As recently as the mid-1980s, it was thought that famine was usually an “act of God” — a “biblical” failure of rains or crops or seasons. But in the 1990s Amartya Sen, the Nobel-winning economist, showed this was wrong by proving one bold fact: “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” Famine, it turns out, is not caused by a failure to produce food. It is caused by a failure to distribute food correctly — because the ruler is not accountable to the starving.
To demonstrate this thesis, Keneally — best known for his remarkable novel “Schindler’s Ark” — closely studies three of the greatest hungers in history: the Irish potato famine that began in 1845, the Bengal famine that raged in 1943 and 1944, and the Ethiopian famines of the 1970s and ’80s. They are scattered across continents yet they are uncannily similar; Keneally says that “it is as if they shared part of the same DNA.”
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