How to Engineer a Famine
AEI charted the biggest recent famines. To get really big numbers, you almost have to institute socialism, but less severe famines can be achieved by bad luck with war or weather, or simply a floundering or chaotic social or political system. China was hit over and over in its pre-socialist days, then had the one disastrous episode in 1958-1962, after which it's largely kept the problem at bay. The area of Africa that encompasses the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia are obviously nowhere you'd want to be.
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4 comments:
The Chinese were really helped after '62 by the fact that they'd already starved so much of their population. The upper bound on that is 60 million dead.
The co-incidence of paycheck to paycheck living, electronic payments, little cash, two days food on hand, make this the ideal weapon for the government to use on the populace in the event of any widespread rebellion. "Obey or starve" is a most powerful inducement.
Like everything in life, it would have some unintended consequence, probably involving BBQ recipes for politically correct long pig(s).
Well there is one upside to being a bit chunky. Also I should note food riots have a tendency to be bad for the governing party.
The great thing about socialism in Russia and China is that they usually have some foreigner to blame it on. Although for the Chinese, they got the Taiwanese nationalists who fled Mao successfully as well as the Japanese next sea over.
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