History and Geography
Food production and distribution in every society are enmeshed in human ecologies of great complexity. Because of this, untoward conditions and events of many sorts can lead to famine.
These include natural disasters such as drought, flood, volcanic eruption, frost, and pestilence. In addition, there are social factors such as war, revolution, political policy, general economic collapse, speculation in food commodities, administrative decision or indecision, inadequate transportation, runaway population growth, and gross social inequality. Despite the popular inclination throughout history to blame food disasters on one or another of these phenomena, close analysis of specific cases invariably reveals multiple causes. Efforts to untangle general factors have led to the creation of various classification schemes and models of famine development. They have also resulted in regional studies of outstanding quality. To date, however, little headway has been made in explaining famine in a way that would account for its historical and geographic incidence on a global scale.One large-scale pattern awaiting explanation is seen in the proportional number of famines suffered in regions of the Old World over the past 6,000 years. Beginning about 4000 B.C. and until 500 B.C., existing records point to the Middle East and northeast Africa, especially the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Nile, as extraordinarily famine prone. Over the next 1,000 years, the region of disproportional incidence shifted to Rome and the eastern parts of its empire, including Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Judea. Western Europe became the major locus about A.D. 500. Eastern Europe assumed this grim distinction after 1500, but about 1700 the high frequency of famine moved further eastward. From that year until 1974, periods of dearth occurred with greatest frequency among peoples residing within a huge belt extending from regions ofRussia south of Moscow, across the southern Asian steppes, into India and China. More recently, African regions, especially the East and the Sahel, have been the scene of a disproportionate share of food emergencies.
The several published lists of the world’s major famines, all compiled before the 1970s, contain little mention of catastrophic food shortages among the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and the New World. These omissions grossly underrepresent the experiences of “peoples without history,” leaving vast sectors of the world a blank map and much of the information required to chart the occurrence of famine beyond Eurasia unassembled. What truly universal patterns might be discovered once the temporal and spatial distribution of famine has been more broadly mapped can be glimpsed from a preliminary analysis of unpublished data drawn from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), a representative, worldwide sample of the world’s known and well-described societies. The SCCS, developed by George P. Murdock and Douglas R. White, includes 186 communities dependent on a wide variety of subsistence systems. Each community is precisely located at a point in time, the sample as a whole spanning history from ancient civilization to the twentieth century. The incidence of famine recorded in SCCS bibliographic sources reveals no remarkable differences in the frequency of unexpected food shortages among the world’s major geographic regions. Climatically, data show no more than a mildly positive relationship between the incidence of starvation and aridity. With respect to persistent famine (i.e., its occurrence more than once per generation) the sample does show, as many would predict, a rather strong association with endemic hunger. Finally, statistics indicate a global tendency for the severity of food shortages to increase with both increased societal complexity and dependence on food importation.