Three Famines (3 page)

F
AMINE ALWAYS HAS
an initiating spark or trigger, a natural disaster that may have a greater or lesser impact on the crops growing on farmers’ land, and an event that tests the political will and wisdom of governments, the latter being more a potential cause of disaster than a trigger.

The triggers for the Ethiopian famines were the failure of one or both annual rains in 1973-4, and 1982 and 1985. Lack of rain was combined with the sudden appearance in the fields of army worms, a larval form of a moth, in reality a caterpillar rather than a worm, which is blown north on the wind from Kenya. In the past, army worms on their own had always been a blight, and Ethiopian farmers abhorred the sudden appearance of these insects among their crops. It was said, indeed it is still said, that they could devour a hectare of grain faster than a herd of 400 cattle. So their work impoverished overnight the owners of a hectare-and-a-half farm, the
average size of land holding among the peasantry. Sometimes farmers planted peas among their grain crop as an insurance, since the army worms did not favour them. But peas occupied space the farmers often needed to give to their teff. In the 1970s and 1980s, the logistics of spraying crops, even if sufficient stocks of pesticide had been held in the country, continued to be beyond the capacities of both the emperor and the Derg.

Of people from Tigray in northern Ethiopia who fled to Somalia and Sudan in 1984 and were interviewed later, 30 per cent said army worms were as much of a problem to them as drought. One Tigrayan in Wad Kauli camp in the Sudan said, ‘I decided to leave home because of the drought and our enemy [the Derg]. Insects and the lack of rain were equally important, but the government caused the famine too.’

Farmers with a family of six needed to produce 1500 kilos of food a year: 1200 for the family, the remaining 300 kilos being sold locally to buy other food, shoes, clothes and other needs. The crop did not need to decline much before the family had nothing to spend.

The rain failures threatened both the highland and lowland people. The highlanders feared their injera would vanish, and the lowland graziers suffered anxiety about the milk and meat of their quickly dying goats and the continued health of their cattle. The drying-out of waterholes and pasture in the lowlands and the consequent death or deterioration of their cattle, were watched with bewilderment and concern by the cattle-owning and grazing peoples of Ethiopia.

In 1769–70, a Bengal famine was estimated to have caused the death of 10 million out of 30 million inhabitants. Yet the province for the next two centuries was largely free from famine. Bengal is only 77,442 square miles, with a population of 60 million at the time of the 1943 famine. An administrative line divided West Bengal from East, and that would become the future border between India and Bangladesh. Bengal’s twenty-six districts averaged over 2 million each in population and nearly 3000 square miles each in area.

Bengal is a country of waterways, but the main rivers that flow into the Bay of Bengal through broad deltas are the Hooghly, the Padma, the Brahmaputra-Jumuna and the Meghna. The annual rainfall is 85 inches, which sheets down between June and September on the south-east monsoon. During that season, the farmers and peasants survive in their huts and houses on mounds raised above the fields.

The trigger for the famine of the early 1940s was the arrival on the coastline of a number of cyclones during 1942, and of a November 1942 tidal wave, which flooded the region around the Ganges Delta, killing 15,000 people. Because of Bengal’s small elevation above sea level, the tsunami rolled far inland, across the low farmlands and rice fields. It spread salt, which poisoned – just as they were about to be harvested – the crops of Muslim and Hindu farmers in one terrible act of God. A fungal disease named rice blast – which, like the potato blight, attacked the leaves, stalk and grain – struck the paddy fields as a result of the wave of saltwater, because the surge had swept the spores from infected parts of the country into as-yet-unaffected ones. The rice fungus reduced the average rice crop in the coastal areas and beyond by a third. There
had already been the Bengali equivalent of a drought, arising from less than normal rainfall in the 1942 June to September monsoon season.

During a debate in the British Parliament, Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery raised the Malthusian concept that something must be done to outstrip the pressure of population, which, he said, was increasing at the rate of 300,000 per month. This left little of a surplus for the individual farmer or purchaser. When the Bengal Famine Inquiry Commission, established by the government in 1944, said that, of all the provinces of India, Bengal was pre-eminent, in that it had the largest number of mouths to feed, it also declared that the province produced the largest amount of cereals of any province, and it grew jute as well. But, for millions, the balance between viability and family disaster was a very narrow one.

The 1943 drought, unexpected but not unprecedented, even in modern times – since, for example, there had been others in 1925 and 1927 – had its own influence on all three of the annual harvests. The province’s different seasonal crops had distinct names. The
aus
was a less important harvest sown in April and harvested in the monsoonal rain of August and September. It was a crop meant to see farmers and their families through a lean time in the autumn, and since it was eaten by poor people, among Hindus it was not considered appropriate for ceremonial purposes. Indeed, the
aus
is not a robust crop and needs to be parboiled to preserve it. The winter crop,
aman
, was sown in May or June in paddies that had begun to be flooded by the south-west monsoon, if it brought its normal rain to the fields. Harvested in November or December, the
aman
crop was intended to reach markets
in the spring of the following year. It was of finer quality, and was the largest and most important crop from which the farmer took his family’s food, with – ideally – some left over to be marketed. The
boro
crop was planted in the broad irrigated regions of Bengal in November and harvested the following February or March.

Over the entirety of Bengal, coastal and inland, the 1943 harvest was no more than 5 per cent less than the crop harvested in late 1941 and early 1942, despite the tidal wave and drought. In the areas most affected, it did put the families of farmers and artisans in immediate peril. None of that should have killed the millions whose deaths are attributed to it.

There were similar conditions of landowning between Bengal and Ireland, and Bengal and Ethiopia. The Famine Commission estimated that 7.5 million families depended on the cultivation of land. Of these, fewer than 2 million families held between two and five acres. That is, nearly three out of four families either lived on fewer than two acres or were landless. In good times, then, farming families were able to sell their surplus rice to pay rent and buy necessities in the market. But bad times were upon them.

In November 1943, in addition to the other problems the Damodar River broke its banks and flooded large areas in Burdwan district. Hundreds of villages were devastated by the water, and rice fields lay utterly drowned beneath flood-water. Cholera now broke out and allied itself with other famine diseases.

The seasonal rains elsewhere than Burdwan had fallen and caused no natural disaster, and a fair
aman
crop planted on larger farms, including land farmed by sharecroppers, seemed
likely. But in the later view of the Famine Inquiry Commission, the chief harvesting month of November was probably the critical month of the Bengal famine, since prices were still rising. It was at this point that the death rate reached its highest level. The acute period of starvation was passing, but epidemics were killing millions of the malnourished throughout the countryside. The disease that took more than any other was malaria.

The trigger for the Irish famine was an agent nearly as voracious as army worms, a fungal spore named
phytophthora infestans
, which either travelled to Europe from America, where there had been a report of blight, on the prevailing westerly wind from the Atlantic; arrived in the holds of American ships; or both. Early in its European career it would afflict crops, particularly in Kent and the Isle of Wight, and elsewhere in England and then Scotland. But resultant want was not as acute in Scotland and England as in Ireland. The Scots, for example, though reduced to hunger, had better supplies of oatmeal and better fishing than the Irish.

At the time, people knew nothing of the blight’s causation, and a Church of England clergyman, the Reverend J. M. Berkley, one of those clergymen whose undemanding work gave him room for natural research – which, in his case, led to an enormous understanding of moulds – and who described the blight as a ‘vampire fungus’, was not listened to.

Yet that is how it manifested itself in Ireland – one day the potato flowers were blooming and rejoicing the cottier’s
heart, then, overnight, everything had rotted. The mysterious fungus would within forty years be identified, and a treatment devised – copper sulphate. But
phytophthora infestans
is still with us, having built a resistance to sprays used against it throughout the twentieth century. It has at various stages attacked grape harvests, still infiltrates potato and tomato crops, and is now responsible for the failure of at least half of Russia’s potato and tomato harvests. Most remarkably, it has also been considered by both the Russians and Americans as a potential instrument of biological warfare, a means of attacking the crops of the enemy.

The blight had led to a miserable Irish winter in 1845–6, but the people who planted their potato-seed crop in the spring of 1846 were full of hope for the late summer harvest. Then, after an early summer drought had in any case delayed the planting and growth of the tubers, continuous and heavy rainfall in late July and early August began to wash the spores of
phytophthora infestans
down to the tubers in the soil.

When, at the end of the summer of 1846, the potato flowers came out and gladdened the Irish, and indeed the government, an evil awakening of blight was about to occur. The fungus had survived the summer in the moist earth and now, amidst the rejoicing at the robustness of the crop, everything turned to mush as it had the year before, but in an even more widespread and fatal manner. The flower, the stalk, the tuber itself turned to putrescence. A famous Irish temperance campaigner, Father Matthew, a Capuchin monk who was travelling from Cork to Dublin in July, saw the plants ‘in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest. Returning on
the 3rd inst [August] I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation.’

The summer of 1847 was spent in hope, but also in anxiety, and indeed in the autumn the crop was blighted again. In 1848 there was a remission from the blight after a less rainy summer, but because of the deaths, weakness or fevers of those who generally did the planting, as well as the fact that many people were labouring on the roads or had wandered to town looking for any form of relief, a much lesser number of potatoes had been sown in the previous spring. So the harvest in general was poor, the acreage under potatoes being barely more than 15 per cent of its 1845 level, with other crops down by 40 per cent. The blight returned in 1849. In 1850, too, it was back, though more local in its impact, and again less of a crop had been grown.

Thus, without intervention, one abnormal harvest could so diminish the number of people planting and harvesting that want could beget want, and food prices based on one shortage created by nature could be compounded by yet another created by the disruption of normal farming life.

P
EASANT PEOPLES AND
small farmers are generally believers. To many sufferers of want, famine has always been, among other things, a theological event. At the start of the outbreak they see God’s will and God’s anger as the cause of the failure of their food supply. Christ, through the filter of the writers of the Christian Gospels, also represents famine as a theological phenomenon, a sign of the end of the world. ‘There shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places.’

There is a comfort for people who face deadly shortages to see them as an unavoidable penance or a test of faith. For if God and the deities can punish with hunger, they can also be persuaded by fasting, prayer and sacrifice to bring an end to it. A survivor of the Irish famine remembered that ‘several reasons are given as to the cause of the blight. Most people think it was a punishment from God for the careless manner in which they treated the crops for years previous when there
was a very plentiful supply of potatoes.’ Another remembered that, ‘It looked like the hand of God.’ Yet again, a Corkman’s testimony to the Irish Folklore Commission declared that even after the Great Hunger ended, ‘Old people said it was God’s will to have the famine come. They abused fine food when they had it aplenty.’

And if it were not God’s will, then it was the work of God’s dark opposite. It was said that an old woman of Rossport in County Mayo, returning home, saw her potatoes rotting and cried, ‘Oh, the Devil polluted all the potatoes last night. There is not a stalk standing.’

In 1943, Hindus and Muslims in Bengal were almost equal in population – 52 per cent were Muslim, 48 per cent Hindu. Hindus tended to live in the west of the province; the Muslims in the east. Both groups similarly saw the divine hand in what was developing. The Sunni tradition had a less formal hierarchy than the Shia, but now, in the red terracotta mosques of the villages, people were led in prayers to the Source of All Bounty by their most respected ministers. In the Hindu temples of the area, and in worship in their homes, the Hindus also sought to appease their deities and avatars. Inevitably these were more numerous than Allah. Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer were propitiated. The more orthodox set of deities, the god Shiva and his female counterparts, Kali and Durga, were worshipped widely among the upper castes. Devotion to the engaging Lord Krishna, the flute-playing young deity, was popular among the lower. In each Hindu house stood a shrine where the god or goddess of the season was summoned by a small house bell and where small brass bowls of milk, water, ghee, salt and rice were placed
in piety. Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and good fortune, received offerings in the home and the temple at harvest time especially, and so could not have been far from people’s minds in 1943. In the waterlands of Bengal, imaginations must also have been drawn to Basanta Chandi, the goddess popular with women, who could conquer cholera and other diseases.

Some Ethiopian farmers in the 1970s and 1980s became desperate enough to revert to the animist practices of their ancestors, and gathered in the fields by night to enact the ancient rain-making rituals disapproved of by their Coptic priests. It was interesting that such rituals had remained, since Christianity had arrived in the fourth century by way of Egypt. The word ‘copt’ is said to have derived from the classical name of Egypt,
Aegyptus
, and its rituals are related to those of Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Dawit Wolde Giorgis, a former officer in the Ethiopian army, who was in charge of Ethiopia’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, set up in the aftermath of the 1973 drought, remembers that as the Ethiopian famine of 1984–5 struck, people had recourse to masses in the Coptic churches, doing penance for their sins in the hope that the curse might be lifted from them. He saw the same prayers uttered in the mosques – Sunni Islam arrived in Ethiopia via ninth-century exiles from Arabia in the east, and from trade and other influences from the Sudan in the west. Perhaps 30 per cent of Ethiopians were Muslim – many of them nomadic people, but town dwellers and farmers as well.

Religious observance might have edged some Ethiopians towards hunger already. In the Christian parts of the country, there were 293 days of the year when fasting was, according to the strict urgings of the Coptic calendar, to be observed.
Some days only meat and dairy products were prohibited, but others involved total abstention from food. Religion, as well as other factors, had made the Ethiopian highlander Christians an enduring race.

A sense of God’s punishment for wantonness was common among those equally hardy Ethiopian Muslims, even the ones who were farmers rather than pastoralists. ‘People had grown reckless. They used to compete at shooting bullets through their stack of harvest grain.’ The practice was a boastful way of proving the plenty and density of the bagged grain. ‘It was such arrogance which brought down God’s wrath on them.’ As an old woman in Wollo declared, ‘When Allah is angry he does not need to cut a staff’, that is, a stick to punish people with. A famine would serve.

There is little doubt that the priests and mullahs agreed with the people’s devout acceptance of misfortune as God’s will and punishment. The question arises of whether the clergy used the reaction of their threatened congregations to extract reward. In Ireland there were tales of priests and parsons who gave the bread from their own tables, and of others who built church improvements in the midst of the dying. Votive offerings are a part of all worship, and sometimes the faithful made a money offering to appease God and the gods in their anger. Much Hindu worship occurs in the home and at the domestic shrine, but the Hindu temples are busy at early-morning prayer time and at such an hour such an offering is normally made.

What is almost beyond dispute is that religious reassurance fortified people in the face of the trial. How early or late that reassurance was swept away by famine’s reality we cannot say.