Record Harvests Make Famines Rarer, But More Work Is Needed to End Hunger

It’s the Irish Hunger Memorial, a piece of public artwork that commemorates the devastating Irish famine of the mid-19th century, which led to the deaths of at least 1 million people and permanently altered Ireland’s history, forcing the emigration of millions more Irish to cities like New York.

The Irish famine is unusual in how heavily commemorated it is, with more than 100 memorials in Ireland itself and around the world. Other famines, including ones that killed far more people like the 1943 Bengal famine in India or China’s 1959–’61 famine, largely go without major public memorials.

It shouldn’t be this way. Researchers estimate that since 1870 alone, approximately 140 million people have died of famine. Go back further in history, and famines become ever more common and ever more deadly. One horrible famine in northern Europe in the early 14th century killed as much as 12 percent of the entire region’s population in a handful of years. Even outside famine years, the availability of food was a constant pressure on the human population.