The Famine Next Time

I’ve turned my attention lately to the subject of famine. Not a cheery topic I know, but one that, like the proverbial Doomsday Clock ticking down to midnight Armageddon, seems more real than metaphorical. What prompted this grim look into the future was a deep dive into the past that included a reading of Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine (Hachette Book Group, 2025) by Padraic X. Scanlan. I only had to get to page three before I was reminded that the starvation of one million of my ancestors and the forced emigration of another one and a half million between 1845 and 1851 were less the potato’s fault than the oppressive regime of Britain’s Irish colonial rule.

My reading of Scanlan also coincided with a recent lecture I attended by Dr. Kyle Harper, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma. The thrust of Dr. Harper’s presentation was a seat-squirming comparison between the fall of the Roman empire and today’s world roasting and drowning from climate change. Add in current events like Israel’s attempt to starve the Gazans from their own land, and the maniacally undemocratic, anti-science perspective of the Trump Junta, I found myself pushing the hands of the Doomsday timepiece several seconds closer to oblivion.

Three years ago, I was staring out the window of one of those cushy-seated tour buses at the oh-so green western Ireland countryside. I noticed that there were stonewalls running straight up the face of passing hills. Every agricultural wall or fence I’ve ever seen also stretched horizontally across a slope to enclose livestock in neat rectangular paddocks. These vertical walls, however, ended a couple of hundred feet short of the summit, un-intersected by a horizontal barrier, allowing even the stupidest of sheep to find their way around them. As if sensing my confusion, our bus driver, whose knowledge of local history far exceeded the skill required to maneuver a bus down narrow country lanes, informed us that these weird stonewalls were the result of make-work projects designed by British landlords. Irish people in the 1840s, with one foot in the grave from hunger, were paid a pittance to build these walls to nowhere. What they earned bought them enough food to barely stay alive.

The Delaney and Lawlor sides of my family can be forgiven for not saluting the Union Jack. The horrors of rotting potatoes and the pitiful relief efforts that—as Scanlan lays out in gut-churning detail—followed free market principles and the denigration of the Irish people. This left them gaunt, fleeing for Australia and North America, or moldering in a shallow Kilkenny grave. But their unnecessary sacrifice offers similar lessons learned by ancient Romans, British-ruled Indians, 30 million-plus Chinese who perished from hunger under Chairman Mao, and today’s Gazans wasting away under apparent genocidal intent in a region surrounded by ample food abundance and relief workers willing to risk their lives.

The lesson is one that has repeated itself time and again over two millennia, and was best articulated by the Nobel economist, Amartya Sen: “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” That statement has been supplemented over time by Sen and others to include the need for a free press, opposition parties, and non-authoritarian leaders. Sen noted that “What makes a famine such a political disaster for a ruling government is the reach of public reasoning…to protest and shout about the ‘uncaring’ government (The Idea of Justice; 2009).”

For example, assuming Israel remains a functioning democracy, at least when its blood-thirsty, right-wing zealots leave the room, its people, clinging to remnants of a diverse free press and opposition parties, and pressured externally by a rising tide of disparaging global opinion and internally by their innate moral sense, may yet save Gazans from mass starvation and find a peaceful solution to their longstanding conflict with Palestinians.

Scanlan’s Rot is a deeply researched look at one of history’s better known and much studied famines. Phytophthora infestans (p. infestans) originated in Mexico and was imported into the British Isles where it found a hospitable ecosystem in Ireland. Facilitated in the 1840s by global trade—a pre-cursor of sorts to today’s accelerated movement of pathogens around the world—p. infestans turned potatoes to mush. While modern agricultural science would have found work arounds, Ireland was harnessed to Britain’s colonialist yoke which included a slavish adherence to capitalism and the market. Ireland’s many impoverished small landholders and shareholders were monocropping potatoes, often only one variety, partly because it was a nutritious food that’s easy to grow and store, but largely because Britain’s economic structure dominated imports, prices, exports, and crop selection. When p. infestans struck with a sickly vengeance, the system couldn’t bend to find alternative solutions, and catastrophe followed. As Scanlan puts it, “When there is no escape from the market, it eats the weakest first.”

While Ireland’s fields were infected with blight, British relief efforts were infected with a deeply prejudicial attitude toward the Irish and a moral economic fever that guided their relief efforts. The blight, a natural disaster, did not have to be a death knell. According to Scanlan, it was British “colonialism and capitalism [that] created conditions that turned blight into famine…. There was always enough food; the obstacle was a stubborn insistence that private merchants deliver food to the hungry; and that the hungry pay for it with money or labour.” Hence, those walls to nowhere.

Echoing Britain’s profound faith in the righteousness of their economic system, no less a statesman than Edmund Burke admonished against “breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and, consequently the laws of God.“ It was an article of faith among the British elite that overly generous food relief was a moral hazard for the Irish, even though it would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and surely dampened the Irish diaspora. In short, without being forced to work or pay for food, the Irish, thought by much of the British leadership to be dissolute, would be firmly set on the road to perdition. As Scanlan sees it, “…the Irish poor needed relief from the market, not relief through the market.”

Let me turn for a moment to the present-day Republican Congress for a contemporary American expression of British famine morality. The Republican members and their sanctimonious leader, Speaker Johnson, controlled by a President, who unlike Burke, couldn’t have a credible conversation with God if his life depended on it, have recently imposed work requirements on SNAP and Medicaid recipients, and hollowed out the federal public health and research infrastructure as well as our disaster response capacity. Should another version of p. infestans (bird flu?) or COVID-19 strike, and it will; should climate change cook or cool the crops to perilously diminish their yield as they have and will, our current government will have neither the tools nor resources to assist our struggling people.

Not only has America returned to a mean-spirited form of 19th century British conservatism, subjecting everyone, including the most vulnerable, to the whims of a highly competitive marketplace, it has, even more disturbingly, reverted to a parsimonious, even racist approach to social welfare characteristic of the latter half of the American 20th century. It was then, in the 1960s, at the birth of the food stamp program, that Congress made the poor pay for their food stamps. The so-called “cash purchase” requirement was eventually phased out, but its roots remained, firmly anchored in racist assumptions that Black people could not be trusted with some form of unrestricted cash welfare; hence food stamps and not “basic human need” stamps. Even then, after grudgingly accepting that starvation just wasn’t tenable, elected U.S. officials ensured that the quantity of food stamps granted to any household was never sufficient for an adequate diet. Add in various attempts to impose cumbersome work requirements on food stamp recipients, we have a 21st century U.S. Congress acting toward the nation’s most vulnerable citizens like a 19th-century British Parliament acted toward the hungry Irish.

What also rises to the top in the review of famine’s larger history is Sen’s codicil to democracy=no famine postulate, is the need for a free press, opposition parties, and non-authoritarian leaders. Free press is a stand in for the lack of information about the risk of hunger in any given region, which, if known by public officials, relief organizations, and the general citizenry would provoke a response sufficient to prevent or at least mitigate a pending famine.

Sen (The Idea of Justice) provides an example in the form of India’s last famine which occurred in 1943 near the end of the British Raj (Scanlan provides several examples of additional famines throughout the 19th and early 20th century when India was under British rule). Food shortages in the State of Bengal, caused in large part by their crops being siphoned off to feed the British army’s Asian war campaigns, were responsible for a growing number of starvation deaths. A British-imposed reporting ban had silenced the press, even as Bengalese were dying at the rate of 26,000 people per week. These state of affairs were known by British officials in India, but several months elapsed before a full-scale relief effort was launched (there was no Indian parliament made up of elected Indians to hold the British colonial government accountable). As Sen tells the story, it wasn’t until Ian Stephens, the editor of the British-owned, Calcutta newspaper The Statesman ignored government censorship and ran the news of the growing Bengal disaster. At that point, it was too late for the 678,000 who died over six months of famine, but not too late for the thousands who were saved by The Statesman’s reporting and the government’s tragically late, but ultimately effective intervention.

If one wants to explore the gruesome depths to which governmental negligence, no information, and authoritarianism can drive humanity, there is no better nor chilling source than Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine—1958-1962 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) by Yang Jisheng. Mao’s iron-fisted grip on the people, non-existent free press, suppression of dissent, and a state-mandated, one-size-fits-all approach to food production left 36 million people dead from starvation and an estimated 40 million children not born due to maternal fertility disorders from extreme malnutrition. (My full review of the book can be found at Famine | Mark Winne). When I think of food insecurity in America, I’m always emotionally drawn to one indicator, that of parents skipping meals so that their children can eat. Yet China’s great famine brought people to an unimaginable level of desperation, where, Yang Jisheng tells us, parents, driven mad by hunger, ate their own children.

In case I haven’t provided a sufficient number of lessons from the past, I’m going to take one giant step backward to the Roman Empire with the help of Dr. Kyle Harper whose breathtaking lecture I attended this June Kyle Harper – Climate Change and Contagion – Complex Crises Past and Present. As a paleoclimatologist, Dr. Harper examines human history—in this case, the written records of the Roman Empire—and climate history through such specimens as tree rings, ice cores, and microscopic particles found in ocean sediment off the southern coast of Italy. These writings and samples allowed him and his colleagues to assemble enough data to present an accurate profile of life during the periods that we refer to today as the Fall of the Roman Empire (there were several “falls” from about 250 to 550 Common Era).

What was learned? What contributed to the falls?

Food crisis, famine from climate eventsClimate events: Volcanic explosions “veiled” the sun for over a year causing a mini-Ice Age and steep temperature drop around 540 CEInvasion and defeat from outside forces (“barbarians”)Monetary crisis, breakdown in financial structureLegitimacy crisis, fragmentation of political and governance structuresPlague of Cyprian (around 250 CE): “The disease grew severe and indescribable, having struck Rome (and) Greece …. The scribes in Rome registered 5,000 or even more dead (who succumbed to the disease) every day.” Dexippus of AthensPlague of Justinian: about 541 CE; the worst health event of the first millennium and the pre-cursor to the Black Death

Dr. Harper drew two powerful conclusions from this catalogue of events. The first suggests a positive outcome is possible. When climate catastrophes occurred, if political stability was the order of the day, the negative impacts, such as famine did not happen. Today, we call this resilience. Likewise, when political instability rules the day, severe climatic events and pandemics, often accompanied by other social, political, and economic challenges, are more likely to lead to famine. I view this as complementary to the research of Padraic Scanlan and Amartya Sen.

The second conclusion offers less hope. Rome and the rest of the world up until about 1900 had one advantage we don’t have today, they didn’t suffer from nearly 2 degrees increase in global temperatures. Up until that moment when the anthropogenic effects of carbon-based energy took over, the earth’s temperature rarely varied by more than half a degree. Devastating and unprecedented floods, hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, and other climate events, including wildfires, are cascading upon us so rapidly that scientists and those who monitor that activity can barely keep up, let alone analyze it. For instance, “The First Street Foundation, a private risk-assessment firm, concluded that floods previously considered to be one hundred-year events have become, on average, sixty-two-year events.” (The New Yorker, 7/28/25).

Dr. Harper concluded his lecture with this slide: “Scary thought: we can also probably handle a lot of climate change, until our constitutional system disintegrates, the dollar collapses, the US splits into two, the next COVID appears, and worldwide crop failure happens simultaneously.” The average ancient Roman lived to about 30 years old compared to today’s developed countries’ average lifespan of about 80. The two biggest causes of that vast difference in those lifespans, according to Harper, are vaccines and basic public health advances such as clean water. Gazing up at his last slide, Harper remarked, “all of this doesn’t feel as remote as I’d like it to be.”

I would say that it feels eerily close given Trump’s sacking of science, universities, health research, nutrition programs, economic wisdom, ethical standards, and everyday common sense. The barbarians are no longer at the gate—they are inside the walls!

Though this example might seem like small potatoes compared to the rotting potatoes of 1846, our food policy council in 2001 discovered that 6000 women, infant, and children had been inadvertently dropped from the WIC rolls in the City of Hartford, Connecticut. This was due to some bureaucratic bungling that city government is, unfortunately, heir to and can easily act indifferently unless advocates scream at them. The negligence was severe enough to send a strong bolt of food insecurity into the lives of the city’s most vulnerable people. The food policy council marched into the mayor’s office threatening to go to the media if these WIC clients weren’t restored to the program immediately. The problem was fixed in two weeks.

Yes, we need more and better food policy councils to be the informed and active citizenry that holds both the ignorant and the malicious accountable. As Scanlan says, however, at the conclusion of his book, “famine in the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth, is a disease of modernity—of war, of ecological accident, of climate change, of the vicissitudes of markets acting on the vulnerable.” Yet, looking at today’s events in Gaza and back at Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, I also can’t help but think that there is something unremittingly dark at the core of the human soul capable of making plausible arguments for death by starvation. The only plausible answer must be, “where there is a functioning democracy, opposition parties, and a free press,” despots, both here and abroad will one day fall like so many cabbage heads into a hand-woven basket. And with the good sense of a democratic people, and the compassionate hearts we are all born with, catastrophes will not mean famine and starvation.