Famine is about so much more than food: it is about a famine of education, democracy, health, transport, and so many other items. The food famine becomes a symptom of that vast failure.
Famines are political. We all know that the immediate response to a famine must be food, aid, and shelter, but we should also look hard at what else can be done earlier on. It is not the lack of food but the fact that some people cannot get access to the food that causes the famine.
Famine emerges from a lack of interlocal trade; when one locality's food crop fails, since there is virtually no trade with other localities, the bulk of the people starve. It is precisely the permeation of the free market throughout the world that has virtually ended this scourge of famine by permitting trade between areas.
Famine has wreaked havoc in Ethiopia for so long , it would be stupid not to be sensitive to the risk of such things occurring. But there has not been a famine on our watch - emergencies, but no famines.
With enough money and international coordination, we can push incoming asteroids out of Earth's path. We might even be able to bring back extinct animals in the lab. The problem really isn't scientific - it's cultural. We aren't yet able to coordinate ourselves as a global civilization to do something simple like bring food to a famine-stricken region. We can actually use current satellite technologies to predict where famine will strike next, but we can't get food there - usually for political reasons.
Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past.
The people suffer from famine because of the multitude of taxes consumed by their superiors. It is through this that they suffer famine.
They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide?
They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide...?
The window of opportunity to avert famine is rapidly closing and could already have closed. The real issue facing us is not whether there will be famine but how many people will actually die.
A huge famine hit North Korea in the mid-1990s. Ultimately, more than a million North Koreans died during the famine, and many only survived by eating grass, bugs, and tree bark.
Years of drought and famine come and years of flood and famine come, and the climate is not changed with dance, libation or prayer.
Unbelief starves the soul; faith finds food in famine.
Hardly any famine affects more than 5 percent, almost never more than 10 percent, of the population. The largest proportion of a population affected was the Irish famine of the 1840s, which came close to 10 percent over a number of years.
Famine was quite deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy, as the last means of breaking the resistance of the peasantry to the new system where they are divorced from personal ownership of the land and obligated to work on the conditions which the state may demand from them... This famine may fairly be called political because it was not the result of any overwhelming natural catastrophe or such complete exhaustions of the country's resources in foreign and civil wars.
During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model -- all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.