Ep 191 Famine: More than starvation

the nearest internet cafe. There, I try to keep up with work and commitments, charge my devices, and catch a brief connection to the outside world. But with a heavy laptop bag on my shoulder, the journey feels less like a short walk and more like crossing a desert. One day, in particular, I had been working NonStop, pushing through dizziness and exhaustion, By the time I reached the stairs to my apartment, my legs were barely holding me up. My

blood sugar had crashed. I collapsed just as I reached my bedroom. I was rushed to the nearest GP, where I was given an IVY to stabilize me. The next morning, I was back at work, not because I had recovered, but because I felt I could not afford to stop. The urgency to bear witness outweighed the need to rest.

This is not about ego. It's about refusing to disappear, about resisting the slow erasure that comes with war and famine, about insisting that our thoughts and our work continue, even when it must be done in the ruins in Gaza. To be an academic today is to refuse to be reduced to a statistic. There are days when continuing feels impossible. The body simply gives out. Reading leaves me lightheaded, concentration slips away, Teaching becomes a battle to remain coherent. The

most basic truth remains difficult to say aloud. We are hungry, not by accident but by design. When did naming that become taboo? This is not just about hunger. It is about being forced to fight for survival in silence. To generate knowledge in the context of hunger is to think through pain, To teach students who have not eaten and still tell them their voices matter. To insist against all odds that Gaza still thinks, still questions, still creates. That in itself is an act of resistance.

And just as we can't isolate starvation's impact on one part of our physiology and ignore its other effects, we can't pretend that mass starvation happens in a vacuum, that one day the crops failed and there simply wasn't enough food, that the cost of famine comes solely down to the direct physiological effects of starvation multiplied by the number of

people impacted. That's not the way that it works. The causes and consequences of famines are far more complex than that, and ultimately each famine is unique, deserving of its own focused examination. But looking back at the vast history of famines, which have been with us for all of our species time on this earth, we can draw out some general patterns to help us understand the present and the possible future.

This is an enormous area of scholarship, like absolutely enormous, and there are people who have dedicated many people who have dedicated decades of their lives to the study of famines.

And I really struggled with how to approach this episode and also like feeling like I can't, like I'm not capable of doing this, but you know, I thought you should, I tell the story of just one famine, should talk about famines in history, And ultimately what I decided to do was to break this down into five chapters definition, causes, consequences, trends, and the future of famine. It's an oversimplified attempt at

trying to understand famine and contextualize what we're seeing. And this is far from exhaustive coverage of a massive and massively important topic. But fortunately there are there's some additional reading that I can point you towards. So for this

episode just wanted to shout out sources in advance. I mostly relied on a few books, so the book Mass Starvation, The History and Future of Famine by famine scholar Alex de Wall, Famine A Short History by Cormick Ograda, Poverty and Famines An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation by Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen and Red Famine Stalin's War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum, as well as a handful of papers. So let's get started, yeah. Chapter one. Definition

of famine. What is famine and why is it important to define it? Famine exists at the extreme end of a spectrum of food scarcity. Simply put, a population experiencing famine is not able to access adequate food, leading to an elevated death rate. It is an event, a deviation from normal life. Throughout human history, different cultures and languages

have used many different words to signify a famine. The ancient Roman orator Cicero used Praisin's caritas to mean present dearness or dearth and future of fames for future famine fames or I'm not sure how you say it is where famine comes from its fames and so it's a Latin word for hunger or starvation. It's like the word famished.

For instance, in ancient Egypt, the word for famine is combined with is one combined that combines both hunger and plague, which is I think relevant in the context of how infectious disease occurs. Alongside oh, yes, Khalian word for famine, keristia, means dearness, so like things that are scarce and expensive and difficult to obtain. In medieval England, the word dearth was used to refer to famine as well as dearness, and the German word for famine hunger snot and probably

really butchering that pronunciation. It refers to hunger associated with scarcity of food. Some famines have their own specific name. There's the holodomor with death by hunger in Ukraine nineteen thirty two to nineteen thirty three, the Skull Famine in India seventeen ninety to seventeen ninety one, the Great Hunger or Black forty seven for the eighteen forty five to eighteen fifty two famine in Ireland, Metunia or the Scramble in Tanzania nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty. And that's just

to name a few. Like many, many famines have their own names. Until very recently, there was no formalized, agreed upon definition of famine. People didn't need one to recognize it as it was happening. They didn't need to understand the physiology of starvation to recognize its effects in themselves, their children, their neighbors. They didn't need a formal death

toll to grasp the magnitude of devastation. But as we've discovered in recent decades, having a standard threshold beyond which we can declare famine is crucial for decision making and

delivering aid, especially as humanitarian aid organizations have grown. In the early two thousands, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification or IPC system was developed for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and it consists of five phases, so phase going from phase one, which is none or minimal, and that means that households are able to quote meet essential food and non food needs without engaging in atypical

and unsustainable strategies to access food and income end quote. And I'm not going to read the deaths of each of the other phases until phase five. But phase two is stressed, Phase three crisis, Phase four emergency, and in phase five, which is catastrophe slash famine quote, households experience an extreme lack of food and or cannot meet other basic needs even after full employment of coping strategies. Starvation, death, destitution,

and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident. For famine classification, area needs to have extreme critical levels of acute malnutrition and mortality end quote. So these phases are determined at the household level, whereas famine is an area wide classification. So how many households are experiencing extreme food scarcity? The threshold for famine is one in five households or twenty percent in a specific area facing a complete lack of

food and other basic needs. Starvation is evident with more than thirty percent of children acutely malnourished, households are destitute, and death rates exceed two per ten thousand per day measured as excess mortality. So it's not just like how many people are dying, it's how many people are dying above the basisine the average.

and it's not. Excess mortality includes and I'm quoting from Alex D. Wall here, quote anyone who died of any causes above the baseline. It includes deaths from communicable diseases often the single biggest cause of death, exposure and exhaustion, and in some instances violence as well. Including all of the deaths can be justified because famine is not just

an aggregate of individual cases of starvation. It is a far reaching social disruption that involves epidemics of an infectious diseases, movements of desperate people, crime, and an array of other social disorders. End quote. Famine is more than starvation on a large scale. Yeah, period, way more, way more. The IPC classification of famine is very specific and technical, and that is by design. It makes no reference to the cause of famine. It is politically agnostic, which is really

important when it comes to delivering humanitarian aid. A declaration of famine as outlined by those clearly defined criteria allows humanitarian aid protocols to be enacted. It frees up resources and funds to deliver aid, and it draws international attention and action to the crisis, hopefully before it's too late, although if it's if a famine is declared, it already is too late for many people, a lot of people.

The IPC system for declaring famine is crucial for acknowledging the need for public action, but it's not really something that we can use to identify or describe historical famines, which often lack the demographic data to determine something like excess mortality, like how do the estimated six hundred thousand deaths from the nine hundred and sixty seven CE flood

in Egypt translate into additional mortality. How much of that is above the baseline for the two nine to two oh three BCE famine in China that killed eighty to ninety percent of the population, what was that baseline population?

set time period. A great famine is one that has killed at least one hundred thousand people, and a catastrophic or calamitous famine I've seen both used is one that has killed over one million. Between the years eighteen seventy and twenty ten, at least one hundred and sixteen million people died in over fifty great and catastrophic famines, a truly staggering number. One hundred and sixteen million people, jeez, and just over you know, in one hundred and forty years.

But the vast majority of those one hundred million deaths happened before nineteen eighty. What changed. I'll get there in a bit, but first let's talk about the causes of famine. So Chapter two, Causes of famine. Why do famines happen? Food shortage from crop failure, other disruptions in the food supply, rising food prices, armed conflict, political will, more things, sometimes all of the above, a blend of things. I think there's often a tendency to think of famine as a

natural force. You know, drought or floods, fire, agricultural pests, fungal epidemics, volcanic ash blotting out the sun, destroying any available food and bringing starvation to the land. And historically that may have occasionally been the case. There may have been famines that were caused directly by crop sequential crop failures,

solely crop failures. But today, and I think for centuries, you could argue famine is exclusively man made, started or perpetuated by political decision, their mismanagement, or malice, not, as Thomas Malthus claimed in seventeen ninety eight, an inevitable outcome of uncontrolled population growth, nature correcting itself by bringing down a population to a more appropriate level. Yeah, Malthus, Yeah, there's In Alex de Wall's book, he refers to it

as like the Malthust zombie. I think it's like this idea, this concept that just won't die, that somehow food will be the only limiting factor. It won't be. There will be many things before food or contributing and we're not even close to that. That's a whole separate discussion anyway.

You brought it upon yourselves, upon yourselves. Yeah, nothing we can do. And in those famines, food was not the limiting factor. Ireland and oftentimes India was still exporting food as forced by England or preventing its delivery in India. If India wasn't actively exporting, famines do not happen, as Mouth is claimed. Our planet is capable of producing enough food for the global population. You know, whether climate change will play a role and shifting that is a question

that remains to be seen. It probably will, but we are not there yet. We're not there. We're not there yet.

erodes every aspect of your life. Whatever the goal submission, humiliation, suffering, genocide, many governments have and continue to wield starvation to accomplish

those goals. Like during many colonial conquests by European governments, like the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, like the Holodomor in nineteen thirty two to nineteen thirty three, which was intended by Stalin to destroy Ukrainian identity and culture, like the Nazis used repeatedly during World War II, including during the Nazi Hunger Plan, which was not enacted fully but intended to kill a

calculated thirty million people, like the US's World War II Operation Starvation was actually named that where I'm one hundred percent serious. They dropped mines into Japanese harbors to disrupt food shipments and it actually intentionally to cut off food supply, or during the Vietnam War when they killed all the crops defoliation with napalm ecoside, like Israeli leaders who use hunger as a weapon and prevent aid from being delivered During the two thousand and eight to two thousand and

nine Israeli siege of Gaza. An advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister is reported to have said, quote, the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger end quote. I get that quote. Yeah again, Outright starvation deaths during famine are rare.

People are far more likely to die of infectious disease or other causes, all of which still constitute famine deaths, even if the goal isn't outright genocide or submission, and a famine begins because of you know, say, harmful government policy and subsequent denial or just like crop failings and then subsequent denial and inaction in action, yeah right. What that reveals is that those in power simply did not

care enough to do anything. During the nineteen forty three Bengal famine that killed two to three million people in India oh my gosh, which India at the time was still under British control. Britain denied that there was any food shortage. They blamed it all on people allegedly hoarding food,

meanwhile requisitioning food themselves for the war effort. And then they refused to provide relief or allow any transport of food into India because they were worried about it being intercepted by Axi's forces, or enact any standard famine relief measures.

They didn't do anything. So, according to scholar Lizzie Collingham quote, it is difficult to reach any conclusion other than that racism was the guiding principle which determined where hunger struck end quote And this famine which the scholar Amartya Sen lived through and then inspired him to write some of his ideas about the economics and the impacts of poverty and famine. I think this it shows, as he pointed out, how important it is to ask the question, is there

no food to buy? Or is it that there's no money to buy food? Or is it that you are prevented from buying food? These are very crucial differences. Malthus would probably say that famines happened when there's no food to buy. There's just no food, there's no food. But in this modern era and likely during Malthus's time, food is never the limiting factor. It's about access and who

prevents access. There's a classic metaphor to describe the vulnerability of a peasant throughout history, and it was created by Richard Tawny in nineteen sixty six, and it's this metaphor of a peasant standing up to his neck in water so that even the slightest ripple can drown him. And thinking about what causes those ripples or waves and what determines the height of the water in the first place, I think that can be helpful in thinking about famine.

Maybe a ripple is a bad crop here. Maybe he's knocked down because of his religious beliefs or just ethnic identity. Maybe a wave comes in the form of an exorbitant tax or a case of dysentery. When an entire population is up to their necks in water, that can make them max extremely vulnerable to a famine, and that famine can have devastating consequences. Chapter three, Consequences of famine. What

happens during and after a famine. Like we talked about last week, starvation profoundly impacts the body and the mind, making people more vulnerable to a whole host of other dangers like infectious disease or exposure. And we talked about that largely in the context of purely starvation. Your immune system weakens, leaving you open to infection, for example. What

famine does is amplify those dangers one thousandfold. So like the men in the Minnesota starvation experiment undoubtedly had weakened immune systems, but they had access to warm water, clean clothes, medical care, fresh food. They had a safety net that simply does not exist in a famine. So let's say, for example, that a person who's moving in famine conditions

is exposed to typhus. Typhus ravages their weakened immune system, and since hot water and clean clothes are out of the question, the infected lice carrying the Typhus bacterium will spread to every member of the household, leaving all of them too weak to cook with what little food they may have. And let's say one person is well enough to venture out to get food. Maybe they'll be shunned out of fear of the disease, or maybe they manage to get food, but it's spoiled or it barely resembles food,

it has almost no nutritional content. If they recover from typhus, food poisoning or dysentery could deliver the death blow. When political conflict drives famine, many people are forcibly displaced, and camps set up to house them can be hot beds of infection. You mentioned crowding and how there tends to be crowding in famine. That's just like it facilitates the spread of infectious disease to an astonishing degree combination with malnutrition.

the youngest. In Duwall's study of the Darfur famine in nineteen eighty four to nineteen eighty five, he estimated that two thirds of the deaths were children under ten, and half of the deaths were children under five.

strike selectively. It is the poor and politically excluded who are its first and principal victims. Commonly, it's only ones star relentlessly hunts out outsiders and marginalized minorities. Or, to phrase it more accurately, those in power administer famines so as to target these people. In a large number of the famines in our catalog, including all the most recent cases, the victims have been constituencies identified as subversives or enemies

of the state. Today's resurgence of xenophobia and resource nationalism across the world bodes ill for the politics of feminogenesis. End quote. Ah yeah, this is heavy, arin, I know. Beyond the physical effects of starvation, those in a famine also grow increasingly apathetic. Beyond despair, they disengage or become

a social survival just shuts everything else out. The cost of famine is often reported as the number dead, But just as starvation is merely one component of famine, the death toll in a famine represents just one devastating outcome. What about the lives forever altered, The trauma, the lasting physical harm, the cognitive impairments, the drop in birth rate, the horror of watching your family, your friends, your neighbors perish while the world just looks on or turns away.

The damage that famine causes spans generations. Adults that were exposed to famine while in the womb are at higher risk of certain diseases like type two diabetes, as well as mental health issues. A famine is an event. It has a start and an end, murky though they may be, but that event stays with those who lived through it for the rest of their lives, Even if, like those who lived through the holodomor or the Great Leap Forward famine in China in the nineteen fifties. You are forbidden

from discussing it. How can it be forgotten? One visitor to Ukraine a decade after the famine in nineteen thirty two to nineteen thirty three reported that quote ten long years had been unable to erase those murderous traces and to disperse the expiring sounds of the innocent children, women and men, of the dying of young people enfeebled by famine. The sad memories still hang like a black haze over the cities and villages, and produce a mortal fear among

the witnesses who escaped the starvation end quote. Those and those two famines that I just mentioned, the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward, Those mark the two most extreme famines of the twentieth century. They killed three point three million and thirty two million people, respectively. Jeez aren. Many modern scholars of famine believe that the age of catastrophic famines like these that number in the millions or multiple millions. They believe that it might be over. Is it like?

What patterns are we seeing? Chapter four? Trends in famines? How have famines changed over time, famine has always been with us. The story goes that when many human societies gradually began their transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and livestock, food production went up, infectious disease went up, and dietary deficiencies went up due to over dependence on certain staple foods like grains. The sedentary lifestyle may have

sheltered agrarian societies from fluctuations in food supply. You know, whether they were truly more sheltered than hunter gatherer societies, It's up for debate. Interesting, But at the same time, their dependence on crops may have also made them more susceptible to sequential crop failings. So, for instance, repeated crop failure and livestock disease led to the Great European Famine of thirteen fifteen to thirteen seventeen that killed ten percent

of the population. And this is just a few decades before the Black Death would carry off thirty percent more. Can you just yeah. The age of European colonialism, beginning in the fourteen nineties and lasting at least through World War One, led to many famines, either as a direct

result of the upheaval and violence imposed on those populations. Remember, hunger is a weapon, or indirectly as imperial conquest destroyed the buffers that people had in place to protect against famine, so like when European governments would force people to farm European crops rather than indigenous plants that they had been growing. The severity of these col colonial era famines was deepened by the fact that the colonizing governments rarely provided any

sort of relief. The lives of those who suffered did not matter. So for instance, there was an enormous famine in South Asia following the British East India Company's conquest of Bengal in the seventeen seventies that led to the death of one third of the population. This famine was not the exception, it was the rule, and famines like these followed into the late eighteen hundreds and early twentieth century.

The causes were multifaceted and dependent on the region, so there might be like severe drought, crop light foods, disruption of economic structure by colonialism, culture erasure via colonialism, a combination of everything, But what followed seemed fairly consistent. The lack of any relief. Instead of easing the tax burden, colonial governments continued to extract brutal taxes under the threat of violence. Instead of stopping the export of food from

a country starving to death, the export continued. Instead of providing adequate food and relief programs, in an effort to stop or slow the famine, government handed out quantities of food that matched the rationing in Nazi concentration camps, so it'd be like, here's four hundred calories. Yeah. Over the first few decades of the twentieth century, the age of colonial famines was supplanted by those created by totalitarian regimes. So the Holodomor in Ukraine, which I've mentioned a few

times now. Raphael Lemkin, who was the person to coin the term genocide in nineteen forty four, he considered this famine to be genocide by starvation. The Nazi hunger planned which was intended to kill thirty million quote unquote useless eaters in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union via starvation. Japanese occupied territories like Burma, Indonesia, and Vietnam all suffered

mass starvations since food prioritized to feed the occupier. But even these famines would pale in comparison to the Great Leap Forward Famine in China between nineteen fifty eight and nineteen sixty two, which killed at least twenty five to over thirty million people, the largest famine in history. I mean, I don't know how you can even begin to wrap your mind around numbers like that. Oh you can't, it can't.

And while environmental factors contributed somewhat to this famine, the lion's share of the blame goes to Mao Zedong's policies. Farmers were forced to leave their farms to work in factories to try to match the economic growth of what was seeing in some of the other in some Western countries, for instance, like steel factories. And this actually was the Great Leap Forward Famine, was a situation where outright starvation was actually often the cause of death for many, and

silence was the rule. The true scope of this famine wasn't realized for twenty years after it ended due to censorship policies, so no one knew and that it was just like the numbers just kept growing and growing. A few more catastrophic totalitarian famines with over one million deaths occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century in Cambodia and North Korea. But then the trajectory of famines began to shift more often famines were occurring in Sub

Saharan Africa. Drought played a role, but the leading driver was war, associated of course with like armed conflict, poverty, harmful economic policies and displacement. Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Darfur, the DRC and other regions have all experienced these famines. The nineteen eighty three to nineteen eighty five famine in Ethiopia that killed six hundred thousand people was among the first

to draw an international humanitarian aid respects. You know, like Bob Geldof and band aid the song do they know It's Christmas? Which like is just the most you don't know that song. I don't know that song. Oh God, it's like, do they know it's It was sung it was like so it created a lot of money. It like, you know, brought in a lot of money for humanitarian aid. But the lyrics of that song are so condescending. No,

do they know it's Christmas? First of all, Ethiopia is one of the places of like the oldest Christian religion like sects in the world anyway, Yeah, okay, many of which many yeah, yeah, Well, I mean it's like band aid and these songs like yeah, do they know it's Christmas? Et cetera. They were instrumental in raising awareness and in

raising money for humanitarian aid response. There is this is a really like complicated humanitarian aid in general, and the shifts in humanitarian aid responses and crisis over chronic food insecurities, you know what draws more money. There's a lot of complications there.

And some governments have used aid not necessarily through like these international humanitarian aid programs, which tend to be more a political but different governments have used aid as like a carrot, you know, on the stick to accomplish certain political goals. So in the US withdrew aid from Bangladesh in the nineteen seventies until they agreed to fall in line with US politics, and by the time they reinstituted aid, it was too late, like there was no point to it.

can get to people who most desperately need it. By the end of the twentieth century, international reporting on famines and the development of a professional international humanitarian aid system meant that we had the ability to recognize famine and do something about it as long as there was also the WILL. Chapter five, The future of famine is the

end of famine in sight? Asking that seems like a ridiculous question when there is literally a famine happening in Gaza, when there have been famines in Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan in the past twenty years. But it is a valid question. When you look at a graph of famine deaths over time starting in eighteen seventy, there is a

noticeable sharp downward trend starting around the nineteen eighties. Why have famines declined in magnitude and by magnitude, I mean fewer people dying overall compared to the century's earlier multimillion death toll famines. It's a combination of different things, public health advances, humanitarian aid responses, and political action and will so think again of that metaphor of the guy who's

standing up to his neck in water. The water level has on average around the globe declined thanks to things like economic growth, improvedments in agriculture, functioning markets, and public health. These factors might reduce how vulnerable an entire population is to famine or the number of vulnerable individuals. They might help reduce deaths due to communicable or other preventable diseases.

They might help in getting aid more quickly to a population because there's awareness of that agricultural productivity has increased. The impacts of the Green Revolution haven't been all positive, and increased productivity doesn't necessarily translate into more access to food, but it has helped thanks to global trade, local food shortages can more easily be remedied. Again, the global food

supply is not the limiting factor here. Maybe one day climate change will put us bring us closer to the edge, but it hasn't yet. We have the tools to prevent, to minimize, to end famine. So maybe the more appropriate question is why does famine still happen? Why has the threat of famine actually increased within the last five years

with more people living with severe hunger and malnutrition. While the globe on average might have the water level lowered, averages can be deceiving, and there are still millions of people standing up to their necks and water. And this is also not like geographically evenly distributed, right, So a lot of the biggest famines throughout the twentieth century tended to take place in Asia, and that's not the case now.

Now most of the food crises are happening in the Middle East and Sub Saharan Africa, and so in these most vulnerable regions there are still millions of people who are at risk of drowning, you know. Using this metaphor again with a ripple caused by a job loss year, violent conflict and escalation of hatred against people of your religion or ethnicity. Rising food prices, forced migration, hostility to refugees, extreme weather events, and I think most worryingly is the

apathy that seems to be on the rise. Humanitarian aid giving way to nationalism quoting again from Mass Starvation by Alex D. Wall quote and this was written in twenty seventeen. Over the last thirty years, we have assumed benevolent governance that the default option in the international order is to

promote humane values and act against needless human suffering. That era may now be passing, and the default setting for global politics may return to the older premise that far away human suffering, including mass starvation, can be tolerated or ignored. End quote. So that was twenty seventeen, and I mean

is prediction has come true. To go from George Bush having a no famine on my watch policy literally that was like the policy to first George Bush, No, this is George w sorry, Yeah, to Donald Trump slashing USAID, which has played a huge role in famine prevention and relief.

I mean, George Bush is a war criminal. This just shows like how far things have fallen, right, Yeah, yeah, I mean it shows how wanting to reduce human suffering it used to be a given like that was like, of course you want to reduce It wasn't even that it was political. It was like every person was like this is you couldn't I just it wasn't. One side wanted to reduce human suffering and the other side wanted

to promote it. That's what it is now. You know, maybe suffering sometimes does seem like an openly declared goal, but even if it's not, that it is, suffering is permitted, it is acceptable with this administration, and not just with this administration, but in many places around the world. It's what we've seen happen currently happening in Gaza. Famine was officially declared on August twenty second of this year, not caused by food shortages, but food and other aid being

withheld by the Israeli government. Not just food also but clean water, housing, sanitation, healthcare, and fuel. Everything just broken down, leading to the intentional, preventable deaths of thousands of people in Gaza. So I guess to go back to the question of whether the end of famine is here the answer seems to be no. It is theoretically within our grasp, but there is a widening gulf between that theoretical possibility

and the reality that we face. And what separates those two is political will, shame, a conscience, the conviction to do the right thing. Can we bridge that gap? I mean, I want to say yes, but how we can begin to is another question. Yeah, Aaron, I don't know what else to say, So I'm going to turn it over to you to update us and the goings on in the world today.

malnutrition overall are not uncommon globally. The World Food Program, which is a humanitarian aid organization that is one of the largest the World Food Program a S stimated in the middle of twenty twenty five that over three hundred million people we're facing acute food insecurity, like just in the short term, seventy percent of which are the direct result of conflict and violence, and the World Health Organization in Fao recently put out a report that estimated that

over six hundred million people experienced hunger overall in twenty twenty four. So this is obviously a very widespread problem, and especially a problem in areas where we see conflict and violence, even in places that we maybe think of as not facing food insecurity initially.

are experiencing severe food shortages and insecurity. But to wrap us up for this episode, I want to focus on the two places in the world that have currently met the IPC threshold for famine, and that is Sudan and Gaza. And just like we have seen in most of the modern famines that you walked us through Arin prior to this classification of famine, many people living in Gaza and Sudan, prior to this declaration, we're already facing food insecurity, and that plays a huge role in how we got to

where we are today. So starting with Sudan, the world's largest humanitarian crisis is currently happening across all of Sudan. There is a conflict there, and I'm not going to get into the drivers of these conflicts. That's way beyond my scope. But it had been ongoing for several years and escalated in April of twenty twenty three. So since April of twenty twenty three, at least twelve million people

have been internally displaced, over half of those children. And the World Health Organization actually their estimate was slightly different than IPCs, and they estimated ten point five million internally displaced and four million people displaced across borders into neighboring countries. And this internal displacement as well as external like displacement outside of your countries, has led to lack of work opportunities,

so that families have no reliable income. Food in this region has become substantially, like exponentially more expensive in part due to scarcity, and that scarcity is very multifactorial. There have been years of low crop yields, there has been flooding, but there are also checkpoints in place. There's difficulties in transporting food. There is ongoing con in these areas, like a truly horrific amount of conflict, and this has also made it even more difficult for humanitarian aid to reach

the areas that are at most at need. Right The other thing that I just want to mention that the IPC includes in you can read these reports where they go through all of the details of how they came to this conclusion when they say that they meet the

criteria for famine in these areas. They also look at food utilization because in these areas, including in Sudan right now, even when food is available, there are difficulties in actually using or consuming it, or being able to like your body, being able to utilize what you have consumed, okay, and

this is because of a lot of different reasons. There's damage to let's say, water facilities, so that you don't have access to clean water to be able to cook your food or clean your you know, things to be able to cook your food with. There's outbreaks of diarrheal diseases, including as of April twenty twenty five in Sudan, a cholera outbreak of over sixty thousand cases and at least sixteen hundred deaths, and that cholera outbreak is not limited

to Sudan. It has actually also spread to South Sudan, where there have been at least one point one million people who have fled into South Sudan from Sudan, and the cholera outbreak there has affected an additional fifty four thousand people and caused over one thousand deaths. So this is like really huge, and that obviously on top of just causing disease, makes it difficult for people to absorb

any food that they are actually eating. So overall in Sudan right now, we don't have a reliable way to quantify the extent of mortality that all of this has caused. We don't really have reliable data that is coming out of there right now. But the most recent report that was published was published by the IPC in December of twenty twenty four and projected out through May of twenty twenty five, and at that time they estimated that five

different areas within Sudan were experiencing famine. That IPC Phase five classification, which was nearly six hundred and forty thousand people at least and over half the population, and estimated twenty four point six million people across Sudan were facing at least Category three or four very high levels of

acute food insecurity. So even before the escalation of this conflict, the global malnutrition rates in children under the age of five in Sudan were estimated at around thirteen percent, and now in many of these areas they're up to thirty percent, which is again what classifies it as famine, and the World Health Organzation estimates that in Sudan five million children and pregnant people are acutely malnourished and over seven hundred thousand kids under the age of five will have meet

criteria for severe acute malnutrition this year. It's pretty horrific and it is still ongoing. Most of the reports, like art have not been updated. I assume that we will have updated reports maybe by the time this comes out. I'm not really sure, but the projections were even grim like, they were very grim.

They start out with quote, this report marks the fifth time the Famine Review Committee has been called to review an analysis on the acute food security and nutrition situation in the Gaza Strip. Never before has the Committee had to return so many times to the same crisis, a stark reflection of how suffering has not only persisted, but

intensified and spread until famine has begun to emerge. So in this report they outlined that famine the famine conditions have been met at least by the time of this report in August in Gaza Governant, and they projected that by the end of September, so by the end of this month that we're recording, it will likely have spread to several other governates in the south across Gaza Strip, affecting an estimated six hundred and forty thousand people already

and at least one million people facing emergency or IPC Phase four levels of food insecurity. In the Guardian, there was an article that came out earlier in September that reported that in the last two weeks of August alone, seven thousand children under the age of five were hospitalized specifically to treat severe acute malnutrition. How many seven thousand kids? And they actually estimated that by the time that they calculated the rest of the numbers from August, it could

have been up to fifteen thousand children hospitalized. And remember that we try not to hospitalize children. That's only when they are extremely ill. Right.

farther than I am going to get into. We don't need to get deep into the scope of that conflict, but we do need to understand a little bit of the context just prior to this, and that is that since at least two thousand and seven, the Gaza strip was already under a blockade in which Israel had essentially all of the borders of Gaza Strip restricted. There was restrictions and total control on importations into Gaza Strip that included food, medicine, gas, all supplies and.

have a link to a maps online. But in part because of how densely populated this region was and is, and because of these controls on importations, residents in Gaza prior to this current conflict primarily relied on imported food, and there was already a very high prevalence of malnutrition. An estimated ninety percent of preschoolers were not getting adequate daily energy intake. Ninety percent was the numbers that I saw.

And this is most of this data is coming from very recent reports, but that was actually from an article in a peer reviewed journal, so it was like a not just a news article. And before these last two years, seventy five percent of the people living in Gaza depended on UN food assistance. So that is similar to how I said that in Sudan there was a i'd spread

prevalence of malnutrition prior to this. The same was true in Gaza, right, And that's an important context to understand the current situation and how things got so severe so quickly.

It also is the case that prior to this conflict, residents of Gaza had access to about twenty one liters of drinking water per person per day, which is a little more than what the World Health Organization recommends should be provided to everyone in emergency situations, but is not enough to be able to engage in things like agriculture, sanitation, cleaning. All of that you need upwards of seventy plus leaders

per person per day. But despite all of that, prior to this, there was still domestic production of things like eggs, fish, meat, oils. Right now, there is no capacity for domestic production, so Gaza is entirely dependent on outside food. Much of the cropland over ninety percent of it was damaged and only one point five five percent of it is actually undamaged and also accessible. And all of the animals that were used for food sheep, cattle, goats, poultry, like the statistics

on how many of them have survived is horrific. And fishing has also been severely restricted because access to coastal areas is very restricted right now. So from March till May there was actually no food at all that entered Gaza, and since that time the amount has fallen far short of the bare minimum that is required to keep people alive.

And as we discussed both last week and this week, when someone has been under conditions of extreme malnutrition for a long time, their body needs more in order to make up for that difference. So even the bare minimum would not be sufficient at this time, and we're not even getting that at least as of September twenty twenty five.

And in the face of such desperate conditions, there have been more and more instances of the few times that food has been allowed in that food is not necessarily even making it to much of the population because there has been either intercepting or in many cases violence including from Israeli forces at these food distribution sites. There have actually been two three hundred and thirty nine fatalities among aid seekers people trying to get food at militarized distribution

sites just since May of this year. And even in the cases where food is available, prices have risen exponentially. And when you combine that with the fact that almost the entire population of Gaza has been displaced multiple times, many of them have no ability to work, they cannot

access that food. There has also been limitations on access to water, to cooking gas, to utensils, and many of the humanitarian aid food packages that have been delivered are composed of foods that you have to cook in order to make edible, right rice. Yeah, so yeah, it's like saying that the situation is die or doesn't quite honestly, saying that it is famine doesn't even quite get at

the real truth of the situation, right. And like you mentioned, Aaron, the debts due to starvation are a very small part of what we are seeing. And yet at least three hundred and sixty one human beings three hundred and sixty one Palestinians have died due to malnutrition and starvation alone, including one hundred and thirty children as of September tenth,

twenty twenty five. I will also point out that that number is over one hundred more people than the estimate I saw from August, and that does not capture the that starvation has on the body.

are still in short supply. So even as the food situation may improve, hopefully we don't know yet, there is still a very real risk of refeeding syndrome for so many people, especially kids in Gaza, given how long they have been subject to under nutrition and the fact that we have limited hospital availability to treat them.

in recent months, like the earthquake in Afghanistan. There was a recent landslide in Sudan which barely got reported on. There was an earthquake in meand Mar. There's a very long list of places where aid is just not making it in. And it's not just funding cuts. It's also the dismantling of the capacity building that had existed to be able to do the kind of humanitarian work that is needed well.

the twenty first century? A Review on the Causes of extreme food Insecurity published twenty twenty five and published in twenty twenty one. Vaserman and Lushchek Prenatal Famine Exposure and Adult Health Outcomes and Epigenetic link just to kind of trace the generational trauma that famines can cause. And also the IPC website has incredible resources infographics. I mean, it is just a wealth of information. I've linked to a few infographics specifically, but there's plenty more there.

news reports. I also because I usually try and rely on peer review journal articles, which are hard to find when things are ongoing, but I did find at least

a few. There was one that I really enjoyed that was published of course this year, in twenty twenty five, by hasun at All from Sustainable Futures that was titled the Implications of the Ongoing War on Gaza for Food Sustainability, and there were several others, so we will as always post the link to our sources on our website, This podcast will Kill You dot Com.