A famine is officially declared only when three measurable thresholds are crossed
Under the international classification used today, an area counts as being in famine only when a fifth of households face extreme shortages, acute malnutrition in children tops 30 percent, and daily deaths exceed two per 10,000 people, all at once. Even then, a declaration obliges no government to act.
Famine means widespread scarcity of food, whether caused by war, natural disaster, crop failure, poverty, economic collapse or government policy, and it usually brings malnutrition, disease and rising deaths. Every inhabited continent has known it, though the Americas have been among the least affected. Across the 1800s and 1900s, the worst death tolls fell on China and India, with Europe and the Middle East also hit hard. Deaths from famine fell steeply from the 1970s and further after 2000.
The rules for naming one are strict. If only the household threshold is met, a population can be described as in catastrophe but not in famine. If two thresholds are exceeded and the third is judged likely, analysts speak of famine with reasonable evidence. A formal declaration focuses world attention but carries no binding duties, and in complex crises the demanding criteria and political sensitivities make declaring one difficult.
Europe's escape from recurring famine was tied to commercial farming. As feudalism broke down in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, landowners enclosed fields, paid wages and grew surpluses to sell, while money taxes pushed peasants toward market crops. Holland's specialised agriculture let it ride out a general Western European famine in the 1590s, and England's last peacetime famine came in 1623 to 1624.
Industrialisation gave governments new tools, including imports, price controls, stockpiles and rationing, but using them well was another matter. During Ireland's Great Famine from 1845, Robert Peel repealed the Corn Laws in 1846 and started public works, but his successor Lord John Russell, guided by faith in free markets, scaled back relief as the crisis deepened; half a million people were on public works by December 1846. In the 1880s the British Raj created a famine commission whose code introduced the first famine scale, distinguishing near-scarcity, scarcity and famine, the last marked by food prices above 140 percent of normal, migration in search of food and widespread deaths.
Source: Famine
