Famines
In many parts of the world famines have been common in the past. What causes famines? How can famines be averted?
This page was first published in 2013 and last revised in March 2025.
A famine is an episode of mass mortality due to mass starvation, which is the destruction, deprivation, or loss of objects and activities required for survival. 1
These crisis characteristics distinguish it from persistent malnutrition, which we discuss on another topic page. The term 'famine' can mean different things to different people and has evolved over time. It is only in recent years that more precise, measurable definitions — in terms of mortality rates, food consumption, and physical signs of malnutrition — have been developed.
But despite these ambiguities, it is nonetheless very clear that in recent decades the presence of major life-taking famines has diminished significantly compared to earlier eras. The parts of the world that continue to be at risk of famine represent a much more limited geographic area than in previous eras, and those famines that have occurred recently have typically been far less deadly – as we will go on to show in this topic page.
Famines have always occurred as the result of a complex mix of ‘technical’ and ‘political’ factors, but the developments of the modern industrial era have generally reduced the salience of natural constraints in causing famine.2 This includes many developments discussed in other pages of Our World in Data, such as the increasing food supply, made possible through increasing crop yields; improvements in healthcare and sanitation; increased trade; reduced food prices and food price volatility; as well as reductions in the number of people living in extreme poverty.
As a consequence famines have over time become increasingly “man-made”-phenomena, becoming more clearly attributable to political causes, including non-democratic government and conflict. Paradoxically, over the course of the 20th century famine was virtually eradicated from most of the world, whilst over the same period there occurred some of the worst famines in recorded history. This is because many of the major famines of the 20th century were the outcome of wars or totalitarian regimes. As such, the waning of the very high levels of warfare over the last decades and the spread of democratic institutions have also played a large part in the substantial reduction in famine mortality witnessed in recent decades.
Emergency food aid provided by relief agencies continues to play a crucial role in preventing loss of life, and the international relief community has recently developed monitoring systems that have allowed for greater preparation and more timely interventions. Where poor harvests are the main cause of famine, relief provision tends to prevent marked increases in mortality. It is the presence of conflict, or abuses of political power that can block food supplies from reaching populations which represents the most pertinent trigger of ‘death-dealing’ famines today.3
Thus, overall, we can see the rapid decline of famine mortality as one of the great accomplishments of our era, representing technological progress, economic development and the spread of stable democracies. Viewed in this light, however, it also serves to highlight the appalling continued presence of famines which are, in the modern world, entirely man-made.
Related topics and writing
Hunger and Undernourishment
What are the consequences of undernourishment and how can we make progress against hunger and undernourishment?
Micronutrient Deficiency
Food is not only a source of energy and protein, but also micronutrients — vitamins and minerals — which are essential to good health. Who is most affected by the "hidden hunger" of micronutrient deficiency?
Food Prices
Food needs to be affordable for people, and at the same it is a key source of income for one-quarter of the world’s labor force.
The Our World in Data Dataset of Famines
A global dataset of famine deaths from 1860 to 2016.
See all interactive charts on famines ↓
Famine across the world since 1870
Long-term trends in global famine mortality
Compared to earlier historical periods, fewer people have died in famines in recent decades. Here we show two bar charts using data from the World Peace Foundation’s famine dataset.4 The first chart shows the number of deaths from large famines. While the number of famine deaths has varied significantly from decade to decade depending on the occurrence of individual catastrophic famines, recent decades have seen low numbers of famine deaths by historical standards.
The next chart shows the death rate from large famines, expressed as the number of people dying each decade per 100,000 people of the world’s population. Viewed in this way, the trend is all the more notable: the famine mortality rate fell to very low levels over the second half of the 20th century.
The sharp reduction in famine mortality represents "one of the great unacknowledged triumphs of our lifetime", as famine researcher, Alex de Waal describes it.5
As de Waal explains, a continued decline is by no means assured: the future of famine will depend largely on the nature and prevalence of war.
Famines by world region since 1870
Increasingly limited parts of the world are affected by famine
The geographic spread of famines has become smaller over time, as the following chart shows.
There hasn’t been a large famine in North or South America since the late 19th century, and no large famine in Europe since the 1940s.
Large famines in Asia have claimed many fewer lives in recent decades, even if they have not disappeared completely.
This has meant that large famines recently have mostly been confined to Africa.
Victims of individual famines
This chart shows the estimated number of people dying in individual famines since the 1870s.
We see that there are very large differences in how deadly different famines are: most death tolls are in the hundreds of thousands, a smaller number of famines claim several million lives, and one — China’s “Great Leap Forward” famine — was far deadlier than all others, claiming an estimated 36 millions lives between 1958 and 1962.
For all famines, the data on the death toll is associated with considerable uncertainty. The data that we rely on — produced by researchers at the World Peace Foundation — puts the most likely death toll for the famine during Mao Zedong's reign at 36 million, drawing on the work of several researchers.6 Other sources suggest that the death toll was even higher. For example, in his book 'Mao's Great Famine', Frank Dikötter suggests that the death toll was 45 million.7
The uncertainty of the data for historical famines is high because the estimates are frequently based on very scant demographic information, and even where such evidence is available there is still disagreement in its interpretation.
Where such differences are present, our source the World Peace Foundation has chosen either the most credible estimate of the number of deaths across sources, or — if there were several equally credible estimates — it used their median.
But while the number of deaths caused by individual famines is often subject to a good deal of uncertainty, the overall trend over time is very clear: compared to earlier historical periods, far fewer people have died in famines in recent decades.
Long-run view of famine in single countries
England
In today’s developed countries peacetime famines had largely ceased by the mid-19th century.8
In England, this was achieved at least a century earlier. This graph shows estimates of the crude population increase – the number of births minus the number of deaths divided by the population – taken from Campbell (2009).9
These figures are based on a national sample of parish register entries, which are available with good coverage from 1538 when the registration of baptisms, marriages, and burials became enforced. By comparing the price of grain (which was well documented in England from the twelfth century onwards) with estimates for real wages and grain yields, the author was able to make reasoned speculations about which of the documented sudden drops in population were likely to have resulted from famine, as opposed to disease epidemics unrelated to food shortages. The idea is that even if harvests were bad, if there was no simultaneous rise in grain prices it seems more likely that disease would have been the main driver of population losses, as opposed to famine (the lower population reducing the demand for food, thereby offsetting the reduced supply to keep prices roughly level).
In this visualization, population crises potentially consisting of famine conditions are indicated with an 'F'. The last was in 1741-2 which was “brought on by an extreme short-term weather anomaly of at least three-years’ duration” that affected much of northwest Europe, causing an even more severe famine in Ireland.
Japan
Saito (2010) has created a chronology of famines in Japan since the 6th century. Data before the 14th century is judged to be incomplete (although the records for the 8th and 9th are surprisingly complete—there were more than 35 famines in each of the two centuries).
In Saito's visualization shown here, the number and intensity of famines are shown as 'points': 1 point is given to widespread famines, and 0.5 points are given to more localized events.
Overall, Saito's chronology comprises information on 281 famines. None of these 281 famines happened in the twentieth century, and the graph here shows that the end of starvation in Japan arrived gradually. Before 1550, there were more than 10 famines per 50-year interval, and since then, famines have become less and less common in Japan.
How frequent were famines in the distant past?
It is very difficult to know how common famines were in the distant past given the absence of historical records.
As noted by the World Peace Foundation, “generally speaking, better demographic calculations lead to lower estimations of excess deaths than those provided by journalists and other contemporary observers. We might therefore reasonably expect an upward bias in the figures for earlier famines on the record.” On the other hand, there is an obvious risk that existing historical records underreport long-past famines and the number of their victims due to the lack of documentation being made at the time or their being lost subsequently. Loveday, an early researcher of Indian famines, noted in 1914 that, “The frequency of the mention of famine in the later history […] increases in exact proportion with the precision and accuracy in detail of her historians.”11
At least in proportionate terms, it seems safe to conclude that the nineteenth century suffered far more intensely from famine than did the twentieth century, with Ó Gráda (2007) considering one hundred million deaths a ‘conservative estimate’ for the nineteenth century as a whole: similar to the combined figure for the twentieth century, and in the context of a much lower population back then.12
On the other hand, it seems unlikely that famines dominated to the degree assumed by some early famine scholars such as Robert Malthus, not least because ‘normal’ mortality rates would have been very high anyhow. “Given that life expectancy was low even in noncrisis years, frequent famines would have made it impossible to sustain population”, concludes Ó Gráda (2007).
Based on consideration of a patchwork of burial records and other historical accounts, Menken and Watkins (1985) conclude that famines in which death rates doubled for two years or more were 'rare', and that famines of even greater intensity were 'highly unusual', if they occurred at all.13
From what evidence there is, it seems unlikely that famine served as a primary check to population growth in the past, with non-crisis malnutrition and disease generating high enough death rates to act as "more potent positive checks on population growth in the long run than the Third Horseman.”14
Why do famines happen?
Food supply
We might naturally tend to associate famine with drought or other natural phenomena, and indeed most documented famines have occurred in the context of harvest failures, often due to droughts or flooding. However, in recent times, aggregate food availability per person has increased dramatically, and given the comparable ease of transportation and communication, localized shortfalls can – in theory at least – be met by importing food from surplus areas far quicker and at a much lower cost nowadays. As such, lack of overall food availability per se plays a less prominent role in causing famine today than it did historically.
Better integrated food markets have on the whole helped to ease acute localized food price volatility due to bad harvests. Food shortages that lead to higher prices create an incentive for traders to increase the supply of food, thereby preventing shortages from developing into outright food crises.
Thus the absence of markets, or the presence of badly functioning markets, can be a key part of why people are not able to obtain enough food. Where means of transport are lacking, trade between surplus and deficit regions can be hampered, as well as making the distribution of food aid much harder during crises. The more limited development of transport infrastructure in parts of Africa has played a contributory role in a number of recent famines on the continent.15
Where markets function badly, supply may be restricted 'artificially'. For example, Amartya Sen argues that 'speculative withdrawal and panic purchase of rice stocks' was one of the primary causes of the Bengali famine of 1943, which turned a 'moderate short-fall in production... into an exceptional short-fall in market release’.16
Where traders have some monopoly power over local markets, hoarding can be a way of increasing profits by making prices rise. Even without monopoly power, where traders collectively expect prices to increase, for whatever reason, it can make sense for them not to sell storable food to final consumers immediately, but rather wait for the higher prices, thereby restricting the current overall supply to consumers. Again, this is part of the normal functioning of a market which encourages food to be transferred from periods of relative plenty to those of relative scarcity. But where such trading leads to excessive speculation on price increases, 'price bubbles' can emerge such that prices no longer bear any relation to the actual relative scarcity. In this sense badly functioning markets can produce 'artificial' scarcities, where food is prevented from reaching final consumers not because of actual falls in production, but only due to the anticipation of higher future prices.
Such self-fulfilling expectations of price increases can occur simply where people have mutually reinforcing, but nonetheless mistaken beliefs about future supply. According to Ravaillion (1987), such a dynamic was indeed at play during the Bangladesh famine, in which food prices soared despite there being no significant drop in food production or in overall food availability per person.17 He suggests that the severe flooding that occurred during the famine created the expectation of a shortfall and related price increases, but that the resulting panic buying and price speculation themselves brought about the scarcity, rather than any realized drop in production. It is argued by others that food price speculation at the time was directed toward a perceived weakness in the government's ability to continue with a policy of buying food at below-market prices in order to keep prices from rising too much.18
For instance, if a weather event (such as the severe flooding that occurred during the Bangladesh famine of 1974) makes people think there will be shortages, panic buying and price speculation can artificially produce scarcity.
The chart shown, taken from Ó Gráda (2006), shows the very dramatic peak in food prices during the Bangladesh famine that happened despite there being no decline in overall food availability. It also shows a sharp increase in the differences in food prices between different regions in Bangladesh (as measured by the standard deviation). This is evidence that, during the famine, markets became more spatially segregated – i.e. food was not able to move to those regions where it was in highest demand, and thereby lower local price differences. The absence of properly functioning markets thus contributed to the localized scarcities.
International aid continues to play a large role in addressing food security, both in emergency situations and to help relieve more persistent periods of food insufficiency (the World Food Program collects data on the quantity and value of international food aid and is available here). The development of better monitoring systems, such as the Famine Early Warning System, has given the international relief community more advanced notice of developing food crises, although such early warnings by no means guarantee a sufficient aid response or the granting of secure access to affected areas.
Thus, whilst drought or flood-caused crop failure might naturally seem to be high up on a list of causes of famine, this was far truer for famines in the past. Nowadays, crop failure is better understood as an important contributing factor rather than a sufficient cause of famine: food crises due simply to localized drops in production do not tend to develop into full-blown famines with high excess mortality unless exacerbated through more overtly human influences.
Demographics
The world is approaching what the late Hans Rosling called “the age of peak child”: the number of births globally has flattened out and we recently passed – or are at – the largest cohort of children that there will likely ever be.
This is relevant to famine trends because children under the age of five are particularly vulnerable, usually accounting for between one half and two thirds of all excess deaths in famines.20 Whilst the absolute number of children has increased, the fraction of the world population that this vulnerable age group makes up has decreased, and will continue to do so. The Demographic transition makes the occurrence of famines with very high mortality rates increasing less likely, both at a global level and as it unfolds in individual countries.
Poverty
As Amartya Sen argued, the fact that there may be enough food available in aggregate within a given area does not necessarily mean that everyone will be able to afford it.21
Food crises are often precipitated by spikes in the price of food relative to wages, or the collapse in the price of assets owned. The latter commonly accompanies famines due to many people all at once trying to sell their assets (for instance their livestock) in order to be able to buy more food. Such shocks can mean that those already living close to the level of subsistence may find their 'exchange entitlement' — that which they can obtain on the market in exchange for their labor or other assets — fails to provide them with enough food, even if the aggregate local supply is sufficient.
Wealthy countries have very few people living in such extreme poverty, both because of higher incomes before tax and benefits, but also due to higher government expenditures and transfers.
The countries in which famines occur tend to be very poor, as the following chart shows. Here we show the average income of each country at the time it experienced a famine. As we can see, many countries had average incomes of below $2,000 when the famine occurred.
Our source, the World Peace Foundation, also identifies a main trigger for each famine. This data suggests that all famines in the slightly richer countries were not triggered by adverse climates, but human action in the form of bad government policies or armed conflict.
Democracy and oppression
Amartya Sen famously noted in his 1999 book Development as Freedom that “there has never been a famine in a functioning multiparty democracy”. He suggested that democratic authorities are incentivized through elections to be more responsive to food crises and that the presence of a free press can quickly draw attention to the event and hold governments to account.
Whilst exceptions to this rule can be found — depending on the definition of ‘democracy’ and ‘famine’ being employed — the visualization here corroborates the idea that famines tend not to happen in democracies. Here we use the World Peace Foundation’s data on famines and group it by data on political regimes (discussed more in our article on democracy data).
Based on these data sources, there was only one large famine in a democracy between 1870 and 2023: in Northeast Nigeria between 2016 and 2019. During that time, fighting between the rebel group Boko Haram and the government displaced millions of people, and both parties were accused of restricting the delivery of humanitarian aid.
It is important to note, however, that the question of how often famines have occurred within democracies crucially depends upon the definition of famine being used. In particular, what, if any, excess mortality lower-bound is being used yields different answers. As Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer (2007) point out, a number of smaller-scale events in which drought-related mortality did occur have happened in functioning democracies.22The authors argue that even within democracies it can still be politically advantageous for governments to allow small minorities to starve if in doing so they are able to win more votes by distributing benefits to others.
Regardless of the threshold though, the main point remains that the large, catastrophic life-taking famines documented in history have occurred in autocratic regimes and not in the context of functioning democratic institutions.
War and famines
Many major famines resulted from international or civil war. For some of these, famine was used as an intentional part of political or military strategy. The ‘Hunger Plan’ pursued by Nazi Germany as part of its attempted invasion of the Soviet Union is an example of the latter. Despite the plan only being partially executed, millions of famine deaths are attributable to the offensive, significantly more than have occurred globally since the turn of the 21st Century.23
In terms of more recent events, from the second half of the 20th century onwards, famines in Africa have become increasingly associated with civil war. In addition to the direct casualties, conflict can also generate disruption to production and trade and can encourage the spread of disease epidemics, particularly through forced migration.24
Crucially, it can also block the arrival of humanitarian relief to those in need.
It is mainly in the context of conflict that major death-dealing famines can be expected today.
Poor health and infectious diseases
It is important to note that, as opposed to dying from literal starvation, the vast majority of people who die during famines actually succumb to infectious diseases or other illnesses, with some diseases being more directly linked to diet than others. Famines brought on by drought often go hand-in-hand with a scarcity of clean drinking water that increases the threat of cholera and other diseases. Increased migration and the disruption of personal hygiene and sanitation routines and healthcare systems also increase the risk of outbreaks of infectious diseases, all in the context of a population already weakened through malnourishment.
This is particularly true in places where such diseases are already endemic. Thus, in sub-Saharan Africa where vaccination rates for measles have been relatively low, the disease has been a big killer during modern famines in the region alongside other infectious and parasitic diseases common in non-crisis times.25
The table here is taken from Ó Gráda and Mokyr (2002) and shows the percentages of excess deaths during a selection of famines attributable to different proximate causes, including the most typical famine diseases. In each case, it can be seen that communicable diseases were the ultimate cause of death in the majority of cases. (Note that, for India and Moscow, the excess mortality attributable to starvation is not available separately).
This is in contrast to some famines that occurred in industrialized countries during WWII, in the context of overall healthier populations and systems of sanitation that were maintained to some degree despite the crisis. In these instances, disease played far less of a role, with deaths from starvation correspondingly higher. Ó Gráda (2009) gives the example of the siege of Leningrad in which “few of Leningrad’s 0.8 million or so victims perished of contagious diseases,” noting that the number of people dying from the main infectious diseases were actually lower in 1941 – amidst an overall vast increase in excess mortality – than they had been in 1940 before the blockade began.25
What does a famine declaration declare?
In recent years, the international humanitarian community has agreed upon specific criteria for determining if a food crisis should be considered a famine. But given the range and complexity of food emergencies, the way in which famines, or potential famines, are discussed can still be quite unclear.
For example, in February 2017, parts of South Sudan were officially declared by the UN as being in famine – the first such declaration since 2011. By May the famine had apparently receded, thanks to an effective aid response that averted large-scale loss of life. And yet, the crisis was far from over. Indeed the overall food security situation in the country had, in fact, 'further deteriorated' over the same period, according to official reports27 – even as the 'famine' status was being withdrawn.
Here, we look in more detail at the famine declaration in South Sudan to better understand how famine is defined today and how this fits in with our understanding of famines in the past.
Intensity vs. magnitude
The UN follows the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) when declaring famines. The IPC famine factsheet and the more general IPC Manual provide details.
The IPC lays out thresholds across three dimensions of outcomes, all of which must be evidenced in order for a famine to be declared in a certain area:
- Food consumption and livelihood change: At least one in five households faces an extreme lack of food, as evidenced by insufficient food consumption (in terms of quantity and/or quality) and by the coping strategies employed by or available to households (e.g. the extent to which assets like livestock or seed may have been sold off)
- Nutritional status: More than 30% of the population is suffering from 'wasting' (being below 2 standard deviations below the median weight for a given height in the reference population)
- Mortality (due to inadequate food consumption): At least two people out of every 10,000 and at least four children under five out of every 10,000 are dying per day.28 The key criterion is for the overall death rate to be above the 2/10,000 threshold. Where this is below the threshold level but the under five death rate is above its threshold, famine should only be declared following consultation with an 'Emergency Review Committee'.29
A few things are worth noting about this definition. First, these thresholds represent only the most severe rank of the IPC food insecurity classification. The system ranges from Phase 1 to Phase 5, with 5 corresponding to a famine situation. Lower phases of food insecurity are categorized by lower thresholds in each of the three dimensions above.
Second, it is important to see that such thresholds are a measure of intensity rather than magnitude.30 That is to say, rather than trying to capture the absolute number of people in a certain situation of food insecurity, it looks at proportions within given geographic areas. Thus different assessments of food security trends will often be made depending on the geographic level of analysis. An amelioration at a very local level is perfectly compatible with an overall deterioration of the food security status of a country as a whole. And this is exactly what happened in South Sudan over the course of 2017.
Here, we show two maps of South Sudan showing the IPC classification of each county in South Sudan in January and May 2017. It was the intensity of the food security situation in Unity State in January (shown in dark red colors), which brought about the famine declaration later in February, with IPC Phase 5 thresholds being confirmed in some parts.
By May the situation in Unity State had somewhat abated due to humanitarian relief efforts, but the food security situation of most other parts of the country had deteriorated significantly. Thus while the 'famine' was over – in the very particular sense of there being no area where intensity thresholds met Phase 5 criteria – the food emergency had in fact become worse for most people.
Areas as a whole vs. individual households within an area
Just as different parts of a country can have different food security statuses, different households can and typically do experience different levels of food insecurity within any given geographic area. Rather than looking at geographical subdivisions, one way of getting a sense of how different people are faring in a food emergency is to look at the numbers of individual households experiencing different levels of food insecurity.
The IPC sets out such a 'Household Group Classification' alongside the 'Area Classification' outlined above. It mirrors the area classification in providing a Phase classification from 1 to 5, with 5 consisting of a 'Catastrophe' situation for the household. Since nutritional status and mortality data are typically collected for whole populations in a given area, only the food consumption and livelihood change dimension is used to categorize food security at the household level – though signs of malnutrition or excess mortality within the household are used to confirm the presence of extreme food gaps at the higher insecurity rankings.33
So whilst the household-level classification considers fewer outcomes (only food deficits, as opposed to nutritional or mortality outcomes), it does allow for an assessment of the magnitude of a food emergency in terms of the absolute number of people being affected at different levels of severity. Looking at the household data for South Sudan over 2017 offers another angle on the evolution of the crisis. The two tables shown give the number of people estimated to be at a given level of insecurity across the different States in January (first table) and May (second table).
With such a disaggregation we can see that the humanitarian provision, targeted to the most in need in Unity State, did indeed bring down the number of people experiencing the very worst food insecurity. It was on this basis that that country was no longer officially 'in famine'. However, if we look at the number of individuals in Phase 3 (Crisis) or worse food insecurity, we see not only a deterioration in the country as a whole (45.2 % of the population in May compared to 32.3% in January), but even in Unity State itself (with 58.7% and 54.7% respectively).
Thus whilst a binary 'famine/no-famine' categorization is very useful in terms of being able to draw international attention and relief efforts to the most dire situations, there are other dimensions that we should be aware of in trying to get a sense of the gravity of a food crisis, particularly in terms of its magnitude.
The global need for emergency food assistance
The Household Group IPC classification can be used to get a sense of the scale of the food emergencies currently underway. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS), for instance, publishes estimates for the number of people in need of emergency food assistance, defined as those experiencing, or imminently likely to experience Phase 3 ('Crisis') food insecurity or worse. This corresponds to households experiencing "food consumption gaps with high or above usual acute malnutrition" or those "marginally able to meet minimum food needs only with accelerated depletion of livelihood assets that will lead to food consumption gaps."
And along this dimension, the numbers were, according to FEWS, 'unprecedented in recent decades'.34
The numbers estimated to be in need of emergency assistance in 2017, as defined by FEWS, did represent a peak in recent times.35
Prospective vs. retrospective classification
The IPC system is fundamentally geared towards preventing famines, rather than assessing their severity after the event. As stated in the IPC Manual,
"The purpose of the IPC... is not to classify various degrees of famine, nor is it to categorize the “worst famine”. Rather, in order to inform real-time decision-making, the IPC thresholds for famine... are set to signify the beginning of famine stages."37
It is important to bear this in mind when trying to compare such assessments with famine trends over time. The World Peace Foundation’s famines data provides estimates of the 'excess mortality' associated with individual famines.38
In reference to the discussion above, this can be thought of as a measure of magnitude only along one dimension: mortality.
Official famine declarations based on the IPC Area classification, like that made for South Sudan in 2017, do not straightforwardly map onto such an analysis. For instance, given the larger population being affected, it is quite possible that more people died due to food consumption deficits in Yemen than in South Sudan in early 2017, despite the intensity of the former crisis not having brought about a famine declaration in any part of the country.
In terms of classification based on excess mortality alone, there are no officially agreed criteria about which food emergencies should be counted as famines and which not.
Does population growth lead to hunger and famine?
Modern Malthusians
It’s no good blaming climate change or food shortages or political corruption. Sorry to be neo-Malthusian about it, but continuing population growth in this region makes periodic famine unavoidable... Many of the children saved by the money raised over the next few weeks will inevitably be back again in similar feeding centres with their own children in a few years time.39
It is not uncommon to see arguments along the lines of this quote from Sir Jonathan Porritt, claiming that famines are ultimately caused by overpopulation. Porritt – former director of 'Friends of the Earth' and also a former chairman of the UK Government’s Sustainable Development Commission – was talking about the 2011 famine in Somalia that went on to kill an estimated 258,000 people.40 He seems certain that the rapid population growth witnessed in East Africa had made famine there ‘unavoidable’.
There is something compelling about this logic: a finite land area, with a limited ‘carrying capacity’, cannot continue to feed a growing population indefinitely. From such a perspective, the provision of humanitarian aid to famine-afflicted countries, however well intended, represents only a temporary fix. In this view it fails to address the fundamental issue: there simply being too many mouths to feed.
As mentioned in the quote, this suggestion is commonly associated with the name of Thomas Robert Malthus, the English political economist writing at the turn of the nineteenth century. Malthus is famous for the assertion that in the absence of ‘preventative checks’ to reduce birth rates, the natural tendency for populations to increase – being ‘so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man’ – ultimately results in ‘positive checks’ that increase the death rate. If all else fails to curb population, ‘gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world'.41
But does the evidence support this idea? Here, we examine the relationship between population growth and famine, and between population growth and hunger more generally.
Does population growth cause famine?
The two chart compare the number of famine deaths per decade since 1870 and the world population over the same period.
Looking at the world as a whole, it is very difficult to square Malthus' hypothesis with the simple but stark fact that, despite the world's population increasing from less than 1.4 billion in 1870 to more than eight billion today, the number of people dying due to famine in recent decades is only a tiny fraction of that in previous eras.
We might naturally think that increasing agricultural production explains this trend. Indeed, food supply per person has consistently increased in recent decades, as we can see in the chart. The large increase in global population being met with an even greater increase in food supply (largely due to increases in yields per hectare).
However, looking at the issue in this way is too simple. As we discuss above, insufficient aggregate food supply per person is just one factor that can bring about famine mortality. Contemporary famine scholarship tends to suggest that insufficient aggregate food supply is less important than one might think, and instead emphasizes the role of public policy and violence: in most famines of the 20th and 21st centuries, conflict, political oppression, corruption, or gross economic mismanagement on the part of dictatorships or colonial regimes played a key role.42
It is also true of the 2011 famine in Somalia referred to above, in which food aid was greatly restricted, and in some cases diverted, by militant Islamist group al Shabaab and other armed opposition groups in the country.43
Famine scholar Stephen Devereux of the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, summarizes the trajectory of famines over the 20th century as follows: "The achievement of a global capacity to guarantee food security was accompanied by a simultaneous expansion of the capacity of governments to inflict lethal policies, including genocidal policies often involving the extraction of food from the poor and denial of food to the starving."44
Thus, all in all, the recent history of famine mortality does not fit the Malthusian narrative particularly well. Firstly, contrary to what Malthus predicted for rapidly increasing populations, the food supply per person has – in all regions – increased as populations have grown. Secondly, famines have not become more, but less frequent. Thirdly, in the modern era the occurrence of major famine mortality, and its prevention, is something for which politics and policy seem the more salient triggers.
Does population growth increase hunger?
Global picture
Famines tend to be thought of as acute periods of crisis and are in that sense to be distinguished from more chronic manifestations of hunger that may in some places represent 'normal' circumstances, despite being responsible for large numbers of deaths.45
Given the typically political nature of outbreaks of such famine crises, it may make more sense to examine the effect of population growth on the longer-term trends of hunger and malnutrition.
But again, at the global level, we know that population growth has been accompanied by a downward trend in hunger. As we discuss in our topic page on hunger and undernourishment, in recent decades the proportion of undernourished people in the world has fallen, and, although more muted, this fall is also seen in the absolute number. The number of people dying globally due to insufficient calorie or protein intake has also fallen, from almost half a million in the 1990s to less than half in more recent data, as shown in the visualization.
Within countries
We can also look at the experiences of individual countries, rather than just at the global level. Do those countries with particularly high population growth rates find it harder to adequately feed its population?
In order to get some idea about this, we can compare countries' Global Hunger Index (GHI) scores with their population growth rates. GHI is a composite measure, out of 100, that combines four indicators: undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting, and child mortality.46
The score is based on data collected in the years leading up to the scoring year, and as such reflects the hunger levels in this period rather than solely capturing conditions in the year itself. All the countries for which there was GHI data available are shown in the three charts.47 Crucially, this excludes a number of very food-insecure countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Somalia, which have also seen high levels of population growth.48 This should be borne in mind when interpreting the following results.
Of the countries for which we do have GHI data, it is clear that those with higher levels of hunger have also tended to have had higher population growth over the last 25 years, as the first chart shows.
It is important to see though that among the countries for which we have GHI scores in both years, the level of hunger went down in all but one – Iraq, as the second chart demonstrates. Over the same period, population went up in almost every case. Moreover, those countries that experienced higher levels of population growth in fact saw a bigger drop in their GHI score over this period.
The countries that saw high population growth over this period started with higher levels of hunger. So what we are seeing here is that countries are converging towards lower levels of hunger: it fell quickest in countries with the highest levels of hunger, as the third chart shows.
So whilst countries that experience hunger do tend to have high levels of population growth, the idea that population growth necessarily leads to increased hunger is clearly mistaken: many countries with high population growth have recently managed to decrease levels of hunger substantially.
Another way of looking at this is by looking at how deadly famines were depending on how fast the population grew leading up to them. The chart shows this by comparing the number of famine deaths to the population growth rate in the 20 years leading up to each famine. We see that most of the worst famines happened after periods of slower population growth, rather than after the largest population increases.
Population growth does not make famine inevitable
Environmental degradation, including climate change, does pose a threat to food security, and the growth of human populations has undoubtedly exacerbated many environmental pressures. However, this represents only one aspect of the complex explanation of why so many people suffer and die from undernourishment today, despite there being adequate food available for consumption globally.49
'Malthusian' explanations of famine and hunger thus fall short for the following reasons, the evidence for which we reviewed above:
- Per capita food supply has increased as populations have grown, largely due to increasing yields.
- Famine deaths have decreased, not increased, with population growth.
- Food scarcity has played a smaller role in famines than suggested by the Malthusian narrative. It ignores other factors like conflict, poverty, access to markets, healthcare systems, and political institutions.
- Population growth is high where hunger is high, but that does not mean that population growth makes hunger inevitable. On the contrary, we see that hunger has fallen fastest in countries with high population growth.
If we want to put an end to hunger, we need to understand the diverse causes that bring it about. Oversimplifications that mistakenly see hunger and famine as an inevitable consequence of population growth do not contribute to this end.
Do famines curb population growth?
Is famine the ultimate 'check'?
English political economist, Thomas Robert Malthus, writing at the turn of the 19th century, is famous for describing famine as "the last, the most dreadful resource of nature" which acts to "level the population with the food of the world" should other forces fail to lower birth rates or increase death rates.41
We can think of this ‘Malthusian’ proposition as containing two separate hypotheses: first, that unabated population growth ultimately leads to famine; and second, that famine acts as a ‘check’ to population in this eventuality.
As we discuss above, recent trends in famine mortality, and hunger more generally, largely contradict the first hypothesis. Here we investigate the second, by considering the contribution of famines to long-run population trends. What role has famine played in shaping birth and mortality rates throughout history?
We begin by considering two examples of famines that differ enormously from a demographic point of view: the Chinese famine of 1959-61 and that in Ireland in the late 1840s.
China's 'Great Leap Forward' famine
The 'Great Leap Forward'-famine in China from 1959-61 was the single largest famine in history in terms of absolute numbers of deaths. Excess mortality estimates vary hugely, but based on the best estimates, it cost around 36 million lives.
The chart shows the estimated changes to birth and death rates during and after this famine period, in addition to the effect of these changes on overall population size. Alongside a significant jump in death rates, there was also a large fall in births — a trend very typical of famines.50
However, this was immediately followed by a spike in birth rates in the years immediately following the famine, offsetting to a large degree its demographic effect. This was followed by a steady decline in birth rates throughout the 1960s and 70s, concurrent with domestic birth control policies, but also in line with many other rapidly developing countries.
The trend in mortality rates is similar: the peak generated by the crisis was followed by a continued decline that forms part of the common experience of countries as they develop. The key thing to note is that these secular shifts in births and deaths far outweigh the short-lived impact of the famine in determining the long-run trajectory of population growth in China. We can see from the lower panel in the chart that the famine had next to no discernible impact on the population in the long run.
The Great Irish Famine
This picture contrasts somewhat with the developments following the Great Irish Famine of the late 1840s, as shown in the chart below. After a period of rapid growth that brought the population to over 8 million, a famine struck that was, in relation to the country's population, far more severe than the 'Great Leap Forward'-famine. It is thought to have reduced the population by about one quarter in its immediate effects: one million perishing and a further million emigrating. But one striking feature of Irish demographics is how the population then continued to shrink following the famine. By 1911 there were in Ireland about half as many people as in 1841. The population only began to grow again in the late 20th century. Is this then an example of a country that learned from its 'Malthusian lesson'?
This continued depopulation was partly due to low birth rates (which were considerably lower than in England and Scotland in the second half of the 19th century) and partly due to very high levels of outward migration, particularly to the US and Great Britain. Between 1851 and 1900, there were almost as many outward migrants as there were deaths in Ireland (4.18 million and 4.56 million, respectively).53 According to Cormac Ó Gráda, "during the decades between the Great Famine and World War One the probability of a young Irishman or Irishwoman not emigrating was less than one in two."54
As Ó Gráda argues, the only way a famine can have any real lasting demographic impact is if it "teaches" the population to alter marriage and family planning practices to reduce fertility rates.
There is some evidence of changing behavior in Ireland following the famine, including more people choosing to marry later or not all. However, it is difficult to know if this is directly attributable to the famine, or if it instead reflects people's responses to other changes taking place at the time, such as increasing life expectancy or increasing incomes. Furthermore, whilst total birth rates were low in the post-famine period, the number of children being born to married couples remained high, and the rate of natural increase was highest in those parts of the country worst hit by the famine, complicating any simple explanation along these lines. Similarly, whilst the famine itself clearly provided the impetus for mass emigration, high levels of outward migration began some decades before the famine and continued long afterward in the context of a much-ameliorated standard of living. Thus, it seems likely that it was the promise of improved economic opportunities, rather than fear of famine that drove emigration between 1851 and 1900.55
Overall then, even in this seemingly paradigmatic ‘Malthusian’ example, whilst Ireland undoubtedly did suffer some lasting demographic impacts from the famine, subsequent economic and social developments unrelated to the famine explain the majority of the depopulation the country experienced in the decades following it.
The role of 'crises' in long-run population trends
But what can we say about the impact of famines on long-term population trends more generally? To help answer this question, we look instead at the role of 'population crises' of all kinds – that is, severe spikes in mortality in general, not just those due to famine. What impact have such crises played in shaping population trends, relative to other global developments?
Here are two charts showing the historic evolution of death rates in England and Wales, and in Norway. Data points mark the annual 'Crude Death Rate' (total deaths per 1,000 people) in each country, and a line plotting the 20-year moving average is shown in each case. We can see that the decline in average mortality rates in both countries was preceded by a reduction in the spread around the average i.e., the number and extent of 'crises' of high mortality.56
However, when such spikes were common, they in fact played a relatively small part in keeping average mortality rates as high as they were. Economic Historian, Robert Fogel, in considering the data for England concludes that "crisis mortality [including famine] accounted for less than 5 percent of total mortality in England prior to 1800 and the elimination of crisis mortality accounted for just 15 percent of the decline in total mortality between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."57
We can imagine this by imagining what would happen if we took the highest points in the charts – representing the crises in mortality – and moved them downwards towards the average for that time. The line showing the 20-year moving average would indeed fall, but only by a small amount compared to the overall decline.
The impact of demographic transition outweighs mortality crises
Falling death rates, and increasing life expectancy, are trends that took place first in early industrializing countries but have been a common experience in all parts of the world as poverty has declined, and healthcare and nutrition have improved. But since the 1960s this has been outpaced by a fall in birth rates, such that overall the global population growth rate has been steadily falling, and is likely to approach zero towards the end of this century. The rapid growth in population witnessed since the early 20th century was due to the fall in death rates happening ahead of the fall in birth rates, generating a period of natural increase in between.
This is known as the 'demographic transition': a shift from stable populations with high birth and death rates to stable populations with low birth and death rates, with a period of rapid increase in between due to the fall in mortality preceding the fall in fertility. This chart shows this transition as it occurred in five very different countries. Here also we can see that the secular decline in death rates follows a reduction in its volatility. But again, the height of the peaks in earlier decades is generally small relative to the overall decline. Even larger crises, such as the "Great Leap Forward", or the spike in mortality in Mauritius in the late 1920s,58 translate into very small changes in overall population trends, if at all. It is the persistent long-term decline in 'normal' birth and death rates that represents the more significant development for population trends, not the absence of temporary mortality spikes.
Famines are no 'solution' to population growth
As with any living organism, humans cannot sustain a given population without sufficient energy resources. Given this, at first glance, it does seem intuitive to assume population growth and famines to be closely linked via food availability. The evidence discussed here (and also above) contradicts any simplified view of this relationship that fails to acknowledge the diverse causes of famines and population dynamics.
The analogy to other living organisms can obscure what is different about the human species. We organize ourselves into complex social and political structures capable of incredible joint accomplishments – such as the eradication of diseases. But we are also capable of inflicting, or consciously allowing, unimaginable suffering – including the majority of famine deaths to date. The capacity of the planet to feed us is not a fixed constant, imposed by nature, but rather it depends on us: on our agricultural practices, the development and transmission of knowledge and technology, and also crucially upon our choice of diet – an inherently cultural act.
The population growth rate is now declining, not, thankfully, due to more frequent crises of mortality, but because people, through their own volition, are choosing to have fewer children. This change is very much associated with rising incomes and other social developments in health and education and has tended to happen more quickly in countries that have developed more recently. If we need any generalization here, it is plenty – in terms of improved access to adequate food, clean water, sanitation, healthcare, education, and so on – rather than scarcity, that is slowing down our species' multiplication.
This isn't to say that increased populations and affluence haven't brought about environmental damage, nor that environmental degradation poses no risks to our future well-being. But the idea we are helpless to stop famines in the face of high population growth in some parts of the world, or that famines represent any kind of 'solution' to the environmental problems humans are causing, are two hypotheses that do little to help either humanity or the planet.
Key Charts on Famines
See all charts on this topic
Acknowledgments
We thank Alex de Waal for his helpful suggestions and ideas for this topic page.
Endnotes
This definition comes from the World Peace Foundation’s Historic Famines dataset, our main data source.
See Famine in the Twentieth Century by Stephen Devereux for a good overview.
See Ó Gráda, Making Famine History.
Until spring 2025 we relied on a dataset that we had assembled ourselves. We have switched to the World Peace Foundation’s data because it provides improved and more recent estimates.
de Waal, A., The end of famine? Prospects for the elimination of mass starvation by political action, Political Geography (2017)
Jisheng, Yang. 2013. Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine.
Graziosi, Andrea, and Frank Sysyn. 2016. Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective.
Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Susanne. 2003. Trauma and Memory: The case of the Great Famine in the People’s Republic of China (1959-1961). Historiography East and West (1)1: 29-67.
See, for example: Dikötter, Frank. 2017. Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962.
Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History, Princeton University Press, 2009; p.9.
Campbell, B. (2009). Four famines and a pestilence: harvest, price, and wage variations in England, 13th to 19th centuries. In B. Liljewall, I. A. Flygare, U. Lange, L. Ljunggren, & J. Söderberg (Eds.), Agrarhistoria på många sätt; 28 studier om manniskan och jorden. Festskrift till Janken Myrdal på hans 60-årsdag, Stockholm, Sweden: KSLAB, Stockholm, Sweden.
This is taken from Osamu Saito (2010) – Climate and Famine in Historic Japan: A Very Long-Term Perspective. In Satomi Kurosu, Tommy Bengtsson, and Cameron Campbell Eds. – Demographic Responses to Economic and Environmental Crises. Reitaku University.
The authors's sources for the famine chronology table are:
Ogashima, M. 1894. Nihon saii-shi. Nihon Kōgyōkai, Tokyo.
Nishimura, M., and I.Yoshikawa eds. 1936. Nihon kyōkō-shi kō. Maruzen, Tokyo.
and Fujiki, H. ed. 2007. Nihon Chūsei Kishō-saigaishi Nenpyō Kō. Kōshi Shoin, Tokyo.
Loveday (1914) – Loveday, Alexander. 1914. The History and Economics of Indian Famines. Repr., New Delhi: Usha Publications, 1985.
As quoted in Ó Gráda – (2007) 'Famine: A Short History.' Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ó Gráda – (2007) 'Famine: A Short History.' Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 36. This contrasts somewhat with Devereux's (2000) assessment of the 20th-century famine mortality: "Not only is it the highest total for any century in history, it occurred at the precise historical moment that the capacity to abolish famine… was first achieved.
Cotts Watkins, Susan & Menken, Jane. (1985). Famines in Historical Perspective. Population and Development Review. 11. 647. 10.2307/1973458.
Ó Gráda – (2007) 'Famine: A Short History.' Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 122
See Stephen Devereux, Famine in the Twentieth Century, IDS Working Paper, 2000.
Sen, A, Poverty and Famines.
Ravallion, M, Markets and Famines, OUP, 1987.
Munir Quddus and Charles Becker. 'Speculative Price Bubbles in the Rice Market and the 1974 Bangladesh Famine' in Journal of Economic Development, Volume 25, Number 2, December 2000.
Taken from Ó Gráda, Making Famine History, UCD Centre for Economic Research Working Paper, 2006.
de Waal (2017)
Sen, A, Poverty and Famines.
Plümper, Thomas and Neumayer, Eric (2009) Famine mortality, rational political inactivity, and international food aid. World Development 37(1): 50–61.
According to the World Peace Foundation.
See Máire A Connolly, David L Heymann (2002), Deadly comrades: war and infectious diseases.
Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History (2009), Princeton University Press, p.109-121.
Mokyr, J., & Ó Gráda, C. (2002). What do people die of during famines: The Great Irish Famine in comparative perspective. European Review of Economic History, 6, 339-363.
IPC May 2017 communication, available here. Access 22 Jan 2018
The IPC Manual version 2.0 states that "for both nutrition and mortality area outcomes, household food consumption deficits must be an explanatory factor in order for that evidence to be used in support of a Phase classification". Where, for instance, illness or conflict, unrelated to food consumption deficits, was the cause of mortality this should not be included in the Phase assessment. However, it is common for poor health or conflict to exacerbate the extent or impact of food consumption deficits. Mortality generated in such circumstances is counted.
See IPC famine factsheet and the more general IPC Manual version 2.0, accessed 26 Jan 2018.
This distinction in famine classification was made in an influential paper by Paul Howe and Steven Devereux in 2004, see Howe, P. & Devereux, S. 2004. Famine intensity and magnitude scales: A proposal for an instrumental definition of famine. Disasters 28(4), 353–372.
IPC Full Analysis Report, Jan 2017. Accessed 31 Jan 2018.
South Sudan: Current (May 2017) and Projected (June-July 2017) Acute Food Insecurity and Acute Malnutrition Situation. IPC. Accessed 31 Jan 2018.
The two classifications are linked by the fact that the categorization of households along this dimension forms the basis of the first threshold criterion of the area classification of food insecurity: "A key criterion for the Area classification is that 20 percent of the population must be in that Phase or worse based on the Household Group classification".
See article here, accessed 27 Jan 2018. FEWS in fact later went on to increase its estimates for 2017 to 83 million, as shown in the bar chart.
This is based on FEWS' statement just cited. I was not able to find figures prior to 2015. It is important to note that the coverage of the FEWS analysis is not global, and the geographical coverage can change from year to year. The system looks at only those countries considered to be at risk of facing food crises. As such it may not capture some households experiencing similar levels of food insecurity in countries that are not within this scope.
See article here, accessed 27 Jan 2018
That is to say, the number of deaths in addition to that which would have been expected in the famine's absence.
Who would have thought it? Population growth and famine would appear to be linked! Blog entry from www.jonathanporritt.com, dated 11/07/2011. Accessed 19 Jan 2018. Emphasis added.
The excess mortality estimate is taken from the World Peace Foundation data.
Malthus T.R. 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Chapter VII, p 44.
See also, de Waal, A. The end of famine? Prospects for the elimination of mass starvation by political action, Political Geography, 62:2008
Seal, A., & Bailey, R. (2013). The 2011 Famine in Somalia: lessons learnt from a failed response? Conflict and Health, 7, 22. As the authors note, this was in part due to concern on the part of humanitarian organizations that they would be contravening US government sanctions. Furthermore, both the US and the EU had significantly reduced humanitarian spending in the country in the run up to the famine.
Devereux, S. Famine in the Twentieth Century. IDS working paper 105, 2000.
de Waal, 2018 defines famine as 'a crisis of mass hunger that causes elevated mortality over a specific period of time'. Note that the official IPC classification system used by the UN for famine declarations just looks at total (undernourishment-related) death rates in absolute terms, rather than relative to any non-crisis reference level. This contrasts somewhat with the typical ex-ante famine assessment in which excess mortality is estimated by factoring out the counterfactual death rate – however high.
More information on these individual indicators, including their definitions, can be found on our topic page on hunger and undernourishment.
Population data was taken from the World Bank. Note that GHI is typically not collected for wealthy countries. Below a score of 5, GHI gets bottom coded as '<5'. Of the 95 countries for which we have data in both years, none of them began bottom-coded but five moved into this range by 2017. In the analysis that follows we replaced these bottom-coded observations with a GHI of 2.5. However the key results are robust to omitting these countries altogether. As a robustness check, we also conducted the analysis on the prevalence of undernourishment separately (one of the four components of GHI). The key results remained unchanged.
These three countries would be situated in the top quarter of our sample in terms of population growth, with DRC and South Sudan roughly in the top decile.
World food supply per person is higher than the Average Dietary Energy Requirements of all countries. See our topic page on food supply for more details.
See for instance the summary of famine demography in Ó Gráda (2009) Famine: A Short History. Princeton.
Data up to 1982 are taken from Luo, S. (1988) 'Reconstruction of life tables and age distributions for the population of China, by year, from 1953 to 1982'. Data from 1983 are taken from the World Bank.
Population figures are from Clio-Infra (2016), except for Ireland from 1920 onwards which in the original data refer to the Republic of Ireland only. We add to this population figures for Northern Ireland, based on census data.
According to John Fitzgerald, President of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland in his May 2016 Presidential Address.
Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History, 2009.
See Ó Gráda, The population of Ireland 1700-1900: a survey. Annales de Démographie Historique, 1979
Note that the distribution is skewed: there are no major 'crises' of survival, with mortality rates far below the average. For earlier periods, death rates are extrapolated from parish records, and imprecision in the estimation possibly contributes to the variance.
Fogel, R. Second Thoughts on the European Escape from Hunger: Famines, Price Elasticities, Entitlements, Chronic Malnutrition, and Mortality Rates. NBER Historical Working Paper No. 1. 1989
The Wikipedia page on the history of Mauritius says that "conflicts arose between the Indian community (mostly sugarcane labourers) and the Franco-Mauritians in the 1920s, leading to several – mainly Indian – deaths."
The data on birth rates, death rates, and the total population is taken from the International Historical Statistics (IHS), edited by Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. (April 2013).
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Bastian Herre, Veronika Samborska, Joe Hasell, and Max Roser (2017) - “Famines” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/famines' [Online Resource]BibTeX citation
@article{owid-famines,
author = {Bastian Herre and Veronika Samborska and Joe Hasell and Max Roser},
title = {Famines},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2017},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/famines}
}
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