Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed"

Kavita Puri on the urgent need to commemorate historical famines

Two boys dressed in thick coats and hats rummage through the ground for potatoes

Published: May 23, 2025 at 9:00 AM

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During the Second World War, Deaths related to hunger matched or outnumbered military losses. Famines afflicted regions including the Soviet Union, China, India, Vietnam and Greece. Yet those who perished are rarely remembered in the same way as fallen soldiers.

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Starvation is not relegated to the past. The latest UN Hunger Hotspots report identifies places of highest concern as Haiti, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan and Palestine. Sadly, the list of countries where hunger persists is much longer, with violence and conflict the key drivers.

Professor Alex de Waal, research professor at Tufts University and a leading expert on famine, explains that part of the reason famines are not remembered and memorialised is that the experience is so painful to recount, and so full of shame, that people want to forget it. In extremis, social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed; a neighbour refuses to give food to a neighbour; forbidden foods are eaten; people sell their bodies to survive; some profit from scarcity. The authorities who engineered a famine, or who neglected the population, have no reason to remember it, either.

In Ireland, it wasn’t until some 150 years after the start of the Great Famine, which began with an outbreak of potato blight in 1845, that victims were widely memorialised. Around a million people died – from a population of fewer than 9 million – and close to 2 million emigrated in a bid to survive.

An expression of remorse by the British government of its role in the famine came only as recently as 1997, though there is still debate about whether the statement issued on behalf of then prime minister Tony Blair constituted an apology. Monuments to the victims and those who fled the country are now dotted around Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain – though none are in London. There are also significant memorials in places to which Irish people emigrated, mostly the US, Canada and Australia.

A memorial in the shape of a cross, with an angelic figure cut out in the middle

A memorial in Kyiv commemorates the Holodomor. Could remembering famines in this way help prevent future catastrophes? (Image by Alamy)

In Ukraine, many millions died during the 1932–33 famine known as the Holodomor (literally ‘death by hunger’), the result of Stalin’s policy of forced agricultural collectivisation. Under the Soviet regime, the subject was taboo; after independence in 1991, though, the famine became central to Ukraine’s nation-building project. There are now Holodomor memorials across Ukraine as well as in the countries in which its diaspora settled, including the US and Canada.

Starvation as a weapon of war was not criminalised in the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which governed the treatment of combatants and civilians during conflicts. The first step to revise that was an additional protocol introduced in 1977 stating that “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited”. Just over two decades later, an article in the Rome Statute of the International Court proscribed “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival”, making it a war crime. To date, there have been no successful prosecutions for such acts.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, developed in 2004, identifies five phases of deprivation, with 5 being the most extreme, designated ‘Famine/Humanitarian Catastrophe’. The UN has voted that action is mandated only at Phase 5 – when families are at or beyond breaking point, when taboos have already been violated to find food, when widespread malnutrition has set in and mortality rates are high. Critics say that point is far too late.

Memorials to famines are, de Waal says, exceptions to the rule, yet he believes that there is a connection between remembering famines and preventing them. In this 80th anniversary year of the end of the Second World War, as we commemorate those who fought and died in the conflict, we could start by remembering those millions who also perished through starvation.

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This column was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

Authors

Kavita Puri

Kavita Puri is a journalist, author and broadcaster. A new edition of her book Partition Voices: Untold British Stories, marking the 75th anniversary of partition, is out now, published by Bloomsbury

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