From famine to food crisis: what history can teach us about local and global subsistence crises

Abstract

The number of famine prone regions in the world has been shrinking for centuries. It is currently mainly limited to sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the impact of endemic hunger has not declined and the early twenty-first century seems to be faced with a new threat: global subsistence crises. In this essay I question the concepts of famine and food crisis from different analytical angles: historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory, and peasant studies. I will argue that only a more integrated historical framework of analysis can surpass dualistic interpretations grounded in Eurocentric modernization paradigms. This article successively debates historical and contemporary famine research, the contemporary food regime and the new global food crisis, the lessons from Europe's ‘grand escape’ from hunger, and the peasantry and ‘depeasantization’ as central analytical concepts. Dualistic histories of food and famine have been dominating developmentalist stories for too long. This essay shows how a blending of historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory and new peasant studies can foster a more integrated perspective.

Keywords:

• famines
• global food crisis
• peasantries

Notes

Earlier versions of this paper were presented in Berkeley (Lecture Pieter Paul Rubens Chair), Utrecht (World Economic History Conference), Groningen (Colloquium Economische en Sociale Geschiedenis), Lund (Lund Research Group on Capitalism as World-Ecology) and Berlin (Forshungskolloquium Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte). Special thanks to Cormac Ó Gráda, Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Jason Moore, and the three anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Peasant Studies for their helpful comments and suggestions.

¹Estimates of ‘undernourished population’ from FAO Statistics: 300 to 500 million in the 1960s (10–15 percent of the world population), 535 million in 1972–1974 (14 percent), 580 million in 1979–1981 (13 percent), 840 in 1990 (16 percent), 820 in 2000 (13 percent) and an estimated one billion in 2009 (15 percent). Earlier estimates from David Grigg (1982, 1985, 5–30, with some added figures in the second edition, 1993), and from Lucile F. Newman (1990, 395–6). David Grigg is very critical about the periodic revisions in the FAO definitions of undernourishment and malnourishment, such as the one responsible for the sudden rise of the 1980 numbers from 580 to 900 million.

²See e.g. Meuvret (1946), Appleby (1980), Rotberg and Rabb (1983), Galloway (1988), Dupâquier (1989), Walter and Schofield (1989). Especially on famine and social and political order: Walter and Wrightson (1976), Labrousse (1943, 1956).

³See e.g. Ó Gráda (2007, 5–6), Devereux (2007a), Howe and Devereux (2004, 355–6), Murton (2000), Cuny and Hill (1999, 1–16), Arnold (1988, 5–28).

⁴See also, ‘The social order mattered: as a critical determinant of demographic change, and as the basis of political as well as economic institutions, it fashioned the conditions of death, no less than those of life’ (Walter and Schofield 1989, 73).

⁵See e.g. the works of de Soto (2000).

⁶‘Interestingly enough, it is more often demographers and economists, geographers, anthropologists and political scientists, rather than historians, who have made the running in the recent discussions of famine and who have advanced many of the most challenging theories’ (Arnold 1988, 1).

⁷The criminalisation of famine proposes political responsibility as the prime and sometimes only cause: Edkins (2007), de Waal (1997, 1–6, 213–21), Plümper and Neumayer (2009).

⁸‘The persistence of hunger in many countries in the contemporary world is related not merely to a general lack of affluence, but also to substantial – often extreme – inequalities within society’ (Sen and Drèze 1991, 8).

⁹In the South the so-called ‘Green Revolutions’ promoted the extensive industrial farming of a small number of mass crops: wheat, corn, rice, and soy, sometimes called the crops of the poor and the livestock.

¹⁰ Global Hunger Index. The challenge of hunger 2008. Available from: http://www. welthungerhilfe.de/global-hunger-index-2008.html

¹¹See also Murray Li et al. 2009 and Oya et al. 2009 (‘Rather, the report largely reads like a toolkit to enable development agencies, governments and other “stakeholders” to identify ways of using agriculture as an engine or facilitator of growth and poverty reduction’, p. 231).

¹²The concept of food security points at the availability of food. Food sovereignty sees food as a human right with ‘just prices’ and ‘just policies’ drawn on a deep, historical reservoir of moral economic sensibilities (Edelman 2005, 341). It prioritises local production over (cheap) imports, protection over open markets. It aims at a re-localisation of food power by rebuilding national food regimes (Holt-Giménez 2008, Patel 2006, 2007).

¹³Regions outside Europe dominated by Caucasians: North and South America, Australia, New Zealand. Today these regions produce more than 70 per cent of all wheat and maize exports, two of the three major grain crops. The term was coined by Alfred Crosby (Manning 2004, 52).

¹⁴See Ó Gráda 2007, 25–30. Between brackets the estimated excess mortality as percent of the total population. Compare to Ireland 1846–1852: 12 percent.

¹⁵Data from World Urbanization Prospects. The 2007 Revision Population Database (http://esa.un.org/unup).