Is All Hunger Genocide?

While there is still a lingering debate about whether or not to define Holodomor as genocide, I am confident in my assertion that it qualifies as a genocide. The United Nations defines genocide as this:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Holodomor was a concerted campaign by Stalin and the central government of the Soviet Union to cut off the agricultural supply in Ukraine and thus starve its inhabitants. Therefore it was a concerted plan to 1. Kill members of that group; 2. Cause them serious bodily and mental harm; 3, change their conditions of life to in part destroy them; 4. Cause millions of babies to die because of the effects of their agricultural reforms. This fits four of five qualifiers, and thus I feel confident calling it a genocide on this website.

And yet, the entire time I have been writing this, I have been struggling with a nagging notion: aren’t all famines genocide? Perhaps a simplistic thought, I still cannot seem to shake it, and thought this blog post would be a good place to test out my thesis.

First, we must ask the obvious question: is there enough food being produced right now to feed everyone on the earth? The answer is a resounding yes! According to a landmark report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the world currently produces enough food to feed every person in the world one and a half times over.

So what gives? Why are close to 700 million people still going hungry today? Why, in our globalized, interconnected world, if a region has a bad yield or undergoes a natural disaster, are they condemned to famine? The answer is of course far more complicated than something like Holodomor? There is no Stalin-Esque figure mandating that food be prevented from being given to hungry people. But it is also not random that the richest countries in the world have more than enough food (the United States wastes about a third of its food supply) and the poorest countries in the world disproportionally experience food insecurity and hunger-related deaths. Because of exploitative trade practices and the concentration of wealth, a large percentage of the world is being artificially starved, even while there is plenty to eat.

A very famous example of this blurred line is Irelands’ Great Potato Famine. Ireland was one of the biggest producers of Great Britain’s agricultural output, and much similar to the practices Stalin employed in Ukraine, they were not allowed to eat it themselves, instead being forced to ship it off to the United Kingdom. In one year, 1847, Ireland’s population was decimated by 25%, even though they had produced enough food to feed their population twice over.

This is a perfect example of Slow Violence, a major theme of our class. Even though I am still unsure if any form of hunger in a world with a surplus of food qualifies as genocide, it is clear that the act of people going hungry for no other reason than inequality and greed is a major disaster.