From famine to food crisis: what history can teach us about local and global subsistence crises

Abstract

The number of famine prone regions in the world has been shrinking for centuries. It is currently mainly limited to sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the impact of endemic hunger has not declined and the early twenty-first century seems to be faced with a new threat: global subsistence crises. In this essay I question the concepts of famine and food crisis from different analytical angles: historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory, and peasant studies. I will argue that only a more integrated historical framework of analysis can surpass dualistic interpretations grounded in Eurocentric modernization paradigms. This article successively debates historical and contemporary famine research, the contemporary food regime and the new global food crisis, the lessons from Europe's 'grand escape' from hunger, and the peasantry and 'depeasantization' as central analytical concepts. Dualistic histories of food and famine have been dominating developmentalist stories for too long. This essay shows how a blending of historical and contemporary famine research, food regime theory and new peasant studies can foster a more integrated perspective.

Famine, exchange networks and the village community. A comparative analysis of the subsistence crises of the 1740s and the 1840s in Flanders

“…The central focus, triggered by a Malthusian and a Marxian perspective, was on macro processes such as the relationship between famine crises and demographic crises, and the impact of subsistence crises on revolutionary political events. 2 In the 1980s the focus shifted to famines as social and communal processes that cause 'the accelerated destitution of the most vulnerable, marginal and least-powerful groups in a community, to a point where they can no longer, as a group, maintain a sustainable livelihood.' 3 This broader interpretation is inspired by the food entitlement approach of the Indian economist Amartya Sen, amongst others.…”

Antropología y campesinado: la pertinencia de lo persistente. Reflexiones antropológicas en torno al internacionalismo campesino

“…No obstante, cabe recordar que cerca de la mitad de la población mundial habita en zonas rurales 10 y que más de un tercio de la población urbana habita en suburbios, muchos de ellos periurbanos. Sumado a este elemento, la instauración de derechos campesinos y de habitantes rurales, contiene en su seno cuestiones de suma relevancia para la reproducción de la humanidad en su conjunto, en un contexto de riesgo global en que la crisis ambiental y alimentaria se vuelven estructurales (Rubio, 2013;Holt-Giménez y Patel, 2012;Vanhaute, 2011) y emergen precisamente de los procesos de mercantilización de la tierra, el agua y el patrimonio biogenético. En estos tér-minos, en la lucha por el establecimiento de una convención internacional de derechos campesinos, se hace patente la identificación del internacionalismo campesino con los intereses más amplios de la humanidad.…”

Fixing our food system

“…In spurring agricultural capitalism, the green revolution seems to have succeeded amply in producing more food. But the vastly increased availability of calories has not ended hunger, the original justification for the revolution (Vanhaute 2011). A key factor of success in reducing undernourishment has to be inclusive economic growth at the bottom of the economic pyramid.…”