The demography of Famines : Perspectives from the past and the present

Symposium organized by Cormac O’Gráda, from 25 – 31 Мау 1999

 

Participants

ADAMETS Serge (Institut National d’études Démographiques (INED), Paris), CANTRELLE Pierre (Comité français pour l’UNICEF), DYSON Tim (London School of Economics (LSE), GARENNE Michel (Centre Français sur la population et le développement (CEPED), Paris), du GUERNY Jacques (Food & Agricultural Organization, Rome), GUINNANE Timothy W. (Economic Growth Center, Yale University, New Haven), HIONIDOU Violetta (University of Southampton, UK), MacINTYRE Kate (Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA), MAIARATNA Arup (University of Burdwan, India), MOKYR Joel (Northwestern University, Evanston, USA), O’GRADA Cormac (University College, Dublin, Ireland), PITKANEN Kari J. (University of Helsinki, Finland), SAITO Osamu (Hitotsubashi University, Japon), SANDS Barbara (University of Arizona, USA), SEAMAN John (Mary Datchelor bouse, London), TНIBON Christian (Université de Pau et des pays de l’Adour (UPPA), WHEATCROFT Stephen (University of Melbourne, Australia)

 

Summary

Most dictionary definitions of ‘famine’ equate it with food scarcity and widespread hunger. They tend to remain silent on the demographic aspects, although the extra mortality caused by famines offers one easy and obvious gauge for ranking famines. Ву this reckoning, for example, the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s was the greatest in nineteenth-century Europe. By the same token some of the modern famines highlighted in media accounts are “small’ by historical standards. Excess mortality, however, is only one aspect of famine demography. Famines typically reduce births and marriages too, and the migrations that they often give rise to can both increase and reduce the death toll. There are differences between how modern famines kill and how historical famines did so. Modern famines differ too in who they kill; they tend to more class-specific and they are even more likely to target males than females than famines in the past. Moreover, famines often have demographic causes as well as consequences; and the consequences mау be long-term as well as short-term.

Les Treilles offered a luxuriously incongruous but highly congenial and productive setting for the conference on The Demography of Famines which took place there in late Mаy 1999. The conference, which was largely funded by the Fondation des Treilles, brought together seventeen specialists in the field. It was very much an interdisciplinary gathering, with demographers, historians, economists, and development specialists present. The contributions ranged widely both in chronological and geographical terms, from Japan in the first millennium to Madagascar in the 1980s. This report offers a brief account of all the papers presented: titles and authors’ affiliations are listed below. It is hoped that revised versions of mort or ail of the fifteen papers presented will be published together in book form in due course.

The conference began with an analysis by Tim Dyson of two famines that hit the central Indian province of Berar in rapid succession in the 1890s. Though Berar was relatively advanced by Indian standards, the underlying causes of famine there were as elsewhere in colonial India. Dyson’s account highlighted how food crises often come in pairs and added an intriguing new twist to the issue of post-famine demographic adjustment. Ils emphasis was on how ‘bang-bang’ famines and epidemics mаy well have reinforced each other to restrict population growth in the past. Just because the age structure of famine mortality may sometimes promise hope of some limited degree of demographic and economic reсovery in famine’s wake should not obscure the possibility that echoes and chain reactions may sometimes have operated powerfully in the opposite direction as a check on reсovery.

Kate Macintyre’s contribution addressed an issue which would recur frequently during our deliberations at Les Treilles, viz. Why females seemed to survive famine better than men. Given the lower life expectanсy of females during ‘normal’ times in famine-prone environments, this is an interesting and important question. Macintyre set out six possible mechanisms that could explain this mortality advantage, using the case of the Great Irish famine (1846-50) as a case-study. The mechanisms are: (1) a spurious reading of poor data, which exacerbate the problem of `missing’ women so that their deaths are less likely to be reported than deaths of men; (2) a concurrent decline in fertility which lowers the risk of pregnancy and hence maternal mortality; (3) a biological argument that says women are less likely to die from starvation because of higher body fat levels, lower energy consumption, or possibly higher resistance to disease; (4) differential individual and group survival strategies, in particular in relation to migration and to the acquisition of knowledge of famine foods; (5) the particular political and social structures which may discriminate against women in ‘normal’ times, but act in their favour in times of great stress; and (6) emotional or moral factors associated with differential notions of pride, which mау mean that women reach places of assistance (the workhouse or the refugee camp, for instance) in a less worse state than men. Macintyre’s reading of the Irish evidence prompted her to opt tentatively for (6).

Kаri J. Pitkdnen’s paper on Finland also addressed the issue of sex bias. During the Great Finnish Famine of the 1860s and also during several other periods of excess mortality in Finland in the preceding decades, Pitkänen could find no evidence for consistent sex differentials in mortality, with one exception. Only in 1868, the peak year of famine in a decade of famine or near-famine, did men suffer more than women. A closer examination of the data, however, revealed that even in 1868 sex differentials in mortality increases were limited to certain regions and age categories. There were some small consistent sex differentials in proportional mortality increases, but they reflected sex differentials in baseline (standard) mortality. When absolute increases in famine mortality between the sexes were compared, the differentials largely disappeared. Overall, Pitkinеn’s evidence suggested that neither sex had an inherent biological disadvantage in resistance to the particular infectious diseases mainly responsible for the mortality increases during these calamities. Only in 1868 were men in certain age categories and in certain regions more likely to succumb than women. Pitkänen argued that this was mostly likely linked to famine-induced temporary migration, which also tended to be age- and sex-selective.

Two of the contributions dealt with the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. In their paper Timothy Guinnane and Cormac Ó Gráda offered a preliminary analysis of the role of local institutional or ‘agency’ factors in determining variations in mortality across Irish regions. They highlighted one particular aspect of agency, the management of workhouses under the poor law regime. About one-quarter of the excess mortality of one million occurred in these workhouses. The paper offered examples of both the case-study and the comparative approach. Individual case-studies yiеld examples of both good and bad management. Close analysis of workhouse registers and qualitative data offers insight into crucial factors such as the quality of health care in the workhouse and the competence of the guardians. The North Dublin Union, the particular focus of part of this study, seems to have been well-run during the famine. However, management quality is arguably endogenous, and this suggested the usefulness of a comparative analysis. So the paper also included a statistical analysis of Ireland’s 130 unions in order to determine which unions under- or over­performed, controlling for the economic and locational conditions that faced them.

The paper by Joel Мokyr and Cormac Ó Gráda was also about the Irish famine. In the 1840s there was no civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths in Ireland, and the enumeration of emigrants was partial. In these circumstances the well-known tables of death constructed by William Wilde for the 1851 Irish census commissioners are a seductive source. Wilde’s tables are impressive in their detail and in their apparent sophistication; rеtrospectivеlу-recorded deaths are cross­tabulated by age, by sex, by cause, by location, and bу date. Alas, the data suffer from serious under-reporting. However, the under-reporting was rather systematic, allowing Mokyr and Ó Gráda to produce a range of estimates that ‘correct’ for it. The results helped to distinguish between excess mortality due to hunger-induced diseases such as dysentery, and that due to diseases such as typhoid fever, which are less the product of hunger than of the social disruption that usually accompanies famine. They then compared the implications of the outcomes for the role of infectious disease and mortality by age and sex in Ireland and elsewhere.

John Seaman’s paper focused on early warning mechamisms. Hе described the computer model of rural economy which he had developed in collaboration with FAO/GIEWS, based on quantitative descriptions of rural economy obtained by rapid assessment methods. The model has already been widely applied to prediction and to ‘hindcasts’, and gives good approximations to real events in terms of the use of household entitlements and the sеverity of food shortage. The system was mot designed with the dеmography of famine in mind, but Seaman felt that the approach, in modified form, might be usеfullу applied to demographic and other aspects of the study of famine.

Three of the conference contributions dealt with famine in Africa. In a the first of these Michel Garenne and Pierre Cantrelle presented a paper (co-authored with Dominique Waltisbergerand Osée Ralijaona) which described what thеу termed a ‘mild’ famine in Antananarivo, the capital City of Madagascar, in the mid­ 1980s. Vital registration data show that mortality underwent major changes during the 1976-1995 period. Mortality increased slowly and regularly between 1974 and 1984, and then went through a major crisis in 1985 and 1986 and to a lesser extent in 1987-1988. It decreased again and by 1991 was close to the baseline level of 1976-1978. Since 1991 mortality stayed roughly at the same high level. The 1985-1986 crisis seems to be due primarily to a severe food shortage following a big increase in the price of rice, the main staple food. The main causes of death responsible for the increase were malnutrition, diarrheal diseases, acute respiratory infections, and in addition for adults tuberculosis and cardiovascular diseases. Furthermore, deaths due to violence other than motor vehicle accidents also increased during the same period. Garenne and his co-authors estimate the crisis of 1985-6, induced by the removal of a food price subsidy, killеd about 16,600 persons, among them 7,600 children, 5,100 adults aged 15-59, and 3,900 older persons aged 60 years or more. Excess mortality was much higher for men (9,400 deaths) than for women (7,200 deaths); the sex ratio of excess mortality was highest for Young adults aged 15-59, and lower among children aged 0-14 years, and among older persons aged 60+ years. A malaria crisis peaking in 1987-89 exacerbated the food crisis of 1985-6, and was responsible for a further 1,400 deaths.

Christian Thibon gave a highly informative account, based on a rich combination of oral and written sources, of famine in the central African country of Burundi over the past century or so. The picture is a complex one, in which shifting economic conditions influenced the inter-tribal equilibrium between Hutu and Tutsi. Its broad outlines in demographic terms are cataclysmic famine in the late pre-colonial era, followed by severe local dearths in the 1920s, and the last natural famine, referred to as ‘Manori’, in 1943/44. There followed a politically­ induced famine in 1972 which resulted in huge mortality (possibly 0.3 million).

Markos Еzra’s paper offered an analysis of the demographic consequence of environmental stress. Using primary survey data carried out to look at the demographic consequences of drought and famine in the drought-prone areas of northern Ethiopia, this study argues that growing environmental stress and persisting food insecuгity have stimulated changes in the demographic behaviours and attitudes of farming communities in this region. Signifiсant increase in acceptance rates of family planning services; changing attitudes towards early age at marnage and towards having a large number of children; actual reduction in fertility; migration (particularly of the youth) out of the communities; and the tendency by many farmers to be involved in non-farm income generating activities as well as in non-farm employment sectors are among the demographic responses observed in the communities investigated.

Serguei Adаmets gave an analysis of the geography of famine in nineteenth-century Russia. Until mid-century few Russian regions were immune, but from then on famine became an inсreasingly regional or localised phenomenon. By century’s end the regions at risk were limited to the Volga region, the northern Caucasus, and the southern Ukraine. More effective control of epidemics, commercialisation, and more effective public action all рlаyed a role. All nineteenth-century famines fade into insignificance when compared to those of the early 1920s and early 1930s in the Soviet Union.

Stephen Wheatcroft’s contribution was enriched by the increasing availability in Russia of demographic data from the Soviet period. Hе combined some of his own earlier data on the famine of 1918-22 with new detailed regional data on the 1929-33 period. Ils focus was on the demographic situation in four major cities (St. Petersburg, Moscow, Saratove, and Kiev) and the regions around them in both the 1918-22 famine period and the 1929-34 period. Some detailed information on deaths by date, age, sex, and cause are now becoming available for a limited number of areas, and Wheatcroft discussed to what extent these partial patterns would aрplу to the country as a whole. The role of epidemic disease in the 1929-34 famine was much less important than in 1918-24, but mortality still was very high indeed in the 1930s. Wheatcroft surmised that the higher incidence of cardio-vascular disease in the 1930s may have been due to the damage to health caused by the earlier famine.

The analysis of the demography of famine is often inhibited by poor data. This is certainly the case for China in the 1950s and 1960s. Barbara Sands presented some of her findings on China’s Great Leap Forward famine. The conventional wisdom conveys this as a man-made disaster where misguided economic policies precipitated widespread famine and world record­breaking population lisses. Sands reconstructed regional population and grain availability data to find more complex patterns than those suggested by classic famine. White allowing for considerable excess mortality in this period, she suggested that portion of it was due to the influenza pandemic of 1957. This prompted an alternative, admittedly still rather speculative explanation of the Great Leap Forward famine. Sands concluded that China’s post-1949 economy was less centrally-­controlled and more vulnerable to natural disaster than previously suggested.

The demography of Japanese famines is also rather poorly documented. Osaтu Saito`s paper relied therefore on indirect, non-standard sources for its insights. It provided an analysis, based on chronological source books or annals, of famine frequencies in three different time periods of Japanese history (ancient, early modern and modern). Then, by combining such data and climatological data, Sait offered a fascinating account of the role of climate in causing famine before and after c. 1600. Finally, he re-examined the role of famines as demographic correctives in Japan. Saito noted that the decline in famine incidence in the nineteenth century produced not just a decline in mortality but also a rise in fertility. This pointed to a significant role for famine as a brake on Japanese population in previous decades.

Arup Maharatna еmрloyеd data on death registration and the price of rice to analyse four major famines in India between the 1870s and the 1900s. In all cases soaring food prices augured in higher mortality with a lag of a few months. Though the seasonal character of excess mortality was in part determined by climatic and environmental factors, Maharatna insisted that the outbreak of epidemics, in particular malaria epidemics, in the wake of drought and famine, could not but be fundamentally attributed to mass starvation and acute malnutrition.

Finally, Violetta Hionidou described another ‘small’ but verу well documented on the Aegean island of Syros in 1941-2. The famine resulted from the occupation of Greece by Axis forces during World War 2, and resulted in the deaths of about one-tenth of the island’s population of twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Medical records suggest that these deaths were overwhelmingly due to literal starvation; infectious disease рlayеd virtually no role. This outcome highlights a fundamental difference between historical famines and war-related famines in developed or semi-developed economies in the twentieth century. Hionidou’s data also show that infant and child mortality were relativеlу low, and that men were much more likely to die than women. Bearing in mind the findings of Pitkänen, Macintyre, and Garenne et al. regarding female advantage, the greater vulnerability of the men of Syros in a context where infectious diseases were absent seemed to lend support to a physiological interpretation.

 

Communications

Tim Dyson (London School of Economics) : Famine in Berar, 1896-7 and 1899-1900 – echoes and chair reactions

Tim Guinnane (Yale University) and Cormac O’Gráda (University College Dublin) – Workhouse mortality during the Great Irish Famine

Kali Pitkänen (University of Helsinki) – Mortality be age and by gender: Finnish famines in the nineteenth century

Kate Maclntyre (Tulane University) – Gender and famine mortality

Osamu Saito (Hitotsubashi University) – The frequency of famines as demographic correctives in the Japanese past

Violetta Hionidou (Southampton University) – The Greek famine of 1941-42

John Seaman (Save the Children Fund) – Household entitlements and famine prediction

Serguei Adamets (INED, Paris) – Russian famines in the 19’s and 20’s centuries

Michel Garenne and Pierre Cantrelle (ORSTOM, Paris) – Famine and food shortages in Africa

Joel Mokyr (Northwestern University) and Cormac O’Gráda (University College Dublin) – Famine disease and famine mortality: lessons from the Irish experience

Arup Maharatna (Burdwan University) – Famines and epidemics: an Indian historical perspective

Barbara Sands (University of Arizona) – Some demographic puzzles of China’s Great Leap Forward Famine

Stephen Wheatcroft (University of Melbourne) – On greatly leaping forward: famines resulting from over­ambitious development projects, the USSR 1927-33 and China 1947-62

Markos Ezra (Addis Abbeba) – Household vulnerability to food crises and mortality: a case study of the drought-prone areas of Northern Ethiopia

Christian Thibon (Université de Pau) – Famines d’hier et d’aujourd’hui au Burundi

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