IT’S BEEN CALLED Black ’47, the Great Irish Famine, and the Potato Famine. From 1845 to 1850, Ireland was hit with one of the most brutal famines of the nineteenth century after several annual harvests of potatoes were ruined by blight. Two million people died, and the harshness of the experience sent at least a million more to seek new homes in the United States and England. Though the Irish population was 8 million in 1841, today it hovers at roughly half of that. The country still, over 160 years later, has not recovered from the aftereffects of a disaster that changed not just Ireland but the entire way we conceive of famine.
Famines have been recorded in historical documents and religious books for almost as long as humans have been writing, and yet they are still among the most poorly understood causes of mass death among humans. The University College Dublin economist Cormac Ó Gráda has spent most of his career studying famine, and admitted to me that it’s very difficult to say how many people die of starvation when “most people in famine die of diseases.” In fact, he added, malnutrition is a bigger killer than generally believed because it leads to the scenarios we explored in the previous chapter, where people are more vulnerable to epidemic disease. It’s only in the last few centuries that we find reliable, complete records of famine that scholars like Ó Gráda can use to piece together the events that lead to masses of people dying from want of the most basic resource: food.
Before the events of Black ’47, the dominant theory of famine came from the eighteenth-century demographer Thomas Malthus, who believed that epidemics and famines were natural “checks” on human populations to keep them in balance with resources available. From the Malthusian perspective, famines should come on a regular basis, especially when a population is outstripping its ability to subsist in a particular area. When the Irish Potato Famine first began to unfold, however, journalists covering the events realized that the Malthusian explanation wasn’t adequate. This famine had its roots in politics. In the decades leading up to Black ’47, industrialization had completely reshaped the Irish landscape. Lands that were once dotted with small farms devoted to a variety of crops were taken over by landlords who converted these farms to pastureland—there, they raised animals for export. Seeking a high-yield crop that could feed their families, peasants on the land that remained available for farming switched from grain crops to potatoes. Many of these peasants were working entirely for “conacres,” or the right to grow their own subsistence food on a landlord’s property. They were living hand-to-mouth, on potatoes, and had no cash to use if their crop failed. When the blight struck, the Irish poor lost both food and money at once. Even at the time it seemed likely that the famine, rather than being a natural “check” on the island’s growing population, was the result of political and economic disaster (itself partly the result of Ireland’s colonial relationship with Britain).
In the century and a half since people began to perceive the political underpinnings of famines, it has become commonplace to view them as caused primarily by economic problems. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen first advanced this theory in the 1980s, in his highly influential book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. There, Sen lays out the details of his famous theory. He explains that “entitlements” are avenues by which people acquire food, and famine is always the result of how those entitlements work in a particular society. Direct entitlements refer to subsistence methods of getting food, like growing potatoes. Indirect entitlements are avenues that allow people to get food from others, usually by earning money and buying it. Transfer entitlements are ways that people get food when they have neither direct nor indirect means—generally, from famine-relief groups. Sen’s theory has allowed economists to diagnose the causes of famines by looking at the causes of “entitlement failures.” In the case of Black ’47, most Irish people suffered all three forms of entitlement failure.
But there is a missing piece in Sen’s theory of entitlements, and it’s one that is only going to become more important as we move into the next century. That piece is the environment. Evan Fraser, a geographer at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, researches food security and land use. He argues that the Irish Potato Famine reveals how poor environmental management can lead to mass death. He believes we should supplement Sen’s theory of entitlements with an understanding of how “ecological systems are vulnerable to disruption.” In other words, famines are undeniably the result of how we use (or abuse) our environments to extract food from them.
Many famines begin when economic or political circumstances encourage people to convert environments into what Fraser calls “specialized landscapes,” good for nothing but growing a limited set of crops. In Ireland, for example, landlords pushed farmers to transform diverse regions into landscapes that could yield only one crop: the potato. Often, this kind of farming appears to work brilliantly in the short term. Black ’47 was preceded by years of escalating productivity as Irish farmers converted grain crops to potatoes. Paradoxically, the wealth of the ecosystem meant that it was also precarious. Any change to these “specialized landscapes,” whether a blight or a slight change in temperature or rainfall, can wipe out not just one farm but every single farm. What’s bad for one potato farm is bad for all of them. As Fraser put it, “You get one bad year, and you’re stuffed.” In the case of the Irish famine, there were at least two bad years of blight before true famine set in, during 1847.
The ecosystem vulnerabilities leading to Black ’47 could very well become common over the next century. Seemingly minor problems like temperature and rainfall changes could spell death for regions that depend on a single crop that is sensitive to such changes. The most immediate areas of concern lie in the breadbaskets of the American Midwest, a vast region of prairies that stretches from Saskatchewan to Texas. “Most societies are interested in grain, and if you think in terms of wheat, then you need a hundred and ten days of growing conditions,” Fraser said. “You need weather that’s not too hot and not too cold, and abundant but not excessive rainfall. If you get long periods of good weather, you don’t realize there could be a problem. And then you get one bad year, and it all unravels very quickly.”
During the dust-bowl famines of the 1930s, farmers saw a collapse of the Midwest ecosystem. And we’re going to see a return to the dust bowl again. “We know from climate records that the Midwest experiences two-hundred- to three-hundred-year droughts. There are periods where we see centuries of below-average precipitation. The twentieth century was above average. We’ve had a long rhythm of good weather. But the next hundred years will be much drier. We’ve already seen droughts hitting in Texas. It’s going to be hard to maintain productivity then.” I spoke to Fraser in early 2012, before the worst drought in over 50 years hit the Midwest that summer, destroying crops and livelihoods. According to the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor that year, “About 62.3 percent of the contiguous U.S. (about 52.6 percent of the U.S. including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico) was classified as experiencing moderate to exceptional drought at the end of August.” Fraser’s predictions for drought are already coming to pass, and he and his colleagues believe more is yet to come.
Does this mean we are witnessing the leading edge of a global famine? Yes and no. The issue here isn’t that people are inevitably victims of their environment, nor that mild changes in the weather always lead to famine. Trouble comes when you see a growing group of people who are extremely poor, combined with a vulnerable ecosystem that’s not diverse and therefore can’t withstand any kind of climate change or pests. A failed crop is a tragedy, but it doesn’t become a famine unless people don’t have the money to buy food elsewhere.
In Black ’47, the main way that people survived the famine was a method that spoke to both problems. They emigrated, moving themselves and their families away from a failing economy and a failing ecosystem. But during many famines, people don’t have that option.
There were many famines during the mid-twentieth century, and most of them were related to war. A lot of these deaths were probably from diseases exacerbated by conflict and malnutrition. War rationing and deprivation leave people weakened, vulnerable to dysentery and epidemic disease. But in the early 2000s, Newcastle University historian and demographer Violetta Hionidou found evidence of a terrifying period during the Axis occupation of Greece from 1941 to 1944, when 5 percent of the population died directly from want of food.
The Greek Army staged a highly successful resistance to Italian invasion in 1940, and the Greek premier refused to buckle under to Mussolini even after a protracted battle. Indeed, had it not been for the aid that Bulgaria and Germany gave to the Italians, it’s likely that Greece would have held fast. Instead, after intense German bombing, Greece fell and was occupied by troops from Italy, Bulgaria, and Germany—all of whom were taking orders from Nazi commanders in Germany, and securing the public’s docility through a Greek puppet government in Athens. In the wake of the occupation, England withdrew its support (the British had been aiding the Greek military) and set up a blockade to prevent supplies from reaching the country. Carved up into territories occupied by three different hostile nations, and cut off from its former allies, Greece was fragmented and intensely vulnerable.
That fragmentation—political, economic, and, in the case of the famine-stricken islands Syros, Mykonos, and Chios, geographical—is what led to the horrors that came next. A first wave of famine struck Athens, claiming as many as 300,000 lives after the German occupying forces requisitioned food and demanded that the Greek government pay the costs of the occupation. In one fell swoop, the people of Athens had lost what Sen would call direct and indirect entitlements, and the blockade prevented transfer entitlements from easing their suffering. Often, that is where the story of the Great Famine of Greece is said to end, with a few nods made to the fact that there were also poor harvests. But according to Hionidou, there was much more to the story than that.
First of all, the production levels from Greek farming did not actually dip below the norm. She found that the numbers historians have used to make this claim are entirely based on products that the occupying government collected tax on. But there was widespread resistance to paying tax, as well as the simple fact that people couldn’t afford it. Therefore a lot of foodstuffs that Greece produced during the famine went untaxed and unrecorded. Still, Greek citizens relied for much of their food on imports and trade; remote island areas were especially dependent on imports. The occupying forces restricted people’s movements to small areas, which meant that nearly the entire Greek population had to sneak around and participate in a black market for food. Of course, as Hionidou pointed out, “Those who couldn’t afford the black market died.”
And then there were those who had no access to the black market at all. On some islands, there was no way, physically, to sneak past the blockades and get to people selling food. On Syros, Mykonos and Chios, for example, people had to depend entirely on the food they produced to eat. And there simply wasn’t enough of it. The mortality patterns Hionidou found during her research flew in the face of the traditional idea that death from starvation is rare. She pored over records from the time, amazed to discover that accounts from both the Axis side and the Greek side matched up. “Greek doctors were reporting the cause of death as starvation, and some could argue that they had good reason to report starvation to blame the occupying forces,” she said. “But the occupying forces produce documents talking about starvation, too. They don’t try to cover it up by saying it’s disease. They’re not denying it at all.”
The only way that people survived these outbreaks of famine was to hold out until 1942, when the blockade was loosened up and food aid reached the Greek people. Some managed to escape the country into Hungary, while others got rich on the black market. But the artificial barriers that the occupation erected between people did more to starve them than any failed crop ever could. For Hionidou the lesson of the Great Famine in Greece is stark. When I asked her how a famine is stopped, she said firmly, “I think it’s political will.”
Nothing could underscore her assertion more than the greatest famine of the twentieth century, which ripped China apart just a little over a decade after World War II came to an end.
It started as a crazy dream based on the urge to transform the world. Mao Zedong, chairman of the People’s Republic of China, wanted to secure his political power in the party and turn China into an industrial powerhouse that could rival Britain. He’d grown up on the utopian promises of Marxism, and as an adult revolutionary leader was awed by the massive engineering projects of the Soviet Union. So when Mao informed his fellow Communist leaders at a 1957 meeting in Moscow that China would surpass Britain in the production of basic goods like grain and steel, he drew up a plan that sounded like something out of science fiction. Under the Great Leap Forward, he said, the Chinese people would turn their prodigious energies to a massive geoengineering project—damming up some of the country’s greatest rivers, halting deadly floods, and creating enough stored water to irrigate even the most arid regions in the mountains. Unfortunately, the plan turned out to be more fiction than science. Mao refused to listen to the advice of engineers, and pushed local party leaders to harness every citizen’s energies to dig dams that failed and divert rivers in ways that didn’t irrigate the soil. Worst of all, these projects prevented farmers from doing crucial labor on farms.
In 1958 and 1959, as Mao moved into the next phases of the Great Leap Forward, he demanded that each province meet fantastically high quotas on agricultural and steel output. According to regional records uncovered recently by the University of Hong Kong history professor Frank Dikötter, this was when the famine began to claim millions of lives—eventually killing as many as 45 million people. People died as a result of two policies: dispossession and fruitless labor. First, the government created vast work collectives by confiscating all private property, dispossessing people of their food stores, homes, and other belongings. Then local party representatives forced the understandably reluctant members of these new collectives to engage in unscientific, misguided experimental agricultural methods and steel manufacture. Farmers were told to plant rice seeds very close together, extremely deep in the soil, because it was considered a scientific method of producing a higher-yield crop. Meanwhile, to meet steel quotas and avoid punishment, people took to melting down farm equipment and anything else they could. Needless to say, the experimental farming techniques left the collectives with little food, and the steel production often left them more impoverished than ever.
Though China wasn’t at war, Mao borrowed the language of militarization to propagandize on behalf of the policies that were starving his people. China’s Great Leap Forward spawned terms like “the People’s Army,” which Mao used to characterize the displaced masses that party leaders deployed to work on China’s industrialization projects. Dikötter suggests that Mao favored terms like this because being in a state of war—if only a metaphoric one—would inspire people to sacrifice even more for the good of the country. It’s easy to see similarities between this strategy and the situation in occupied Greece. In both cases, war was used to justify abuses that led to millions of deaths.
China’s Great Famine was the worst famine of the twentieth century, and it was entirely manufactured by human political choices, which in turn affected land use. Dikötter calls the famine a mass murder, while the Chinese government considers it to be the result of tragically misguided policies. Regardless, it’s clear that the worst famines in recent history are cultural disasters rather than natural ones.
Survivors of the Great Famine included people who were willing to bend the political rules that Mao and his representatives had imposed on them. They secreted away foods that were supposed to go to the communes, engaged in illegal forms of trade, and, in a few cases, formed armed mobs and robbed trains, communes, and other villages. It wasn’t until 1961 that Mao acknowledged the desperate conditions in some provinces and called off the programs of the Great Leap Forward. When people were allowed to live in more permanent homes and return to tried-and-true methods of farming, the famine slowly abated.
Stories of recent famines raise the same question that stories of war always do: Are we humans going to exterminate ourselves more efficiently than a megavolcano ever could? It’s undeniable that one of the greatest threats we face is ourselves. Though famine has historically been a less efficient killer than other disasters like pandemics, and our systems for dealing with it have improved immensely over time, our survival is still at risk from malnutrition caused by environmental change and what demographer Hionidou called political will.
Evan Fraser’s predictions about environmental change in North America’s breadbaskets are already being borne out by the dire drought conditions that struck in the summer of 2012. Many farmers in Africa have suffered similar droughts for decades because they depend entirely on rainfall rather than irrigation systems.
Some of the environmental changes we’re witnessing in the grain baskets of Africa and North America are cyclical changes that have nothing to do with humans’ use of fossil fuels. But if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent models of rising global temperatures from carbon emissions turn out to be accurate, we’ll soon be dealing with cyclical drought conditions, exacerbated by the heat humans are adding to the party. Many regions will suffer the same problems that farmers face in Africa every season, when drought can wreck an entire region’s hope for food and incomes. It’s very possible that our dreams for a global society in an industrialized world will have the unintended consequence of pushing most people on Earth into lives of poverty, hunger, and disease.
Leaving aside questions of environmental change, we’re still contemplating an exceptionally harsh future. As UC Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong put it to me:
You get a famine if the price of food spikes far beyond that of some people’s means. This can be because food is short, objectively. This can be because the rich have bid the resources normally used to produce food away to other uses. You also get famines even when the price of food is moderate if the incomes of large groups collapse.… In all of this, the lesson is that a properly functioning market does not seek to advance human happiness but rather to advance human wealth. What speaks in the market is money: purchasing power. If you have no money, you have no voice in the market. The market then acts as if it does not know that you exist and does not care whether you live or die.
DeLong describes a marketplace that leaves people to die—not out of malice, but out of indifference. Coupling this idea with Sen’s entitlement theory, you might say oppression and war deprive people of the entitlements necessary to feed themselves. The problem is that the market doesn’t care if people starve or grow ill. Based on historical evidence from famines in Ireland, Greece, and China, we can reasonably expect that if our economic systems remain unchanged, we will continue to suffer periods of mass death from famine. These famines will get worse and worse while the market continues to ignore the growing impoverished class.
Of all the forms of mass death we’ve looked at so far, famine can be understood as the least natural of all disasters. The good news is that famines (often accompanied by pandemics), unlike megavolcanoes and asteroid strikes, are human-made problems with human solutions. If we consider the examples of famine we’ve explored in this chapter, there are a few common themes that emerge in the stories of survivors. All of them have to do with ways that countries have acted collectively to fight mass death. One key lesson we can draw from Black ’47 is that mobility—movement either internally or across national borders—often saves lives. A million Irish immigrants escaped death, thanks in part to other nations allowing them to relocate. Today, Somalian and Ethiopian refugees are attempting to do the same thing as they stream out of regions where food supplies have dried up. By contrast, during the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s government prevented the Chinese who lived in famine-racked provinces from fleeing to other places with better food security. The death tolls that resulted were staggering. Similarly, Greeks who suffered the worst effects of famine during World War II were trapped on islands, unable to flee even if they had wanted to risk the dangers of slipping through the blockades.
Still, global cooperation did ultimately prevent the Greek famine from reaching the proportions that the Great Leap Forward did. A few Greeks left the country, but for the most part the population was saved by humanitarian aid coming in from outside. Like immigration, food aid is a solution that requires other nations or regions to cooperatively step in. This solution to famine involves what Sen called transfer entitlements. To survive, starving regions must rely on the kindness and generosity of regions that can ship in their surplus food.
There is another lesson to be drawn from Black ’47 and the Great Leap Forward that is especially important in today’s drought-stricken times. Mass societies need to adapt better to their environments, figuring out ways to farm sustainably so that a few years of bumper crops don’t give way to decades of blight and dust bowls. It is one of history’s great tragedies that Mao’s attempt to revolutionize China’s land use was so horrifically misguided and ill-informed. He was right that farming methods needed to change radically to sustain China’s huge population. But to say that his implementation was faulty is a gross understatement. Changes in our land use have to be based on an understanding of how ecosystems actually function over the long term. Ultimately, as we’ve learned from studying both human and geological history, the safest route is to maintain diversity. Farmers need to move away from specialized landscapes and monocultures that can make a region’s food security vulnerable to climate change, plant diseases, and pests.
None of these solutions—immigration, aid, and transformed land use—is foolproof, certainly, but they can all prevent large groups from being extinguished. These are solutions that also require mass cooperation, often on a global scale. Preventing famine, like preventing pandemics, has meant changing our social structures. But those changes are always ongoing, often spurred by protests and political upheaval. We even have today’s version of the Peasants’ Revolt in the form of the Occupy movement, whose goals those London rioters in 1381 would undoubtedly have recognized and understood. Still, sometimes it feels as if change doesn’t come soon enough. Famines and their accompanying pandemics are problems that we’ve been trying desperately to solve for hundreds of years. How are we ever going to survive over the next several hundred?
In the rest of this book, we’re going to explore the answer to that question. As we’ve seen, human mass death is caused by a tangle of social and environmental factors. Our survival strategy will need to address both factors. We need a way forward based on rationally assessing likely threats, which we’ve learned about from our planet’s long geological history and our experiences as a species. But we also need a plan that’s based on an optimistic map of where we as a human civilization want to go in the future. To draw that map, we’ll take our cues from some of the survivors around us today, human and otherwise. Those survivors and their stories are what we’ll explore next.