The Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture-"A million deaths is a statistic”: A history of famine denialism

 

It’s common for those responsible for famines to deny them, while they are raging and afterwards. This was the case in colonial India, and post-colonial China, Ethiopia, Sudan and Yemen. At the time of the Holodomor, Josef Stalin infamously said, ‘if one man dies of hunger, it is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.’ Denialism takes several forms, including outright factual denial, explaining the calamity as something else, and giving a different meaning to starvation in order to justify inflicting it. Today, with internationally validated metrics for measuring food insecurity and determining ‘famine’, such as the United Nations-accredited Integrated food security Phase Classification (IPC), denialists have adopted new methods for dealing with inconvenient statistics. The deepest denial is that famines are man-made, profound societal traumas.

 

 

 

Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He is an authority on famine and has worked on the Horn of Africa since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner. He was listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential international intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic’s 29 ‘brave thinkers’ in 2009 and is the winner of the Huxley Award of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2024. De Waal’s recent books include: Mass Starvation: The history and future of famine (2018), and New Pandemics, Old Politics: 200 years of the war on disease and its alternatives (2021).