Can anyone point me in the direct of a year by year death toll from famine? It would be good if it would cover the last 200 years.

I have been looking but cannot find anything.

Any help would be great.

any specific country?

http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/globalhunger.jpg

United Nations World Food Programme

http://www.wfp.org/aboutwfp/introduction/hunger_who.asp?section=1&sub_section=1

cheers for those dragon. But what I am trying to prove is that famine has not been getting worse since 1914 globally. My friends is a J witness and believes that famine is a sign of the end of this system and that post 1914 it would get worse. However, I believe it is the total opposite as we farm so much better these days etc. But finding the stats on this is really hard.

cheers for those dragon. But what I am trying to prove is that famine has not been getting worse since 1914 globally. My friends is a J witness and believes that famine is a sign of the end of this system and that post 1914 it would get worse. However, I believe it is the total opposite as we farm so much better these days etc. But finding the stats on this is really hard.


I tried to look for statistic of world hunger, but cannot find one which covers till at least back to 1914. Anyway you are right that famine has not been getting worse, at least not since the last 30 years. I crop this table from FAO statistical year book, but because the table is very long, I just crop the bottom part:

http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc247/x_inzomnia/undernourished.jpg

As you can see from the table, the proportion of undernourished in total population has been decreasing. But, this does not distributed evenly. In some countries such as in Africa this has been getting worse (you can see that also from the graph provided by draqon).

Original document (#G.3):

http://www.fao.org/statistics/yearbook/vol_1_1/site_en.asp?page=welfare

yeah I would agree that famine has been going down...but we got now different issues...in place of famine. Like pollution and lack of water.

inz cheers for that. I didn't realise how hard it would be to find this type of data :)

If decisive action is not taken, the number of chronically malnourished persons will be substantially the same in fifteen years time.According to the chart, the number of chronically malnourished persons has remained substantially the same for forty years. During that period the earth's population has increased by sixty percent! Anyone who understands statistics (obviously not the people who drew the chart) would consider this a great victory. A child born in 2008 is 35% less likely to suffer from malnutrition as one born in 1970. Three cheers for civilization, and a giant middle finger to the people who manipulate statistics to promote their own point of view.The greatest suffering will be in sub-Saharan Africa, where food output has not kept pace with population growth.What does that mean, that every nation has to produce all of its own food, the way the world was in past centuries? Haven't these people heard of railroads, ships and trucks? Haven't they heard of the economic principle of division of labor, which tells us that every nation should produce what it produces best, and trade products with other nations that have other skills? Perhaps the solution to the Africans' problem is not to grow their own food, but to launch some other type of industry. Maybe they need more universities and fewer subsistence farms. Once again, these statistics are simply sophomoric.Reversing these trends will require rapid and sustainable production gains as well as measures to make food accessible to those who need it.The Western hemisphere with its relatively low population density has high acreage devoted to farming. It also has efficient, sustainable techniques. We can grow enough food to feed the whole planet even if the population keeps increasing. Even the hyper-industrialized, high-technology United States is a major exporter of grains and other important food crops. Tiny, overcrowded Japan grows more rice than its people can eat. There is clearly no shortage of food production on this planet.

So is the problem in food delivery systems? Certainly not. My kitchen cabinets are full of food produced in China, Belgium, Israel, Thailand and India. It appears to me that the world has an incredibly capacious and efficient food transportation network. In fact my refigerator contains fresh produce from Chile, six or eight thousand miles away! The people on this planet can get any food from any place to any place else so fast that it doesn't have a chance to spoil!

Is the problem then one of noblesse failing to oblige? Are we rich Western bastards ignoring the poor Africans and letting them starve because we don't care? No again! America alone has a Herculean charity industry that collects food for the starving Africans and ships it to them. I personally once collected a thousand dollars for World Vision International's campaign for the Ethiopian famine, in just a couple of days. Absolutely nobody turned down my request for money.

So what is the problem in Africa? The African leaders are the problem. The majority of the African nations are led by despots who don't give a damn about their own people. They intercept our shipments of food, sell it on the black market, and use the money to buy champagne, Land Rovers, villas, hookers, and weapons to fight the despot in charge of the starving country across the border--or the tribes right inside their own border.

Africans will not stop starving until they stop tolerating despotic leadership.

That said, I have no idea what the solution to that problem is. Before somebody says, "Let's just go over there and get rid of the SOB and clean up the country," I submit Iraq as a textbook example of why that doesn't work.

But the point is that famine in Africa is not an agricultural problem. It is a political problem. Charts like these are misleading and I have a very strong hunch that the people who prepared it know that quite well. Perhaps they are part of the problem!

The Western hemisphere with its relatively low population density has high acreage devoted to farming. It also has efficient, sustainable techniques. We can grow enough food to feed the whole planet even if the population keeps increasing. Even the hyper-industrialized, high-technology United States is a major exporter of grains and other important food crops. They techniques currently employed to produce food in the US are not sustainable. They are dependent on cheap imported oil, irrigation of dryland, tolerance of net erosion, and other things which will have to change in the foreseeable (possibly near) future.

Meanwhile, the US is a net importer of foodstuffs if I recall the stats correctly. And a good deal of the food shortages - which are actually money shortages, these days, most of the time - are at least partly consequence of diversion of food production to export crops. The money in is not only less than the increased local replacement cost of the food out, but not as evenly distributed - and some people are left behind.

They techniques currently employed to produce food in the US are not sustainable. They are dependent on cheap imported oil, irrigation of dryland. . . .Energy is indeed the weakness in our agriculture (irrigation is the transportation of water and therefore an energy issue) and we'll either wake up and deal with it or not, especially if the rest of the world becomes dependent on our grains. Nonetheless as has been discussed on many other threads, there is still just enough time to solve the energy problem in the short run by building nuclear plants and in the long run by building orbital solar collectors.. . . .tolerance of net erosion. . . .That was a big problem for the Mesoamerican civilizations and arguably the cause of the desert that now covers northern Mexico, but I think our current agricultural engineers have it under control. Unlike the engineers in China who are watching the Gobi Desert creep measurably closer to the suburbs of Beijing every year.Meanwhile, the US is a net importer of foodstuffs if I recall the stats correctly.Yes but most of that stuff is at the top of the food pyramid. If times get tough we can get by on a healthy balanced diet without all the Belgian chocolate, Vietnamese XO sauce, Indian cardamom, Ethiopian coffee and Chilean kiwi fruit. Sure I pointed to a huge variety of imported foodstuffs in my kitchen, but that stuff adds variety and fun to my diet, not basic nutrition. And a good deal of the food shortages - which are actually money shortages, these days, most of the time - are at least partly consequence of diversion of food production to export crops. The money in is not only less than the increased local replacement cost of the food out, but not as evenly distributed - and some people are left behind.Yes, but the point that is obscured by these misleading, inflammatory, and nearly fraudulent statistics is that the problem you identify is being steadily mitigated over time, especially during the modern era.

We must accept the fact that on a planet with six billion people, many of whom inexplicably do not share our clear, wise and unerring vision of the path to complete peace and prosperity, we cannot solve all of the world's problems for all of the world's people within our lifetime. We're going to have to settle for the reassurance that peace and prosperity are inexorably spreading, and do what we can to hasten that spread.

Publishing bad statistics created by hacks is not the way to do it.

Nonetheless as has been discussed on many other threads, there is still just enough time to solve the energy problem in the short run by building nuclear plants and in the long run by building orbital solar collectors. Neither one of those will help the farmer much- and the orbital solar collectors are completely unnecessary (as are the nukes, but that's another matter).
but I think our current agricultural engineers have it {erosion, degradation} under control. The Oglalla aquifer is still dropping, the irrigated dryland is still salting up, and the Iowa topsoil is still eroding, every year. The major response of the "agricultural engineers" has been to launch major genetic engineering programs to produce crops that can grow in salty, dry, and biologically degraded soils.
Yes but most of that stuff is at the top of the food pyramid. If times get tough we can get by on a healthy balanced diet without all the Belgian chocolate, Vietnamese XO sauce, Indian cardamom, Ethiopian coffee and Chilean kiwi fruit. The question is not what "we" can get by on, but what the people with money are willing to give up - in China, as well as in America. Most modern food shortages are shortages of money, not physical food, and the people running short are often in a money competition with people on other continents. Inner city Americans are not immune from Chinese and Japanese rich people's competition for US agricultural products, in a time of declining productivity per dollar.
Yes, but the point that is obscured by these misleading, inflammatory, and nearly fraudulent statistics is that the problem you identify is being steadily mitigated over time, especially during the modern era. Not steadily. We've been backsliding, for a while now.