IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/17630.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

From famine to food crisis. What history can teach us about local and global subsistence crises

Author

Listed:
  • Vanhaute, Eric

Abstract

The range of famine prone regions in the world has been shrinking for centuries; it’s currently mainly limited to sub-Sahara Africa. Yet the impact of endemic hunger has not declined and the early 21st century seems to be faced with a new threat: global subsistence crises. In this essay I question the concepts of famine and food crisis. I will formulate some suggestions to understand these seemingly unrelated processes in a more integrated way. The article successively debates historical famine research, Europe’s ‘grand escape’ from hunger, past and contemporary ‘depeasantisation’, and the state of 21st century food systems. Only more integrated models of interpretation can supersede the dualistic histories of food and famine that have been dominating developmentalist stories for so long.

Suggested Citation

  • Vanhaute, Eric, 2009. "From famine to food crisis. What history can teach us about local and global subsistence crises," MPRA Paper 17630, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:17630
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/17630/1/MPRA_paper_17630.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Sen, Amartya, 1983. "Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198284635.
    2. Martin Ravallion, 1997. "Famines and Economics," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 35(3), pages 1205-1242, September.
    3. Robert W. Fogel, 1989. "Second Thoughts on the European Escape from Hunger: Famines, Price Elasticities, Entitlements, Chronic Malnutrition, and Mortality Rates," NBER Historical Working Papers 0001, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Plümper, Thomas & Neumayer, Eric, 2009. "Famine Mortality, Rational Political Inactivity, and International Food Aid," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 50-61, January.
    5. Vanhaute, Eric, 2008. "The End of Peasantries? Rethinking the Role of Peasantries in a World-Historical View," MPRA Paper 13291, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Cormac Ó Gráda & Eric Vanhaute & Richard Paping, 2006. "The European subsistence crisis of 1845-1850 : a comparative perspective," Working Papers 200609, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Romy Santpoort, 2020. "The Drivers of Maize Area Expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa. How Policies to Boost Maize Production Overlook the Interests of Smallholder Farmers," Land, MDPI, vol. 9(3), pages 1-13, February.
    2. van Bavel, Bas, 2016. "The Invisible Hand?: How Market Economies have Emerged and Declined Since AD 500," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199608133.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Cormac Ó Gráda, 2004. "Introduction to Special Issue of Food and Foodways," Working Papers 200409, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    2. Sophie Mitra & Jean-Marc Boussard, 2008. "Storage and the Volatility of Agricultural Prices: A Model of Endogenous Fluctuations," Fordham Economics Discussion Paper Series dp2008-11, Fordham University, Department of Economics.
    3. Howe, Paul, 2018. "Famine systems: A new model for understanding the development of famines," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 144-155.
    4. Bowbrick, Peter, 2020. "Toxic famine research and how it suppresses its critics," MPRA Paper 101970, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Kiran Sharma & Subhradeep Das & Anirban Chakraborti, 2017. "Global Income Inequality and Savings: A Data Science Perspective," Papers 1801.00253, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2018.
    6. Genesis T. Yengoh & Frederick Ato Armah & Edward Ebo Onumah, 2010. "Paths to Attaining Food Security: The Case of Cameroon," Challenges, MDPI, vol. 1(1), pages 1-22, August.
    7. Hong, Harrison G & de Paula, Aureo & Singh, Vishal, 2015. "Hoard Behavior During Commodity Bubbles," CEPR Discussion Papers 10441, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    8. Subhani Keerthiratne & Richard S. J. Tol, 2017. "Impact of Natural Disasters on Financial Development," Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Springer, vol. 1(1), pages 33-54, June.
    9. André Schultz & Alexander Libman, 2015. "Is there a local knowledge advantage in federations? Evidence from a natural experiment," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 162(1), pages 25-42, January.
    10. Julie Subervie & Patrick Guillaumont & Catherine Korachais, 2006. "How Macroeconomic Instability Lowers Child Survival," Post-Print hal-00221458, HAL.
    11. John R. Owen & Deanna Kemp, 2024. "Corporate Responses to Community Grievance: Voluntarism and Pathologies of Practice," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 189(1), pages 55-68, January.
    12. Bartoš, Vojtěch, 2021. "Seasonal scarcity and sharing norms," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 185(C), pages 303-316.
    13. Sophie Drogué & Clotilde Grandval & Jean-Christophe Bureau & Hervé Guyomard & Laurence Roudart, 2006. "Panorama des analyses prospectives sur l'évolution de la sécurité alimentaire mondiale à l'horizon 2020-2030," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/54558, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    14. Paul Mosley & Robert Holzmann & Steen Jorgensen, 1999. "Social protection as social risk management: conceptual underpinnings for the social protection sector strategy paper," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 11(7), pages 1005-1027.
    15. Chen, Yuyu & Zhou, Li-An, 2007. "The long-term health and economic consequences of the 1959-1961 famine in China," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(4), pages 659-681, July.
    16. Risse, Mathias, 2009. "Immigration, Ethics and the Capabilities Approach," MPRA Paper 19218, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    17. Plümper, Thomas & Neumayer, Eric, 2009. "Famine Mortality, Rational Political Inactivity, and International Food Aid," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 50-61, January.
    18. Wendala Gamaralalage Subhani Sulochana Keerthiratne, 2017. "Economic impact of natural disasters," Economics PhD Theses 0617, Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School.
    19. Luis Carvalho & Aurora A.C. Teixeira, 2011. "Where are the poor in International Economics?," FEP Working Papers 425, Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto.
    20. Cormac Ó Gráda, 2007. "Making Famine History," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 45(1), pages 5-38, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    famines food crisis peasantry depeasantisation;

    JEL classification:

    • N10 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - General, International, or Comparative
    • N50 - Economic History - - Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment and Extractive Industries - - - General, International, or Comparative
    • Q10 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - General
    • Q18 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Agricultural Policy; Food Policy; Animal Welfare Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:17630. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.