Discussions of Truth

Listed as one of Atlantic Monthly's  "bravest thinkers" (2009), author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine, Alex de Waal presents his case forOperation Starvation.  "Mass starvation as a consequence of the weather has very nearly disappeared: today’s famines are all caused by political decisions, yet journalists still use the phrase ‘man­-made famine’ as if such events were unusual... The organization I work for, the World Peace Foundation, has compiled a catalogue of every case of famine or forced mass starvation since 1870 that killed at least 100,000 people. There are 61 entries on the list, responsible for the deaths of at least 105 million people. About two thirds of the famine deaths in this period were in Asia, about 20 per cent in Europe and the USSR, just under 10 per cent in Africa.  The biggest killers were famines that resulted from political decisions, among them  the Nazi ‘hunger plan’ for the Soviet Union, the famines during the Chinese Civil War, the starvation inflicted by the Japanese during the Second World War, and by Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1958-­62, the largest famine on record, which killed at least 25 million."   de Waal, received his PhD in social anthropology from Oxford University in 1988 for his thesis on the 1984 Darfur famine in Sedan.

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