How do famines relate to food supply?
Some see the connection as almost definitional: famine is, in this view, synonymous with a country being short of food. When Mr Malone, the rich Irish-American in Shaw’s Man and Superman, refers to the Irish famine of the 1840s, he refuses to describe it as one. He explains that ‘when a country is full o food and exporting it, there can be no famine.’ There is some distinctive use of language here. Malone mentions that his father ‘died of starvation in the black 47’. Since more than a million other Irishmen did the same in the 1840s, it is hard not to see a ‘famine’ there, as the term is understood. Malone’s definitional point about famines really raises a different and extremely important causal question: why did the Irish starve, given the fact that Ireland had food enough to export some to England? That question remains tragically relevant. No recorded famine has killed a higher proportion of the population than the Irish famine. This applies to the much publicized recent famines in
