This is a continuation of a series of blogs on disasters and there may be quite a few more to follow because it hasn’t even begun to move through the Probaway Scale of Disasters. This blog is on famine, and the order in which people die. If you think famines are rare go to this list of historical famines. An unexpected effect of famines is the order in which various categories of people die.
In the book Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race by Richard Rhodes, on page 31 there is an extended quote from the German agricultural attaché, Otto Schiller traveling through the North Caucasus in May 1933 herein excerpted a bit.
The famine is not so much the result of last year’s failure of crops as of the brutal campaign of State Grain Collection. Therefore even such localities as the Northern districts of North Caucasia in which the crops were quite satisfactory, did not escape ….
In some of the villages the population is almost extinct. In others about half the population have died out. And there are still villages in which death from famine is not so frequent.
But famine reigns everywhere, at least in those regions which I have visited….
People have become callous and indifferent to the fate of those near to them. One meets people with legs swollen from starvation who move with difficulty. Others have already become so week that they lie about in the road waiting for death. Several days usually elapse before a chance passerby endeavors to help them.
One can therefore see bodies of those dead from famine not only on the highroads, but even in the streets of the towns….
What strikes one in all the villages is the small percentage of men. They have evidently less power of resistance, and more easily fall victims to the famine. The women who have children die sooner than others, therefore single women predominate in the villages which have suffered most severely.”
What caught my attention was that last paragraph about the order in which various categories of people die. One would expect the strongest to survive longest, and that the most dependent people would die first. That would typically lead to the following order of death: the infirm elderly would die first because they are nearer death to begin with, followed by infants whose parents were forced to choose between letting their child die, or letting themselves die, and then their child dies without their care, then the younger children who couldn’t scavenge for themselves, followed by the women who could not provide for themselves , and lastly the men who were most able to go out and find food. Because, men normally seem to have more options it would be expected that men would be the last to starve to death; but in every modern famine the men have been hit hardest and apparently they died in greater percentages.
In pre-modern times, under normal non-famine conditions women tended to have shorter lives than their men. Now days with medical care preventing childbirth deaths women tend to live longer than their men. Without doubt every famine is different in detail but in general as food supplies dwindle and each adult is working physically harder for less food in return there is a point where they are putting out more energy than they are getting back. As their stored food supplies run lower they are forced to burn body fat, and their bodies naturally reduce energy output, and lower body temperature, and essentially move toward hibernation. If food supplies are less than 1600 calories per day after a few weeks they will steadily lose weight. But, the men are typically engaged in more physical activities that consume more energy, and thus when food supplies are in short supply they tend to burn up their body fat sooner. If food doesn’t become available to them when they are still active, but have burnt up all of their fat, they are at risk of starvation, and will soon die. The women having less physically demanding tasks take a little longer to reach this skinny condition, and generally have more reserve of fat to keep them going longer. Then after some people of any category have died there is relatively more food available to those who have survived this far, and they receive enough food to survive the famine. Thus, at the end of a famine there tend to be more women in a community than men.
There was a strange report from Leningrad during the military siege of the winter 1941, and spring of 1942 where a substantial portion of the inhabitants died from war induced starvation. It was reported that the intellectual class died off at a higher rate than other classes, and after the famine books had no monetary value because no one survived who valued them, and therefore they were being used for firewood.
My chances of surviving a local famine are compromised. As an older male who reads books and after my successful dieting last year I have less fat so there are three strikes against me even before it starts. I must do what I can to stave off global famine.
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