Natural Disasters and Man-made Famines: The Big Picture

dry parched ground, symbolizing natural disaster, famine

Modern famines are man-made. That’s a simple maxim. But when did it become true and why?

The World Peace Foundation’s historic famines dataset points us to some explanations.

Figure 1 plots the famines in the dataset from 1870 to 2025 by GDP per capita (US$ at 2011 prices). They are color-coded according to their principal cause (the immediate trigger): adverse climate or other natural factors (16 cases), armed conflict (36 cases), government policies (11 cases), or genocide (5 cases).

Figure 1: Main proximate causes of famine 1870-2025 by GDP per capita

Sources: WPF famines dataset; GDP figures from World Bank, Our World in Data and Statista. Note that 11 famines are missing from the earlier period where GDP estimates aren’t available.

We can see several trends and patterns in the data: the predominance of natural disaster as a major cause in the years before World War One; the big cluster of World War Two famines; government policy famines in the middle part of the 20^th century (mostly caused by communist collectivization); the recent predominance of war-related famines.

Figure 2: Proximate causes clusters of famine 1870-2025 by GDP per capita

graph proximate causes of clusters of famines

Zoom in more closely on those caused by adverse climate and something else becomes clear.

Figure 3: Natural calamity-caused famines 1870-2025 by GDP per capita

Sources: as above.

There’s a cut-off. While most famines (of all causes) strike poorer countries, all of the natural calamity famines struck countries with a GDP per capita (in 2011 US$) below $1100.

Of the 220 countries that have good official data for GDP per capita today, all have surpassed this threshold. The exceptions include Somalia (approx. $650), South Sudan ($250) and Yemen ($350), all of which are chronically on the edge of famine.

There’s a simple lesson from this: economic growth over the last 100 years has pulled almost every country above the line where famines are triggered by natural calamity.

The worldwide tipping point for countries passing the threshold was in the 1980s; the last famines triggered by drought struck that decade. That’s history. But now in some countries, war and misgovernment have pulled some countries down into the danger zone.

Alex de Waal is a Research Professor at The Fletcher School, Tufts University, and leads the WPF research programs on African Peacemaking and Mass Starvation.

Considered one of the foremost experts on the Horn of Africa, his scholarly work and practice has also probed humanitarian crisis and response, human rights, pandemic disease, and conflict and peace-building. His latest book is New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives. He is also author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine and The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa (Polity Press, 2015)

Following a fellowship with the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard (2004-06), he worked with the Social Science Research Council as Director of the program on HIV/AIDS and Social Transformation, and led projects on conflict and humanitarian crises in Africa (2006-09). During 2005-06, de Waal was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur and from 2009-11 served as senior adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan. He was on the list of Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential public intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic Monthly’s 27 “brave thinkers” in 2009 and is the winner of the 2024 Huxley Award of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Professor de Waal regularly teaches a course on Conflict in Africa at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. During this course, students should gain a deeper understanding of the nature of contemporary violent conflict in Africa. Students will be expected to master the key theoretical approaches to violence in Africa, and to become familiar with a number of important case studies. The focus is on the origins and nature of violence, rather than policy responses and solutions. The course is inter-disciplinary and involves readings in political science, international relations, and social anthropology, while also touching on economics, environmental studies, and history.

Kait Bell is a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) candidate at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, focusing on conflict studies, political communication, and design. Before Fletcher, she worked as a UN congressional advisor, a media and risk analyst specializing in the Middle East, and with a human rights coalition in Jerusalem. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and International Studies from the University of Michigan.