Comparing The Famines Of Bengal And Ethiopia

2. The immediate cause of the starvation was the black marketeers hoarding the food and only selling it for very high prices. A street food vendor “offered three options to its customers: A price to see the food. A higher price to smell the food. [And, a] third price to eat the food.” (Mehta 522).

In the midst of drought, the destruction of social and economic infrastructure, asset stripping, ‘clan-cleansing’ and the disruption of food supplies caused a famine in which an estimated 250,000 died. Those who suffered most came from the politically marginalised and poorly armed riverine and inter-riverine agro-pastoral

A famine that has taken place in the last 100 years is the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961. In just three years between 16.5 and 45 million people perished. At the time of the famine, the Chinese government had full control of all food production, consumption and distribution. The government also prevented peasants from migrating so they were stuck with the amount of food they were allocated. Causes of the famine were bad weather, poor government policies, and weekend worker incentives. One of the faults in government participation in the famine was that in 1959 they obtained more grain than need from the rural areas. So when famine struck they had less food to live off of than expected. Also, the government didn’t help them out until the

The first famine resulted as an economic disturbance caused by the tail ends of World War I, the 1917 Revolution, and the Soviet Civil War. Infrastructure, specifically the railroads were in a state of disrepair and were incredibly unreliable, resulting in problems involving the transportation of food supplies across the

Despite its strong foundational beginnings, Ethiopia is experiencing a profusion of issues today in regards to nutritional accessibility due to climate change, substandard farming techniques, and below-average maintenance of food security. Ethiopia’s economic and agricultural state can be traced accurately back to the second century. Ethiopia’s emergence as an empire would take place under the Aksumites during the 5th century. Historically, Ethiopia was ranked among the most powerful countries in the world from the 5th century until the 16th century. The Aksum civilization began its rapid rise to prominence by trading its agricultural resources, gold, and ivory through the port of Adulis in the Red Sea trade network. The Aksum were also renowned for their fine architecture, crafts, and skills, in particular as masons and metal workers. The Aksum kingdom’s economic dominance allowed it to develop one of the most powerful militaries during the kingdom’s existence. Its military allowed the civilization to control a majority of trade and distribution of wealth in the east African region.

12.7 million smallholders don’t have the resources or money to deal with the changes in weather which means they are likely to not have enough food or water ending in food insecurity. There are 730,000 refugees who all need food which the people who already liv there don’t have and they also don’t have the skills to help grow and produce food. The refugees are causing the little food Ethiopia have to disappear quickly

Reports of a devastating famine in Malawi first surfaced as rumors coming from rural areas of the country around October 2001. Malawians in the cities, including government officials in Lilongwe, the capital, were slow to believe, or act on, the persistent accounts. Even when well-known advocacy groups like the Malawi Economic Justice Network (MEJN) and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace presented data to back up the reports, they were dismissed as lacking credibility. But incredible as it may have seemed, Malawi - hardly a desert state, but a densely-populated country in a lush region - really was facing catastrophic food shortages in the wake of a combination of flooding and a regional drought, and after over a decade of “structural adjustment” policies designed by the IMF.

Ethiopia faces detrimental consequences from an unstable agricultural system and has become dependent on foreign aid for basic resources. Efforts must be made in Ethiopia to both prevent and reverse the negative effects that both natural disasters and urbanization have had on the health, environment, and economy of this third-world country. Although the country is continuing to make improvements to become educated on more modern and efficient farming techniques, more progress is needed to augment the country’s agricultural productivity and better provide for the growing population. By researching this particular country, other third world countries may be able to implement similar approaches to solve poverty and malnutrition in comparable environments.

The idea that famine is due to food shortages is false, the world produces more food than we need, but unfortunately those who need it do not have access to it.

Faced with devastating, debilitating droughts, Somalia, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Yemen struggle to cope with famine, an obstacle that hinders all people within the nation. In Somalia, over 2.9 million people are at risk because of famine. In Yemen, 18.8 million are in need of assistance, and in South Sudan, over 40% of the population is in need of food urgently, while 100,000 are in imminent danger of death by starvation. Although all of these countries are in deep waters, famine has only been declared in South Sudan while Somalia, Yemen, and Nigeria are on the brink. An Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (ISFPC) system is used to classify food insecurity

Finally, after years of the country’s citizens starving – many literally to death -- due to the lack of food caused by the Malawi government’s abandonment of offering fertilizer subsidies to the nation’s farmers, a government regulation that was effectively imposed by the IMF’s strict rules, the elected president Bingu wa Mutharika decided to re-implement the fertilizer subsidies to the nations farmers, an act directly in contradiction of the mandate of the IMF. Dugger. With the

as the Bengal Famine, an estimated 4 million people died of hunger that year in eastern India (which included today's Bangladesh). Initially, this catastrophe was attributed to an acute shortfall in food production in the area. However, Indian economist Amartya Sen (recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, 1998) has established that while food shortage was a contributor to the problem, a more potent factor was the result of hysteria related to World War II, which made food supply a low priority for the British rulers.

Food exploitation due to corruption is another major cause of hunger, especially in the developing countries. Around three-quarters of the developing countries that report child malnutrition are busy exporting food to the developed countries. For example, during the much-publicized famine in the1980s, Ethiopia was exporting green beans to Europe. In the year 1999, the Indian government had 10 million tons of surplus food grains, which increased to 60 million by the year 2000. Most of the produce was left in the granaries to rot in the hope of being exported. It also stopped buying grain from its own farmers, leaving them destitute. The farmers, who had gone into debt to purchase expensive chemical fertilizers and pesticides on the advice of the government, were now forced to burn their crops in their fields. The wasted food would have been enough to feed entire starving population of India, which is about a third of 830 million worldwide.

According to FAD (Food Availability Decline) theory of famines, as the total availability of food grains falls, the price of food grains rises so much that the poor people can’t afford to buy even minimum amount of food grains for survival. This causes starvation at a massive scale taking the shape of famine. The casual link is that a large scale decline in food supply pushes the market price up to such a level that many poor people can no longer afford to buy the minimum amount for

Since not every person is able to access the relief food, the government has come up with ways to ensure that is able to curb drought so as to increase the level of farm production and solve food insecurity problems.