History Repeats: The Coming Famine

History Repeats: The U.S. 'Holodomor' ?

By Melissa Lane

At the height of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine under Joseph Stalin, starving people roamed the countryside, desperate for something, anything to eat. In the village of Stavyshche, a young peasant boy watched as the wanderers dug into empty gardens with their bare hands. Many were so emaciated, he recalled, that their bodies began to swell and stink from the extreme lack of nutrients.

“You could see them walking about, just walking and walking, and one would drop, and then another, and so on it went,” he said many years later, in a case history collected in the late 1980s by a Congressional committee. In the cemetery outside the village hospital, overwhelmed doctors carried the bodies on stretchers and tossed them into an enormous pit.

The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.

“The Ukrainian famine was a clear case of a man-made famine,” explains Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University. He describes it as “a hybrid…of a famine caused by calamitous social-economic policies and one aimed at a particular population for repression or punishment.”

The coronavirus is disrupting food supply chains for more than a year because farmers and laborers cannot work or travel, transportation delays are causing shortages, and in the United States, for example, meat processing plants have been forced to close.

Not only are these breaks in the supply chain affecting the availability of food, but also its affordability. Millions who already struggled to support themselves and their families have been struck by economic hardship caused by lockdowns around the globe.

Millions of people will be pushed into extreme poverty this year owing to the pandemic, but the long-term effects will be even worse, as poor nutrition in childhood causes lifelong suffering.

In an open letter published on Tuesday to support the UN Call for Action to Avert Famine in 2021, hundreds of aid organizations from around the world said: “People are not starving – they are being starved.“

The letter comes a year after David Beasley, director of the WFP, warned that the world was facing famine “of biblical proportions” because of the coronavirus pandemic.

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