Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
grown in the first place. Under famine conditions the animal feed should have been turned
over to human use, because that is partly what animals are for: to ensure that there is always
a surplus of grain. The reason why it wasn't (as the Scandinavian report correctly identi-
fied) was because the people who were starving didn't have control over it.
It is now widely recognized that although famines may involve an absolute food shortage
in the affected locality, there is very often no absolute food shortage in the country whose
government is responsible for agricultural policy and food security. The export of food
from famine prone areas is a regular occurrence, and it doesn't seem to make much dif-
ference whether the food is originally destined for humans or for animals. Throughout the
Irish famine of 1845 wheat was being exported from the east of the country to England, and
wheat tends to be grown for human consumption as much as for animals. 3 During the cata-
strophic famine in India in 1876, which killed about ten million people, Londoners were
eating rice and wheat exported from India. 'It seems an anomaly', wrote Cornelius Walford
at the time, 'that with her famines at hand, India is able to supply food for other parts of the
world'. 4
But the anomaly continued: 'Between 1875 and 1900, years that included the worst fam-
ines in Indian history, annual grain exports increased from three million tonnes to 10 mil-
lion tonnes … By the turn of the century, India was supplying nearly one fifth of Bri-
tain's wheat consumption'. 5 During the 1899 famine in the Indian province of Berar, when
143,000 Berari died, 747,000 bushels of grain and tens of thousands of bales of cotton were
sent out of the province. 6
Nor does it really make much difference whether the produce is exported abroad, or is
hoarded by local merchants and élites. An English medical officer, interviewed after the
1873 Bengal famine, testified:
A: In Bengal they died in front of bulging food shops.
Q: Bulging with grain?
A: Yes, they died in the streets in front of shops bulging with grain.
Q: Because they could not buy?
A: Yes. 7
Crop failure, or dearth, in recent times, has usually only turned into famine when a group
of people has no money or access to limited but still available supplies of food. As Amartya
Sen put it in his influential study Poverty and Famine , 20th century famines have occurred
when 'a moderate short fall in production' is 'translated into an exceptional shortfall in
market release'. To understand how easily that sort of thing can happen we have only to
point to the current housing situation in the UK. There is no real shortage of buildings, or
indeed of houses (for many lie empty or are second homes), and the building industry until
2007 was booming - yet, many people cannot afford a home and the number of people in
 
 
 
 
 
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