The Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture-“A million deaths is a statistic”: A history of famine denialism

Event hosted by the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy

It’s common for those responsible for famines to deny them, while they are raging and afterwards. This was the case in colonial India, and post-colonial China, Ethiopia, Sudan and Yemen. At the time of the Holodomor, Josef Stalin infamously said, ‘if one man dies of hunger, it is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.’ Denialism takes several forms, including outright factual denial, explaining the calamity as something else, and giving a different meaning to starvation in order to justify inflicting it. Today, with internationally validated metrics for measuring food insecurity and determining ‘famine’, such as the United Nations-accredited Integrated food security Phase Classification (IPC), denialists have adopted new methods for dealing with inconvenient statistics. The deepest denial is that famines are man-made, profound societal traumas.

Speaker: Alex de Waal, Executive Director, World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School, Tufts University