“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 Holodomor’s Death Toll
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 almost two years 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.
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.
“We are not talking about people going to bed hungry… We are talking about extreme conditions, emergency status – people literally marching to the brink of starvation. If we don’t get food to people, people will die.” (source: Strange Sounds)
“This is truly more than just a pandemic – it is creating a hunger pandemic. This is a humanitarian and food catastrophe.”
He added, “In a worst-case scenario, we could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries and, in fact, in ten of these countries we already have more than one million people per country who are on the verge of starvation.”
While it didn’t take a lot to shut down our farms or lower the amount they produce to levels where we would see shortages, there is one thing that could shut down the entire food supplies in a day. That’s any sort of damage to our nation’s trucking industry.
The food production and foodservice industries depend on trucking, more so than many other industries. Without our nation’s trucking industry taking food from the farm to the various processing facilities and then from those to the stores, the supermarket shelves would empty in a day.
