Drought and Famine: Crash Course World History #208 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 2 - World Knowledge

Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course World History.
Today we're going to talk about drought and famine.
Really, Stan? When are we going to talk about, like,
peace and happiness? I feel like we've been
on kind of a sad run here at Crash Course.
You know what, actually I'm gonna talk about
peace and happiness, but not until the very
end. In the mean time, drought and famine.
Mr. Green, Mr. Green! This is science again. Famines
are just natural disasters, they happen sometimes.
Yeah, Me From the Past, no. For the most part,
famines have historically been man-made disasters.
So Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen
commented that
"starvation is the characteristic of some
people not having enough food to eat. It is
not the characteristic of there not being
enough to eat."
In other words, people starve it's often because
they are unable to obtain food that might
be available somewhere in their vicinity.
The issue isn't existence of resources, it's
access to resources.
And there are a lot of ways that humans can
contribute to famines. Right, like, take governments.
Sometimes governments just do a bad job of
providing relief to starving people. Other
times, they have deliberate policies that
lead to starvation.
The most obvious example of that is Stalin's
collectivization and subsequent terror, which
killed millions of Ukrainians and Russians
between 1932 and 1933. There's also Mao's
Great Leap Forward which caused famines that killed
up to 10 million Chinese people in the late 1950's.
And in the Capitalist world market forces
can cause famines, such as when there's enough
food to keep people from starving but they
can't afford to buy it.
Shortages or panic cause prices to go up,
then people who can afford to pay end up hoarding
resources and people who can't afford to pay
end up starving.
Now, drought and other natural disasters can
create shortages but hoarding makes them much
worse. Like, think about the price of bottled water
in Florida when a hurricane is about to hit.
But of course, when it comes to the disaster of famine,
people can't do it alone. We need weather's help.
Okay, so here's a map of famines. You'll notice
that they often occur in what historians sometimes
call the global south.
Good job with the naming there, historians.
I might have called it The Drought Belt. Or
the, ah, Southern Hemisphere.
Southern latitudes are more effected by weather
related to El Niño. El Niños affects wind
and rain patterns and they're associated with
weak monsoons and droughts is parts of Asia,
Africa and north-eastern South America.
By the way, the fact that north-eastern South
America is a grammatically correct phrase
in English indicates that there is SOMETHING
WRONG with historians and naming!
Right, but my point is that weak monsoons
can be devastating to agriculture in Asia.
If the spring rains don't come, the wheat
crop will be poor and if the summer monsoon
fails the entire year's harvest can be lost.
And El Niño also contributes to famine in
East Africa where it accounts for about 50
percent of the variance in rainfall. Now,
El Niño probably contributed to recent famines
like the one in China between 1957 and 1959,
that's associated with Mao's Great Leap
Forward, but we're going to focus on some
perhaps lesser known food disasters. Especially
the ones that occurred in India, in the late
19th century.
India was Britain's most populous and most
important colony in the 19th century and also
the scene of it's greatest colonial failure,
which is really saying something.
The famines that struck India in the last
quarter of the 19th century claimed millions
of lives and they highlight the devastating
combination of market forces, government policy,
ideology, and bad weather.
Now, it's tempting to blame those devastating
famines on the severe El Niño events that
occurred in those years, but it's important
to note that there have been El Niños that
didn't result in famine and also famines that
aren't related to El Niño.
When studying history - and also when doing
anything else - we seem to have this urge
to essentialize, to find, like, the one secret
cause of terrible or great things. I understand
that urge to find the one true problem, because
then maybe we could find a one true solution
but it just doesn't work that way. The truth
is always nuanced.
Okay, so until about 1800, India was the world's
leader in textile production with the industry
employing millions of people at wages that,
while not extravagant, were more than enough
to avoid starvation. This was largely due
to the fact that food prices were low because
Indian agriculture was very productive.
And then, the British happened.
Let's go to the thought bubble.
As industrial manufacturing took off in Britain
the labor intensive Indian textile industry
couldn't compete. So, former Indian textile
workers turned to growing cotton for export
which required land, seed and fertilizer,
which cost money. And that drove many Indian
cotton farmers into debt.
Government policy made things worse, especially
tax policies.
Now, I like taxes, when they pay for things
like schools and infrastructure, but taxes
can be bad when they fall on those least able
to pay them. In British-India colonial taxes
forced peasants further into the market economy
because they had to be paid in cash.
Now, to service that debt, and pay all of those
taxes with money, Indian farmers needed a
cash crop which meant yet more land devoted
to cotton and less land devoted to growing food.
During the 1876 to 1878 El Niño drought,
British administrators continued to collect
taxes which meant that Indian peasants continued
to have to grow cotton instead of food. And
when droughts struck again at the turn of
the 20th century, the British raised taxes
24 percent and then confiscated the land of
farmers that refused to pay.
Those taxes largely went pay for the British
military and only rarely did Indians see a benefit.
The only area where the British did locally
invest the money they collected was in railroads,
but those were a mixed blessing. The railroads
could have been used to alleviate famine by
bringing much needed food, but usually they
just shipped raw materials to markets.
In fact, during the 1876 to 1878 famine, to
quote one historian, "The population decreased
more rapidly where the districts were served
by railways than where there were no railways."
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
Oohh, it must be time for the open letter!
Bet it has something to do with railroads.
Oh my gosh, it's lions! An a open letter to
The Ghost and The Darkness.
Hey there, The Ghost and The Darkness. You are
the two most famous man eating lions of all
time. But the story of why you actually ate
humans turns out to be pretty fascinating.
So the British also built railroads in Africa,
and in order to build them quickly, they needed
lots of labor, and that labor needed lots
of food. Hunters killed almost all of the
available game which deprived local lion populations
of food and then because there was lots of
malaria, all the people with malaria were
together in a sick tent, and then The Ghost
and The Darkness would, y'know, go to
the sick tent and eat.
So, the Ghost and the Darkness, you're part
of the reason that we see lions as these terrifying
human eaters. But in fact, you were just reacting
to the lion version of a man-made famine.
Best wishes, John Green.
So we've talked about how both collectivist and
market economic policies can lead to famine, right?
But I think it's unfair to pin famine on one
ideology or another, like the disastrous consequences
of the ideologically motivated policies of
Mao and Stalin are self evident. Both were
totalitarian states, where collectivist policies
led millions to starve.
But, liberal free trade policy can also lead
to famine.
The godfather of free market capitalism, Adam
Smith, asserted that, quote, "Famine has never
arisen from any other cause but the violence
of government attempting by improper means
to remedy the inconvenience of dearth."
Stan, how come we don't use the word "dearth"
more often? It was such a big dearth, gotta
a great sound. It's like all the best parts
of death and all the best parts of Darth Vader.
I'm sorry. We're not talking about the dearth
of dearth, we're talking about famine.
So Smith blames famine on mother nature and
government's efforts to alleviate suffering.
But, the famines in colonial India show us
that a laissez faire approach to starvation
from the government can also lead to millions
of deaths.
Victorian Britons often justified their policy
of doing nothing to help starving people by
referring to Thomas Malthus's concept that
population inevitably outstrips resources,
claiming that India's population, quote, "Has
a tendency to increase more rapidly than the
food it raises from the soil," thus providing
a natural justification for the suffering.
But to reiterate, famine isn't natural! Or
at least it's not simply natural.
So, when the British did try to provide relief
for famine victims, they feared that too much
help would lead Indian subjects to become
dependent on handouts.
So they set up work camps. Often hundreds
of miles away from the worst areas of famine,
where starving Indians could work to earn a ration
that worked out to 1627 calories per day.
Now that, of course, isn't enough fuel to
do heavy labor, so the death rates in some
of these work camps reached as high as 94
percent.
Meanwhile, the British clung their ideology
and their racism. Like here's a quote from
the Lieutenant Governor of the Bengal,
Sir Richard Temple.
"The infatuation of these poor people in respect
to eating the bread of idleness; their dread
of marching on command to any distance from
home; their preference often for extreme privation
rather than the submission to even simple
and reasonable orders, can be fully believed
only by those who have seen or personally
known these things."
Basically, he's saying that people would rather
be lazy than well fed, which ignores the fact
that on 1627 calories per day, no one can
work.
So, I promised to talk about happiness and peace
and rainbows and puppies here at the end.
Famines don't just happen naturally. Now,
some famines may be the inevitable result
of of drought but certainly we don't have to have
as much starvation in the world as we do.
In fact, with current agricultural technologies,
we don't have to have any starvation. And
here's where the really is some happiness
and peace and puppies and rainbows:
there are fewer undernourished people today than
there ever have been at any point in centuries.
More people have food security and fewer people
are starving.
That also isn't the result of weather. And
yes, we will face tremendous droughts as the
climate changes. But, as we face them let
us remember that there is nothing natural
about some starving while others have plenty.
In short, let's remember to look for the fingerprints
of humans where we would perhaps prefer to
see acts of God.
Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.
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