History of Food Insecurity
The scale of the current global hunger crisis is enormous and only continues to grow. More than 333 million people faced acute levels of food insecurity in 2023 and do not know where their next meal is coming from. Furthermore, at least 129,000 people are expected to experience famine in Burkina Faso, Mali, Somalia, and South Sudan. But the question still remains: How? How did society let this happen?
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During one time, famines had mainly natural causes such as prolonged drought, which resulted in crops failing. Famines occurred under the Soviet Union and the deadliest famine with about 30 million victims took place in China between 1959-1961. These famines could have possibly been prevented but were the result of totalitarian regimes. However, even with the fall of the Soviet Union and China being economically stable, global hunger remains.
Over the last two decades the number of hungry and malnourished people has been declining but began rising again after 2015. This sudden decline is a result of many things such as climate change, inability of humanitarian aid to reach the intended location, and conflict.
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For example, in South Sudan a civil war broke out in 2013. The fighting led to 400,000 deaths and left four million homeless and without food. In 2017, the conflict caught up to them as there was officially a hunger crisis alongside an economic crisis. Armed groups stole food, set fire to markets, and raided cattle, preventing farmers from cultivating land. Although a ceasefire was negotiated in September 2018, UN agencies have reported over half the population were facing acute food insecurity as of early 2019.
Globally
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In Syria, the Syrian conflict began in 2011 and has displaced more than 12 million people from their homes, with more than six million displaced within Syria as of July 2019. By 2016, Syrians fleeing the fighting contributed to the largest global refugee crisis since the end of World War II. The many internally displaced Syrians was a major cause of the country’s hunger crisis. Additionally, the Syrian government and its opponents have used starvation as a military tactic. Syrian government forces have destroyed areas under rebel control, placing a blockade on incoming supplies while bombing markets, hospitals, and other civilian targets.
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While South Sudan and Syria are not the only places experiencing food insecurities, they help to represent the larger picture: Food insecurities remain a central part of many individual’s daily lives both in the past and present. As a society we must work together to curb this worldwide epidemic as we cannot continue to watch person after person perish because of something that is preventable.
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Global Timeline
1700s & 1800s
1900s
1961
1967 - 1970
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1975 - 1979
1982 - 1985
1991 - 1992
Famines had mainly natural causes such as prolonged drought, resulting in crops failing.
Famines continued but took on new causes such as conflict in regions and totalitarian regimes. The deadliest famine took place in China with about 30 million victims between 1959 - 1961.
The World Food Programme is created to provide food aid through the UN system.
After Nigeria declared independence, the country’s eastern territory of Biafra also declared independence. Starvation was used as a weapon of war and food was cut off for 13 million people. In three years, an estimated 2 million, or 15% of Biafra’s population, died.
The Cambodian Civil War claimed about 25-33% of the country’s pre-war population. Many of these deaths were because of Khmer Rouge’s labor camps, where malnutrition was rampant. Beyond these camps, hunger continued as emergency services were unable to get food into Cambodia. An estimated 500,000 people died due to famine alone.
A 16-year civil war in Mozambique resulted in 1 million civilian casualties and two major famines. In 1992, a Human Rights Watch report did not directly name hunger as a weapon of war used by either side, but it does say “the combination of military strategies and human rights violations” with a famine that “cost many more lives than have been lost directly on account of the violence itself.”
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The collapse of Somalia’s central government in 1991 marked the decline of the country’s infrastructure. Additionally, a drought took place, making agricultural resources limited and an absence of government oversight weaponized food. Crops were burned in the country’s main agricultural regions causing Somalis to flee their homes.
Currently
Although Ukraine was known as a “global agricultural powerhouse,” now there is an estimated $40 billion worth of damage to the Ukrainian agricultural infrastructure. There is a significant number of small-scale farmers and people living in rural areas who are still in need of support and assistance.
There are unprecedented levels of acute food insecurity, hunger, and near famine-like conditions in Gaza. In a recent study, all 2.2 million people in Gaza were considered to have some level of food insecurity. Before the conflict, Gaza had a self-sustaining fruit and vegetable production sector, populated with greenhouses and a small-scale livestock production sector. Now, the majority of this has been destroyed.
Many organizations are working closely with authorities in Ukraine and Gaza to ensure that food, water, and medical supplies are getting delivered.
Food Insecurity in the United States
Images of long lines at food banks both in the past and present is not something our society has never seen before. Reliable access to healthy food is a central aspect of our wellbeing, but, at the same time, unpredictable economic changes put this at risk. The first time food insecurity started to be seriously looked at by the US was in the 1930s when the Great Depression left thousands unemployed. During this time, US farmers were still producing food to sell, but millions of Americans were still left hungry, a “paradox of want amid plenty.”
With many people going weeks on end with no food and lines only continuing to grow, the government started to take a more active role than had ever been done before. To help the pantries that millions of families were using everyday, they bought a surplus of wheat from farmers and then donated it to charities across the country. While these efforts did not go unnoticed, this was simply not enough. There needed to be long-lasting solutions that were regularly receiving funding. This was when the School Breakfast Program was created, free and reduced meals were offered in schools, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (NWIC) while also expanding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
As we saw with the COVID-19 pandemic, food insecurity is far from predictable. During the 1980s, uncertainty hit American towns as a recession came through. At the same time, there was a rise in poverty with federal budget cuts weakening social support programs. As a result, the size and number of emergency food programs grew over just a few short years. In New York City alone, 100 new emergency food programs opened in 1983. Still today, emergency food programs provide food assistance to more than one in 20 Americans for at least some parts of the year.
Food Insecurity not only addresses that immediate need of when someone experiences hunger but also the context that surrounds the situation. Food security is commonly based on three factors: Does the region produce enough food for its people? Is the food supply stable (robust enough to weather droughts)?, Do people have physical and economic access to food? In the US, the primary concern is the accessibility of food. Unemployment, low wages, physical and mental illness, and other burdens can make it difficult to obtain nutritious food on a regular basis, especially when money must be allocated towards housing, medical, and child-care costs. This then results in a domino effect as food insecurity has been linked to diabetes, nutrient deficiencies, and other indicators of unhealthy diets. Families that also have the added burden of living far from supermarkets and lack reliable access to transportation may be particularly affected.
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