Hunger | Democracy Prevents Famine

The world still thinks of famine the way that Thomas Malthus did, as Mother Nature’s revenge on hapless humanity. In fact, famine is anything but what the dour English economist called “nature’s last most dreadful resource.” As in Somalia in the early 1990s, it is often a man-made disaster, an avoidable economic and political catastrophe.

The kind of famine that struck there—created by clan warfare, not by crop shortages or endemic poverty—is the rule, not the exception, according to economists who have studied famines in Africa, Asia and Europe.

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