:

In 1979, World Food Day was established.

• According to the US NSA, in 2004-2005. every day 24,000 people died of starvation in the world.

The list of countries with the highest death rate from hunger is the country with the highest population density, lack of natural resources (primarily water), and religious bans on birth control. In the worst state, residents of countries where all these three factors are represented simultaneously (for example, the Black Continent ). The provision of food aid is only a delay: there is neither water, nor fertile land for the newly-born, and the situation is getting worse every year.

The authors of the academic collection “Demography of Hunger” (Famine Demography: Perspectives from the Past and Present) note that during times of mass starvation more men than women usually die, and most lives are not hunger as such, but inevitably accompanying diseases. There are other consequences of mass starvation. So, for example, the number of suicides increases sharply, the birth rate decreases (after the end of hunger, a short-term surge in fertility is usually observed, which again turns into a recession) and the number of marriages decreases. Mass hunger leads to a serious change in the demographic structure of the population: in particular, the proportion of children and the elderly is sharply reduced and the proportion of women is increasing.

Stephen Devereux (Stephen Devereux), the author of many studies on the causes of famine, in 2000 published an article entitled “Famine in the 20th century” (Famine in the Twentieth Century) ^[12] , in which he pays special attention to the situation in Africa, where By the way, most cases of hunger occur. According to him, in this region of the world, armed conflicts are the main cause of hunger, which destroy agriculture and lead to chaos in the food delivery systems from outside. Devereaux sums up that "hunger arises only because no one has tried to prevent it - it is allowed to appear."

British Africanist Alex de Waal (Alex de Waal), author of many books on famine in Africa, in the last of them, “Hunger that Kills: Darfur, Sudan” (Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan) claims that “any government if it is willing, able to take effective measures that can stop hunger. " It is noted that Africa has significant potential in the field of agriculture and, therefore, there is no reason for the continent to experience food shortages ^[6] .

(Mike Davis) in the book The (The Late Victorian Holocausts) describes the tragic situation that has developed in many regions of the world at the end of the XIX century. Then, hunger arose in many regions of India, China, Brazil and Africa, the death rate from hunger was incredibly high - the roads were literally covered with the bodies of the dead. Hunger caused mass migrations of the population, led to robbery, murder and violence, the emergence of epidemics, etc. Davis points out that in many cases the authorities reacted inadequately and quite cynically to this catastrophe. For example, in those years, the volume of export of wheat from India to Europe broke all records, although millions of Indians died from lack of food. The authorities and grain dealers explained their actions by the laws of free trade , since the Europeans could pay more for bread than the Indians. Davis believes that such actions by the authorities can be considered an act of genocide .

In our time, one of the most prominent activists in the fight against hunger is the American academician Raj Patel .

The primary measure of the fight against hunger - the supply of food in starving areas. At the same time, the point of view is now finding more and more support that aid should be provided in cash, especially in those regions where food is available but is not available for a part of the population at a price ^[13] . The largest non-governmental food supply organization, the UN World Food Program , switched to providing cash aid instead of direct food supplies, which executive director of this organization, Josette Sheeran, called the “revolution” in the fight against hunger ^{[13] [14]} . Another starving agency, Concern Worldwide , in collaboration with mobile operator Safaricom, has launched a pilot project for the transfer of funds through a cellular network ^[13] .

However, in the case of drought or for regions remote from the main markets, the direct delivery of food still remains relevant ^[13] . But as noted by Frederick Kewey , the place of food procurement plays an important role. For example, US laws prohibit making purchases outside the country, and the cost of food in countries covered by hunger is such that it is cheaper to buy it abroad. Because of this, before the arrival of aid, part of the starving dies ^{[15] [16] [17]} .

According to one of the largest analytical centers in Hong Kong, the Asian Patrion Portal, the malnutrition of the population in Southeast Asia and Africa is systemic in nature and is due to the lack of expensive animal protein in the body. Thus, the capacity of the animal protein market was estimated at 180 million tons, and the cost - more than $ 6 billion a year. The conclusions reached by the Asian Patrion Portal are not a single private company, even if a very large company is able to solve the problem of filling this market, so the problem of malnutrition in the region can be solved only together.

• General determinant of hunger

• Yanovsky A.E. ,. Hunger, as a public disaster // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : 86 tons (82 tons and 4 extra). - SPb. , 1890-1907.

• Food crisis. Collection of facts
• Hunger and malnutrition in the world
• IFPRI. The Global Hunger Index