 (Depiction of Grande Seca victims) Criança Morta “Dead Child” 1944 by Cândido Portinari “A child’s gotta eat their share of dirt” — Old southern saying Famines and periods of mass starvation have been manufactured for as long as civilization has existed. To starve one’s enemy or even one’s own populace is a powerful strategy, despite its revolting nature. Gaza’s imposed famine however, is unique. Images of starving children have been almost literally uploaded into our collective consciousness. Malnourished bodies, already ravaged by years of bullets, bombs, fire, and sickness, creep into our insular worlds on various social medias. One year ago The Lancet, a respected independent medical journal, estimated that 186,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza at that stage of the genocide. It is a year later and there are estimations that 434,000 Gazans have likely been killed now. For four months we have seen day in and day out “hunger games”, mass shooting executions at supposed food aid sites run by the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”, a stooge organization for the U.S and Israel. These executions of food starved concentration camp prisoners, along with the mounting globalized images of bony Palestinian corpses, has led many to start applying the term “famine” to the Gaza genocide. Given the increased use of this term, which I may add is correctly applied, I think it is important to put this term in context historically, not only by comparing the Gaza famine to its precedents, but in exploring this brief history of famines elucidate what a famine is definitionally.  Hungry Palestinians at a food distribution center  Grande Seca victims 1877–1878 Victorian Famines Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World explores this definitional and historical issue with the term famine. Davis’ case study of famines in 19th century India, Brazil, and China reveals that although climate events primarily caused by ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) had significant impacts on agriculture, food distribution, and general living conditions; it was the colonial administrations that ruled over these areas that caused the famine and mass starvations. In India, the ENSO related droughts were devastating, especially in the interior Deccan Plateau region, but not nearly as devastating as the colonial British and their many sick machinations. Machinations ranging from diverting life saving grain from the exterior regions of India to England rather than the Deccan, to enslaving famine stricken Indians in work death camps with pitiful food subsistence. In Brazil, this was mirrored with the Portuguese decision to divert and withhold food aid to the Sertanejos fleeing from intense droughts in the Sertão, killing around 500,000 in what the Brazilians call the Grande Seca or “Great Drought”. In Northern China, Davis exposes once more how the British left millions hungry and without food aid of any kind. The famine was so horrifying that many turned to eating dirt, the hay and grass thatching of their house roofs, and eventually other people.  Famine victims from the Great Indian Famine of 1876–78  Northern China Famine 1876–79 “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat.” — Amartya Sen Malnutrition By Conquest  “Famine” located in Dublin by Rowan Gillepsie 1993, depicting the Great Famine of Ireland 1845–1849 Famously the British also imposed famine onto the Irish, killing one million and forcing two million more to flee, representing a 1/3 population decrease in only a decade. Somehow, the memory of this starvation has grown to rightfully blame the British for their murderous policy. Yet the baggage laden word famine still remains when discussing the “Great Famine”. Besides the brutality of the British and the Portuguese, other European powers committed their share of manufactured food massacres. Numerically, the Spanish conquests of the New World are the greatest of these food deprivations. “The main islands were thickly populated with a peaceful folk when Christ-over found them. But the orgy of blood which followed, no man has written. We are the slaughterers. It is the tortured soul of our world.” — William Carlos Williams In David Stannard’s book American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, he gives a conservative estimate that 75,000,000 indigenous people’s of the Americas were exterminated primarily by the Spanish. Nearly every tribe, civilization, people’s lost 95+ percent of their populations within just a few hundred years. Mass murder, hangings, shootings, stabbings, immolations, live burials, and death by dogs were all commonly used by the Spanish. Introduced diseases that natives had no immunity to killed most, but starvation tactics were often used too. Native crops were destroyed, food reserves plundered, and hunting grounds hunted to extinction.  Spanish conquistadors executing Native Americans Further, many were pushed onto barren reservations completely removed from their ancestral homelands. This undoubtedly caused millions to die of starvation and millions more who were already weakened by sickness and injury to die also. The crime of starving all these innocent peoples is doubled given the known history that nearly all New World peoples were extremely hospitable to the European colonizers and on many occasions fed them and taught them how to live and navigate about the land. The famine catastrophe the Spanish created was continued by the British and eventually the Americans, both of whom waged ecological war against the remnants of Native Americans.  Modern Massacres The New World murderous conquests, the Victorian era starvations of Malthusian calculation, and the exodus of the Irish may lead one to believe that famines are not only clearly defined as periods of mass starvation enforced deliberately as an act of policy, but also have ceased to exist to the same degree. After all, there have been significant technological improvements in agriculture, weather prediction, and the ability to distribute goods of all manner. This is a disastrous assumption. If anything the 20th and 21st centuries have revealed that famines not only continue to exist, but also that our new found technological advancements enable new sickening methods to carry out genocide by hunger.  No one in Gaza is spared the most inhumane of deaths In Guatemala, for nearly 40 years the U.S government backed right wing death squads that not only “disappeared” hundreds of thousands of primarily indigenous Mayans, but also carried out a scorched earth doctrine that left thousands more starving and destitute. Internationally Illegal bombing and blockades in Yemen for nearly a decade now have been carried out by Saudi Arabia with the backing of the United States. Prior to Gaza’s unfolding genocide, Yemen was the worlds greatest humanitarian famine crises, a crises deliberately made. Tragically, Gaza is just the latest (albeit one of the most sickening) in a long and continuing history of state imposed starvations and imposed colonial famines. Understanding that famines are inherently created purposely by genocidal colonial projects is a crucial step in exposing the underlying framework that makes these famines possible in the first place. Originally published on Medium. Author Jacan Stone Archives August 2025
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