Is there more to famine than lack of food? In the search for food, humanity has gone to astonishing lengths and recorded some stunning success. Yet still, hunger is always at the door, even in an era like hours, people still die of starvation. Do people starve because there are too many of us as Parson Malthus asserted? Or ids famine the companion of civilization where population, markets and trading of foodstuff commodities are all subject to vagaries in supply and demand? Or in fact, do the hungry simply die of politics?
—The new politics of food has been a specter in the international economic crisis. To some Americans, the possibility of agricultural power suggested extravagant opportunities. The Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Political Research, for example, looking recently at the future of food, concluded that “As custodian of the bulk of the world’s exportable grain, the United States might regain the primacy in world affairs that it held in the immediate postwar period.”1 The United States, others suggested, might join a cartel of food-exporting countries, an OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) for agriculture. The object of such an organization could be profit; it could be the opportunity to influence other countries to favor agricultural reform, for example, or contraception.—Emma Rothschild, 1976—click image for source…
Occasionally, a major newspaper prints a horrifying story of an old man or woman found dead of starvation, alone, unfed, a victim of the vast anonymity of urban life. Yet how rare it is for anyone in our cities to die that way- and how common elsewhere from Africa, to India and even Russia. The harrowing pictures stir our conscience, for the children, the listless downhearted adults, the pathetic elders are always black or brown, never white. And we are told that famine will spread, that hunger will reach many more; if we in the West just gave up meat one day per week, we would release enough grain to stem the tide, but, alas, not for long. Famine will persist and grow worst. The pictures of the doomed will continue to haunt us. But this is hardly new. Famine and humankind have lived together for millenniums.
—Owing to the disturbed state of Ireland – the potato crop having failed throughout the country – an Irish Arms (or Coercion) Bill was brought in by the Peel ministry.—click image for source…
It is hard for us to believe that famine used to sweep through the towns and villages of Western Europe almost every decade,garnering the young, the old, the weak. Europe indeed, has known an abundance of food for a very short time, far shorter than America. Indeed, apart from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and a few tiny, underpopulated parts of the world, America is the only society in human history to lack the traumatic experience of famine. Even Europe did not defeat famine until the late nineteenth century, and then only in the West. France was one of the richest agricultural nations in Europe, fertility everywhere, yet everywhere endemic starvation.
The typical cycle was starvation which bred pestilence as virulent diseases leapt from one enfeebled body to another. Such great harvests of death were not, however,without their macabre recompense: bad times ended, and plenty, once returned, had fewer mouths to feed. But man, fertile as ever in the most gruesome times, replenished the population, and thus created the prospect of renewed decimation.
—References to acts of cannibalism are sprinkled throughout many religious and historical documents, such as reports of cooked human flesh being sold in 11th-century English markets during times of famine. Here, an engraving by Theodor de Bry depicts hungry Spaniards cutting down the bodies of thieves hanged by Pedro de Mendoza in order to eat them. (© Stapleton Collection/Corbis)
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Europes-Hypocritical-History-of-Cannibalism-204752351.html#ixzz2gT6c30As
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter—
So it was in most of Europe; only the Netherlands and England fared better. Farther east, conditions were worse. No decade passed without famine stalking thel and. By 1750, only England had defeated famine: improved agriculture,an admirable transport system by the standards of the day, and a relatively small population made it one of the first countries to escape the scourge of famine. But not of course, hunger: that still abounded, often desperate enough, as in Bristol in 1812, to drive men and women to riot.
But if England escaped famine, the British Isles did not, for Ireland, supporting too large a population on a single precarious crop, the potato, experienced not he worst, but one of the most publicized famines of the nineteenth century- the Great Hunger of 1846. Over a million people, out of a population of some eight million, perished. Many were so desperate they resorted to cannibalism. The misery was so profound, so traumatic, that it affected generations of Irish, breeding a deep hatred of the English, who, as absentee landlords, became the mythic fathers of famine. ( to be continued)…
COMMENTS