A widespread scarcity of food severe enough to cause mass death — though, in the modern age, rarely a simple absence of food. The worst famines have struck where food existed or was even being exported, because what collapses is people’s access to it: their wages, rights, and purchasing power. Drought and blight cause shortages; wealth, rights, and politics decide whether a shortage becomes a famine.
It is filed under natural disaster, beside the earthquake and the flood. But the worst famines of the modern age struck where food was present, sometimes even being shipped out, while the poor starved. In Ireland in the 1840s, grain left the ports as a million people died. The economist Amartya Sen built a career on the pattern: famine, he argued, is rarely a simple lack of food. It is a failure of who can obtain it — of wages, rights, and markets. His sharpest claim is that no substantial famine has ever happened in a working democracy with a free press, because a government answerable to voters cannot let its people starve unseen. The hunger we blame on bad weather is, far more often, a failure of politics.