Melondy Phillips
Staff Writer
Whether by flood, drought, disease, blight, war or political policy, famine stalks countries around the world with increasing intensity.
“There shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers’ places.” Matthew.
• 1315 AD – 1317 AD – The Great Famine in Europe: An estimated 10–25% of the population of many cities and towns died as a famine rolled through Europe. A drop in average global temperatures and unrelenting rains and flooding made planting difficult, damaged crops, and made it hard to transport crops to market. Starting around 1280, bad weather and crop failures made the yield ratio of wheat fall, meaning that fewer seeds were reaped for every seed planted. Weather changes and crop failures also led to disease in cattle which caused sheep and cattle numbers to plummet as much as 80 percent. Desperation due to starvation led to infanticide and cannibalism in some places, as well as class warfare and political strife. The prices of everyday items, from grains to salt, skyrocketed so that many people could not afford them even when they could find the supplies. In their despair, many people begged, stole and murdered for what little they could find. The famine marked the end of a period of growth and prosperity that had lasted for two centuries. Children were abandoned and left to fend for themselves by families who could no longer feed them. The horrifying events during this dark period of history may have been the inspiration for the fairytale Hansel and Gretel.
Some historians believe the weather changes leading to this massive famine may have been caused by a volcanic eruption, perhaps that of Mount Tarawera in New Zealand (which is known to have erupted around 1314).
• 1333 – 1337 – Famine in China: Unusual atmospheric events caused droughts and flooding leading to crop failures. An estimated six million people died from this famine.
• 1344 – Famine in India: The famine in 1344 was only one of many for India. In India alone, more than 60 million deaths have resulted from famine in just the last several hundred years. Famines are quite common throughout the world. Historically, they happen every few years, spreading from country to country around the world. wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
• Panic of 1819 (1817-1825 Monroe – D): This event is considered to be the first major economic depression in the United States. A rapid deflation as prices that fell 30.6 percent and agricultural prices falling to about half, led to mortgages being foreclosed, bank closures and a mounting unemployment rate.
• Panic of 1837 (1829-1837 Jackson – D): A United States financial crisis and major depression (not the Great Depression). President Jackson did not trust banks and allowed the charter for the Bank of the United States to expire in 1836. This opened the door for individual “pet banks” to legally print their own money. This, in turn, ushered in the depreciation of currency, spiking inflation, and increased prices for all goods, which also led to a high number of unemployed.
• 1838 – The Trail of Tears: The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole were among the resettled tribes forced westward from the South and Southeast America. Brought on, in part, by the discovery of gold in Georgia, the United States Government passed the Indian Removal Act so they could ethnically cleanse, or forcibly remove, the people from their ancestral homelands.
“Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous.”
According to estimates based on tribal and military records, approximately 100,000 Indigenous people were forced from their homes during the Trail of Tears, and some 15,000 died during their relocation.
• 1840s – Irish Potato Famine: Many families in Ireland relied on potatoes due to the small plots of land they grew crops on. Potatoes produced three times more food per acre than grain. A blight struck the potato crop, causing a severe famine. Some 2.6 million Irish entered overcrowded workhouses, where more than 200,000 people died.
• Panic of 1857 (1853-1857 Pierce – D): Considered to be the first United States’ financial crisis that spread worldwide. Hundreds of thousands of employees were laid off after businesses began closing and the railroad industry started declining.
• Panic of 1873 (1869-1877 Grant – R): This financial crisis began when a European stock market crashed. This is thought to be one of the triggers of the first “Great Depression” in the United States (known as the Long Depression) but it affected countries worldwide.
• Panic of 1893 (1889-1893 B. Harrison – R): The leading railroads declared bankruptcy, spawned a falling stock market and many bank failures. Banks closing, a run on currency, and businesses not being able to open (because they couldn’t afford to pay the employees or buy supplies) led to even greater repercussions.
• Panic of 1907 (1933-1945 Roosevelt – D): This was the first worldwide financial crisis of the 20th century. It started within New York City financial institutions and markets and led to the formation of the Federal Reserve Bank. This crisis had similarities to the financial crisis of 2007-2009; considered the Great Recession.
• 1928 – 1932 – The Collectivization of the Ukraine: Stalin’s policies for state control of urban cultivation trampled on personal freedoms and led to massive food shortages and starvation across the land. This could have been the major reason for the man-made famine, the Holodomor (which means “murder by hunger or starvation”). Private farms and laborers were seized and added to collective farms, or state-owned farms, called kolkhoz. Not readily willing to give up their freedoms, peasants destroyed their farming equipment and slaughtered all their livestock before becoming subjugated to the state. One opinion, held by historian Andrea Graziosi, is that once food shortages began … “starvation was selectively weaponized, and the famine was “instrumentalized” and amplified against Ukrainians as a means to punish Ukrainians for resisting Soviet policies.”
When the Ukrainian peasants fell short of the state directed quota, Stalin ordered the confiscation of everything they did have as punishment. In 1932, the Soviet state seized enough grain to feed over 12 million people for an entire year, but instead, exported the precious commodity for cash while subjecting their own people to a collective death sentence. With the Soviet state having direct control over Ukraine’s agricultural resources, more than two million people were thrown into prison or labor camps and an estimated 4-10 million people died of starvation. This event has now been recognized, by multiple governments, as “genocide against the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.”
• 1929 – The Stock Market Crash: This led to the Great Depression, which crippled the American work force with an unprecedented 25% unemployment rate; almost 13 million people in 1933.
• 1929 – 1941 – The Great Depression: began in August 1929, when the economic expansion of the Roaring Twenties came to an end. A series of financial crises impacted the severity of this bleak financial period. These crises included a stock market crash in 1929, a series of regional banking panics in 1930 and 1931, and a series of national and international financial crises from 1931 through 1933. Leading to the bottom falling out in March 1933, when the commercial banking system collapsed, and President Roosevelt declared a national banking holiday. Sweeping reforms of the financial system accompanied the economic recovery but was interrupted by a double-dip recession in 1937. Return to full output and employment didn’t occur until the Second World War. The percentage of children who were malnourished children reached nearly 90% in some areas of the United States. The estimated death toll numbers vary greatly depending on the source.
• 1943 – Bengal Famine: A famine in the Bengal province of British India with an estimated 800,000–3.8 million death toll.
• 1958 – 1962 – The Great Chinese Famine: The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution was a five-year economic plan executed by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. It began in 1958 and was ultimately abandoned in 1961. The goal was to modernize the country’s agricultural sector using communist economic ideologies. Instead of stimulating the country’s economy, The Great Leap Forward resulted in mass starvation and famine. An estimated 30-45 million Chinese citizens died due to famine, execution, and forced labor, along with massive economic and environmental destruction. Private plot farming was abolished, and rural farmers were forced to work on collective farms where all production, resource allocation, and food distribution was centrally controlled by the Communist Party. People resorted to eating tree bark and dirt, and, in some areas, to cannibalism. Farmers who failed to meet grain quotas, those who tried to get more food, or attempted escape were tortured and killed, along with their family members, by beating, mutilation, being buried alive, scalding with boiling water, and other methods. Some records say that the government killed twice as many people as Hitler.
• 1973 – Roe v. Wade: According to Guttmacher and CDC records, from 1973 – 2019 more than 63 million babies were legally terminated. That exceeds three times more deaths than from World War I and is approximately one death for every three to four babies born.
On a personal note, everyone has some type of difficulty or trauma they are dealing with; from an injury or declining health, unemployment, divorce, violent crime, a tragic accident, the loss of a loved one, or something else. As human beings, there are certain things that we need: air to breath, food to eat, protection from the elements, and emotional and spiritual connections. Accumulations beyond these are like icing on the cake. However, when one of these basic needs is lost or taken, it can shake us to our core.
Are we really living through a horrible time or is the worse yet to come?
History is flooded with examples of what happens when policies implementing collective farms and other government oversights, have led to famine, disease and violent upheavals. Like with most monopolies, when one group or governmental body has ultimate control over everything, there are no checks and balances to protect the common man; society suffers.
On a more subtle note, but something that can be just as devastating, is rampant inflation. According to inflationdata.com, cumulative inflation rose almost 2,300% from 1970 to 2020; twenty-three hundred percent in only fifty years (inflation compounds annually). Seeing this, it is conceivable that there will be a day, yet to come, that a day’s wages will only be enough to feed a single person for a single day; a measure of wheat (enough for one person for one day) for a penny (a day’s wage).
When the worst or best time in history does come, will we be ready for that which matters most?
The body is only temporary, the spirit is not.