The Biggest Famines In World History

It's tempting to think the modern world is a place where starvation doesn't happen anymore. A little of that is delusion (that guy with the cardboard sign isn't really hungry, he just wants beer!) and a little of that is just wishful thinking. But the truth is, the world is a bad, bad place, evil people do evil things, and sometimes the weather is just as evil as the people are.

Famines have been a thing since the beginning of human history, and nothing's really changed since the notorious Urgh vs. Urm wars of 2 million B.C., when Urgh stole all of Urm's figs and Urm burned down Urgh's apple tree. Just kidding, that never happened. Still, famine has human causes as often as it has environmental causes, and as the world's population has grown things haven't really gotten any better. A startlingly large number of the world's worst famines happened in recent history, many of them in the good ole 20th century, a time that a lot of people can actually remember. So let's take a walk through the history of world famine, and maybe make a note that we should try not to repeat the things that caused past famines. Just a thought.

According to the "Encyclopedia of Disaster Relief," the Chinese Famine of 1907 was the second-worst famine in history, coming close to the Great Chinese Famine that began more than half a century later. It happened before communism and the Great Leap Forward, during the Qing Dynasty, but unlike the famine of 1959, it was largely caused by environmental disaster. Before heavy rains and flooding during the growing season in 1906 wiped out crops over 40,000 square miles in the Anhui, Honan, and Kiang-Su provinces, Chinese farmers were learning to grow imported crops like corn and sweet potatoes, and using new techniques such as terraced farming, better irrigation, and grain storage. That wasn't enough to stop the famine, though, and by the beginning of 1907 about four million people were starving. Food riots broke out all over the country, and starving people congregated in overcrowded refugee camps, where diseases like smallpox ran wild and killed even more people. 

The 1907 famine didn't end overnight, but media attention helped slow it down as people all over the world donated food and money. Ultimately, the famine killed an estimated 25 million people and also contributed to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, not because the Qing Dynasty caused the famine but because of its abject failure to manage the disaster.

An 18th-century Indian famine is ominously known as "the Skull Famine," which doesn't really make it any worse than any other famine, but does give it rather sinister overtones. According to the Medieval History Journal this 1791 famine was so-named because, at its worst, victims were left unburied, and their skulls littered the ground.

During 1788-1794, famines affected most of India, caused by a series of alternating droughts and severe El Niño events, conditions that may have persisted for up to eight years. By 1792, 600,000 people had died in 167 districts in India. The deaths were largely attributed to drought, but short periods of violent rainfall were also noted. In October of 1791, for example, 25.5 inches of rain fell in just three days. Conditions were so bad that in some provinces up to a third of the villages were abandoned.

There's no doubt that the years of drought and flood were the root cause of the famine, but this was during British colonialism, and the suffering was exacerbated by the fact that the colonizers weren't doing much to try and offset the fact that rice crops were failing all over the country. By the time the famine was over, around 11 million people in India were dead. The consequences went farther than that, though — the Medieval History Journal also notes that the effects of the severe weather events were felt as far away as Australia, Europe, and Mexico. 

In 1917, the British decided to take over Iran and then proceeded to cause a famine that killed between 8 and 10 million people. According to "The Great Famine & Genocide in Iran: 1917-1919," British forces in Iran started by hoarding food for themselves, but the shenanigans quickly escalated until the British were just deliberately buying up local food stocks and putting it all in storage, leaving the locals with nothing to eat. Records made at the time claim this was being done so the British would be able to feed troops stationed in Iran, Iraq, and Russia, but the Iranians themselves had other theories. Those who hadn't already starved to death believed the British were deliberately causing a famine so they could later swoop in with free food and call themselves saviors.

All of this was made worse by widespread drought and disease, which was impacting harvests and making already scarce food even scarcer (via Atlantic Council). At the famine's height, local newspapers said thousands of people were dying every day, and that unburied corpses filled the streets and alleys of Tehran. Some estimates say the death toll was between 8 to 10 million people, though others more conservatively say it was closer to 2 million (via Tehran Times). 

Communism in the 20th century has been associated with an awfully high mortality rate in China, and the same is true of communism's originating nation, the Soviet Union, though on not quite so big a scale. According to the University of Minnesota, in 1932 — just a couple of years after the famine that devastated northern China — Joseph Stalin decided to deliberately engineer a famine in Ukraine. Called "Holodomor," which is a nice, literal name meaning "death inflicted by starvation," the famine was Stalin's way of telling Ukrainians that they were going to be a part of the Soviet Union, whether they liked it or not.

The Soviet Union annexed most of Ukraine in 1922, but it also enacted policies that helped preserve Ukrainian culture and language. When Stalin came into power, though, he feared all of that cultural autonomy might make Ukraine think too highly of itself, so he had a bunch of people executed and seized control of Ukraine's farms. More than 4 million tons of grain were shipped out of the country, and villages that couldn't meet ridiculously high production quotas were essentially walled off by Soviet troops, who let no one out and nothing in. Unable to flee, people starved to death in their homes. By the time Stalin was done with Ukraine in 1933, somewhere between 3.9 million and 7 million people were dead. 

The thing about medieval and renaissance history is that it doesn't always remember exactly the way things happened, and it doesn't usually have all the numbers. That's because historians were largely uninterested in the fate of regular people like farmers and merchants. This is why we know the details of Anne Boleyn's bout with the sweating sickness, but we don't really know how many people died of the black plague.

Similarly, we don't really know how many people died during the Great Famine, which struck Europe between 1315 and 1317. According to historian Lynn Harry Nelson, at the time there were so many people living in Western Europe that, even in good years, it was barely possible to grow enough food to support them. This means that even a small kink in the system could lead to a cascade of events that could spark a famine, and that's exactly what happened in 1315 when heavy rains rotted seed stores and made it harder to get the fields ready for planting. Production dropped, which led to widespread food insecurity. The next growing season was more of the same, and by then the food shortages were being felt everywhere. It got so bad that people abandoned their children and the elderly starved themselves to death so their families could go on. No one is really sure how many lives were lost during the Great Famine, but historians are pretty sure it was "millions." 

According to the Wilson Center, the North Korean famine of the 1990s is poorly understood, just like most of what happens in North Korea. That's because the people in charge of North Korea want the outside world to think communism is awesome and everyone in the country is doing Just Fine. Famines, unfortunately, don't tend to support that narrative.

It's pretty hard to hide an entire famine from the world, though, even if you're North Korea — eventually, word gets out. The North Koreans claimed flooding disrupted the food supply, but the Wilson Center says the famine was largely due to the "Stalinist agriculture system," which basically disincentivizes farming. The government exacerbated the problem by cutting off the food deliveries to parts of the country in order to ensure that everyone in the capital would have enough to eat (sounds a bit "Hunger Games," doesn't it?). Then it cut rations to farmers who (surprise) responded by hoarding food.

The North Korean government admits there was a famine but says 235,000 people died at most. People who know better, though, say the death toll was actually somewhere between 2.5 million and 3.5 million. 

War isn't good for much, but it's especially bad for civilians. Famines are frequently associated with wars, even wars as recent as World War II.

According to "The Ecology of War in China," in 1943 China's Henan Province suffered a drought, and the Nationalist regime not only couldn't be bothered to do anything about it (they were preoccupied with the war, after all), but also decided to reward struggling farmers by taxing them for whatever they had left, presumably so they could make sure the troops stayed fat and happy.

The war probably exacerbated the famine in other ways, too. Wars can disrupt supply chains, for example, making it harder to get food where it needs to go. They can also siphon human resources away from agriculture — when farmers get drafted, killed, or both, that leaves farmland without anyone to work it. As food becomes scarce, hungry people become less productive, and food becomes even more scarce. Meanwhile, what little food there is gets captured by the enemy, spoils during transport, or gets blown up in bomb attacks.

Some or all of these things probably contributed to the Henan famine, and there were also acts of God, like unprecedented flooding and plagues of locusts, because of course plagues of locusts. For the people of Henan, it must have seemed like one horrible thing after another. By the time the famine was finally over, between 1.5 million and 2 million people were dead.