Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future

Cormac Ó Gráda

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400865819
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

New perspectives on the history of famine—and the possibility of a famine-free world Famines are becoming smaller and rarer, but optimism about the possibility of a famine-free future must be tempered by the threat of global warming. That is just one of the arguments that Cormac Ó Gráda, one of the world's leading authorities on the history and economics of famine, develops in this wide-ranging book, which provides crucial new perspectives on key questions raised by famines around the globe between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries.The book begins with a taboo topic. Ó Gráda argues that cannibalism, while by no means a universal feature of famines and never responsible for more than a tiny proportion of famine deaths, has probably been more common during very severe famines than previously thought. The book goes on to offer new interpretations of two of the twentieth century's most notorious and controversial famines, the Great Bengal Famine and the Chinese Great Leap Forward Famine. Ó Gráda questions the standard view of the Bengal Famine as a perfect example of market failure, arguing instead that the primary cause was the unwillingness of colonial rulers to divert food from their war effort. The book also addresses the role played by traders and speculators during famines more generally, invoking evidence from famines in France, Ireland, Finland, Malawi, Niger, and Somalia since the 1600s, and overturning Adam Smith's claim that government attempts to solve food shortages always cause famines.Thought-provoking and important, this is essential reading for historians, economists, demographers, and anyone else who is interested in the history and possible future of famine.

1

Eating People Is Wrong

FAMINE’S DARKEST SECRET?

The act of cannibalism symbolizes how far human beings are willing to let themselves fall.

Kon Ichikawa, Japanese filmmaker

On looking around I noticed a woman lying on her face. She was dead and perfectly naked … and the side of her face and breast were gnawed away. Two famished-looking men and a woman were seated a few yards aft glaring at the body with wolfish eyes. Could famine have driven them to this horrible repast? I would not believe, and yet I could not doubt it, so hungry and ravenous were their looks….

William Brittlebank (1873: 180–81)

There was also of course a great deal of psychic decomposition, even right down to some cases of cannibalism, even, or especially, cannibalism in one’s own family. It was, as far as we can tell, of the deranged, of those who were themselves victims, driven mad by hunger.

Joseph Lee, Irish historian¹

John Post’s The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (1977) is a classic work of famine history. Its title refers to the famine that followed the dark and cold European summer of 1816, when (in Lord Byron’s words) “The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.” Post’s title was a misnomer, an exercise in historic license. True, by the 1810s famine in England and France was already history. England had not experienced a truly “biblical” famine since before the Black Death, and France’s last such famine had occurred during the devastating winter of 1709. But in the Western world as a whole, the era of famine—and famine is defined here as “a shortage of food or purchasing power that leads directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger-induced diseases.”²—would not end for another 130 years. The famines linked to the failure of the potato in the 1840s, including the Great Irish Famine but lesser famines too in the Low Countries and in parts of what is now Germany, were still to come³, as was the Finnish famine of 1867–68 (on which more in Essay 3). So was the famine that resulted from the Allied blockade of Germany in 1918–19, the massive Soviet famines of 1920–22 and 1931–33, and the several war famines of World War II. But the dubious distinction of “last subsistence crisis in the western world”⁴ belongs to Moldova and adjoining parts of the Soviet Union in 1946–47.

Moldova’s was no small famine, relatively speaking; in the Soviet Union, as in Ireland and in Finland, the era of famines came to an end with a bang, not a whimper. As many as 0.2 million⁵ Moldovans out of a population of 2.5 million may have perished. Yet little has been written about the famine, and what has been written has been colored by the Cold War and the post-Soviet legacy. The Romanian-speaking core of Bessarabia, henceforth the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, had been annexed by the Soviet Union as recently as 1940 as a by-product of the Nazi-Soviet pact. For Russian historian V. F. Zima, its famine was the product of excessive grain procurements by Moscow.⁶ For Soviet specialist Stephen Wheatcroft, by contrast, the famine must be analyzed against the backdrop of a critical food supply situation in the Soviet Union and elsewhere at the time.⁷ And there is no denying the role of food supply: in 1945 in Russia, less affected than the famine zones elsewhere in the Soviet Union, grain output was less than half the prewar norm (25.4 versus 51.9 million tons), and in the following year it was lower still (21.2 million tons).⁸ Wheatcroft provocatively claims that the Stalinist regime, faced with a severe shortfall in output, coupled with no prospect of outside aid and with “dangerously low” stock levels, pressed workers in rural areas harder than the peasantry.⁹

Two generations on, the Moldovan famine remains a highly contentious and emotional issue in Moldova itself. As recently as 2006, the Moldovan legislature rejected an attempt to provide “a political and legal appreciation” of the 1946–47 Moldovan famine. Opposition deputies described the famine as “premeditated,” but the official line—from a pro-Moscow administration—was that while there was no denying that there had been a famine, it had “a pragmatic explanation historically demonstrated: the difficult post-war period, the poor crops, and the drought.” And so communal tensions in present-day Moldova drive one side to absolve Stalin of all responsibility for the famine. The same tensions also drive discussions of famine in Ukraine in 1932–33.

One aspect of the Moldovan famine that makes its memory more fraught is the gruesome suggestion that “the eating of corpses took place on a large scale.”¹⁰ The authorities were aware of the practice and sought to stamp it out. They even showed Alexei Kosygin, soon to become a member of the Politburo, who had been sent from Moscow to investigate in February 1947, a corpse that had been prepared for consumption. There were stories both of survivors living off the corpses of those who had perished and the murder of people for the purpose of consumption:

[I]n June 1946, there were a number of cases in the villages of Alexandreşti, Recea-Slobozia and Sturzeni in Râşcani district…. On 8 September 1947, the District Committee of the Communist Party of Cahul, where 10 cases of cannibalism were officially recorded between February 1946 and February 1947, prepared a document advising secretaries of district party committees on how to prevent cannibalism. According to the document, the district leadership had information on cannibalism and the use of human bodies as food in certain villages in the districts of Vulcăneşti, Taraclia, Ciadâr-Lunga, Baimaclia and, particularly, Congaz. An official told party and state leaders that on 7 and 8 February 1947 in the village of Baurci in Congaz district (currently in the Gagauz Autonomous Territorial Unit of the Republic of Moldova), he had recorded four killings for the purposes of cannibalism. According to this source, the consumption of bodies had become a frequent occurrence. There were cases of stolen bodies that had been taken to the cemetery and not buried. The muscles and limbs of several bodies found at various places in the village had been removed. In the village of Beşalma the situation was even more serious. The consumption of bodies was also common in other villages, he concluded. In January 1947, a peasant woman from the village of Tambula, in Bălţi district, killed two of her four children, a girl of six and a boy of five, with a view to eating them. A peasant in Glinjeni, in Chişcăreni district, invited a female neighbour into his house then strangled and ate her. Another peasant from the village of Cajba in Glodeni district killed his 12-year-old grandson who had come to visit and ate him. Some 39 cases of cannibalism were recorded in Moldova during the 1946–47 famine.¹¹

Cannibalism is famine’s darkest secret, a taboo topic. How common was it in the past? I am not referring here to what scientist and historian Jared Diamond has dubbed “customary cannibalism,”¹² i.e., the ceremonial or ritual consumption of human flesh in non-emergency situations. Our focus is on famine cannibalism, that is, cases of cannibalism during life-threatening food shortages.

Of all the horrors of famine, cannibalism may be the most unsettling. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, writing against the background of the Russian famine of 1921–22, which cost millions of lives and during which he claimed cannibalism was “an ordinary occurrence,” pointed out that the practice entailed the suppression not only of religious, moral, legal, and aesthetic reflexes, but also those related to group preservation.¹³ Much in the same vein, Danish anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup has argued that when famine results in cannibalism it has gone “far beyond mensurational reach” to a level of “hardship so extreme that humanity itself seems at stake.”¹⁴

Hastrup did not distinguish between “survivor cannibalism”— survivors consuming the corpses of those who have already died— and what might be called “murder cannibalism,” that is, murdering people for meat. But during the Great North China Famine of 1876–78, in a widely reproduced letter the Catholic bishop of Shanxi reported that “until lately the starving people were content to feed on the dead; but now they are slaughtering the living for food.”¹⁵ Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley refers to three stock phrases regarding cannibalism which recur in gazetteers’ accounts of the 1876–78 North China famine: “people ate each other,” “exchanging children and eating them,” and variants of “people ate each other to the point that close kin destroyed each other.” In Russian, too, there are different words to describe murdering for food (lyudoedstvo) and corpse consumption (trupoedstvo).¹⁶

The record on famine cannibalism, like that of ritual cannibalism, is contested. William Chester Jordan, historian of the Great Northern European Famine of the early fourteenth century, notes that references to famine cannibalism may act as a form of cliché to convey the “stark horror” of famine conditions: “to make a famine real, one had to include cannibalism in the story.” And famine historian David Arnold dismisses most of the evidence for it as “second-hand and hearsay.”¹⁷ Stories of famine cannibalism have also been invoked for pejorative purposes, as part of a narrative that demonizes enemies or “outsiders.”¹⁸ Recurrent references to old women or “hags” devourin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Eating People Is Wrong: Famine’s Darkest Secret?
• 2 “Sufficiency and Sufficiency and Sufficiency”: Revisiting the Great Bengal Famine of 1943–44
• 3 Markets and Famines: Pre-industrial Europe and Beyond
• 4 Great Leap into Great Famine
• 5 Famine Is Not the Problem—For Now
• Bibliography
• Index