Out of the 27 countries measured, the U. In the meantime, approximately million people are starving around the world, according to the U. That makes up about 11 percent of the population. Of the million, more than million suffer from severe malnutrition and risk starving to death. Examples of potentially controversial omissions we have made along these lines include the Highland Potato Famine in Scotland , the Bihar famine in India discussed in more detail below and Niger in Various secondary sources that we have used to compile our table listed in the Data Sources section below themselves use some excess mortality cut-off, but one typically higher than our threshold of 1, This means that there may exist records of famines of a magnitude larger than 1, excess deaths that are not included in our table if they did not appear in the International Disaster Database.
The International Disaster Database lists a drought in India in as killing 1. The only food crisis around this time that we could find cross-references for was that in Bihar, more commonly cited as occurring in Official statistics, however, suggest very low excess mortality. Indeed, the famine was sometimes invoked as evidencing that independent India had turned a corner in its development, such that it could now cope with a serious drought without sustaining major loss of life.
Dyson and Maharatna , however, regarded the official mortality data to be highly deficient. For our table we decided to exclude this famine given such uncertainty. Notably, we chose to excluded the EM-DAT figure for such a high mortality seems questionable given the absence of other corroborating references. Similar issues surrounded the determination of an excess mortality figure for the Maharashtra crisis in This was largely due to an enormous public employment programme which at its peak employed as many as 5 million people in Maharashtra state alone.
They arrive at this conclusion based on adjusting the figures to account for systematic under-registration of deaths, the pre-crisis trend in mortality rates, inter-census population growth and the possibility of excess mortality also occurring in Nevertheless, in the absence of a specific mortality estimate for the Bihar famine it has been excluded from our list of famines. In any case, the level of uncertainty surrounding both of these famines should be borne in mind.
By far the largest single event in our table is that of China at the turn of the s associated with the economic and social campaign led by Mao Zedong known as the Great Leap Forward. In the post-Mao era of the early s, some official demographic data was newly released allowing for the first systematic investigations of the death toll. Initial results from this suggested an excess mortality of around 30 million, and this figure gained some currency.
Subsequent estimates have tended to be lower. One of the key issues is how these official data compare with UN estimates that exist for infant mortality and life expectancy for the period , which imply significant under-registration in official data. Exactly what assumptions are made about such under-registration have consequences for the ultimate mortality estimate produced.
There is necessarily a degree of arbitrariness to such assumptions, with different hypotheses often standing in contradiction to alternative sources of evidence such as historical documentation and conflicting with the demographic patterns typically observed in famines.
Whilst there is much uncertainty about the exact number of deaths attributable to the Great Leap Forward famine, it seems certain that it represents the single biggest famine event in history in absolute terms.
These were then used to make inferences about the number of deaths across the country and, in conjunction with an assumed baseline mortality rate capturing the number of people that would have died anyway in the absence of the conflict, were used to generate the overall excess mortality figure. In addition, the Report argued that the samples of respondents used in the earliest IRC surveys were unrepresentative and also too small to provide reliable estimates. 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.
Contrariwise, the IRC authors point to the fact that access to some of the most insecure zones was impossible during the surveys, suggesting a sample bias in the opposite direction. The overall argument of the Human Security Report is that the available data is not sufficient to form the basis for a credible excess mortality estimate, and any attempt to make one is very sensitive to the choice between a range of plausible alternatives and subject to a very wide margin of error.
It does produce an estimate, but only for the period between for which the surveys conducted were more representative and numerous. However, it points out that this is very sensitive to assumptions about whether the counterfactual baseline mortality rate should be considered to have a trend. For short-lived events a point estimate for the baseline mortality rate is sufficient.
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. As such, the , figure that we include as a lower bound in our table should be treated with extreme caution in that it completely excludes the period prior to and also ignores the downward pre-trend in mortality rates as does the IRC estimate.
As such we do not attempt to subtract violent deaths from the total. The number of people that died in the North Korean famine remains highly uncertain, largely due to the closed nature of the country which has precluded access to official data and other channels of inquiry, such as surveys. Via a reconstruction of demographic trends between and census data, the authors deduce an estimated mortality between , and , A rough consensus seems to have emerged that the 3.
Over time, estimates made via a variety of methods have tended suggest increasingly lower excess mortality. For instance, Goodkind and West put forward , million, with a subsequent study by Goodkind, West and Johnson suggesting a mortality towards the lower end of that range.
Ho Il Moon in an article for VOX argues for a figure of ,, again based on reconstruction of intercensal demographics. Pierre van der Eng collates local and international newspaper reports of a series of localized famines that may have affected specific parts of Indonesia intermittently during this period, against a backdrop of more generalized and persistent malnutrition in much of the country his paper is partly available here.
As news reports, these figures are clearly not necessarily all that reliable and naturally focus on total numbers of deaths rather than excess mortality. Nevertheless, taken together they probably do point towards some excess famine mortality. Moreover, this was a period of significant repression of press freedoms in which the Government appears to have sought to actively restrict reporting on food crises, such that the reports collated may only represent a subset of famine events that occurred.
Our dataset is based on four main sources:. Kumar and Raychaudhuri [Eds. Journal of Economic Literature. Available online here. Twentieth-century famines in china and India as economic history. Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: An ongoing crisis. New York, International Rescue Committee. Human Security Report Project. New York: Oxford University Press, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Imperial Gazetteer of India vol. Through Wikipedia here. Lambton , pp. Crowell and Oozevaseuk — The St. Online here. Population growth Famine across the world since The number of famine victims by decade, ss 7 The rate of famine deaths by decade, ss 8. Increasingly limited parts of the world are affected by famine. Famines by world region, s 9. Number of deaths and duration of individual famines, s Long-run view of famine in single countries.
Estimated crude rates of natural increase in England, —, with possible famines highlighted — Campbell The number of famine points by half-century, — Saito How frequent were famines in the distant past?
Why do famines happen? Famines and real GDP per capita, Famines since by political regime What does a famine declaration declare? Intensity vs. Areas as a whole vs. The global need for emergency food assistance. Prospective vs. Does population growth lead to hunger and famine? Famine victims by decade and world population, ss.
Click to open interactive version. Global picture. Within countries. Famine deaths have decreased, not increased, with population growth. Food scarcity has played a smaller role in famines than suggested by the Malthusian narrative. It ignores other factors like conflict, poverty, access to markets, healthcare systems, and political institutions.
Population growth is high where hunger is high, but that does not mean that population growth makes hunger inevitable. On the contrary, we see that hunger has fallen fastest in countries with high population growth.
Do famines curb population growth? Population of the Island of Ireland, Historic crude death rates in England and Wales. The impact of demographic transition outweighs mortality crises. Demographic transition in 5 countries, Is mortality from the current ongoing food crises included?
Incomplete or inaccurate historical record. How is excess mortality estimated? How should war famines be taken into account? Famines with very low mortality. Famines in independent India: Bihar and Maharashtra Great Leap Forward Famine, China But again, the positive development has faded in recent years and even reversed.
Share of undernourished people in the world: Acute hunger Of the million undernourished people in the world, million face acute hunger meaning they are in urgent need of food and nutrients.
Well into the 21st century hunger is still the world's biggest health problem. See more. Climate change already causing hunger In , over 20 million people in the African countries of Ethiopia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Kenya experienced acute food insecurity as a consequence of climate change. While million people suffer from undernourishment, about a third of all food for human consumption is lost or wasted.
UN Food and Agriculture Organization: 1. Support TheWorldCounts Spread the message. Visit our Shop Make a Donation. Sustainable Shopping. The organisation also urges influential governments to push for humanitarian access in all contexts, so all children can receive the support they need. To truly put an end to global hunger and the malnutrition crisis, however, the international community must address the root causes of food and nutrition insecurity. Only by putting an end to global conflict, tackling changing climate and food systems, and building more resilient systems and communities will we be able to ensure the same warnings do not ring out again in the coming years.
Save the Children launches largest ever appeal to help prevent hundreds of thousands of children from dying of hunger With an estimated 5. According to the analysis: The Democratic Republic of Congo has the highest number of children under five who are facing emergency levels of food shortages: 1.
In Yemen, almost , children under five face critical food shortages and in Afghanistan, almost half a million children are facing extreme hunger. This includes an estimated 41 million people experiencing IPC4 , which means they are only one step away from famine. A further million people could be pushed into extreme poverty by the end of this year alone. In , 45 million children under the age of five were wasted.
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