John VanSickle wrote:
> andrel wrote:
>> John VanSickle wrote:
>>> Mueen Nawaz wrote:
>>>> John VanSickle wrote:
>>>>> The only genuinely human-induced famines (and the only famines to 
>>>>> strike
>>>>> industrialized nations) occurred in communist nations, whether due to
>>>>> the sheer incompetence of the communist system (China's Great Leap
>>>>> Forward starved millions) or malice of communist leaders (Lenin
>>>>> purposefully starved millions of people).
>>>>
>>>>     Saying "only" is a stretch.
>>>>
>>>>     Recently there was a "famine" in Niger. There was no real 
>>>> shortage of
>>>> food. Plenty of food was available, but it was unaffordable:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/famine/story/0,12128,1540214,00.html
>>>>
>>>> Niger is anything but a communist country.
>>>
>>> Well, I stand corrected; the only cases of human-induced *mass 
>>> starvation* occurred in nations claiming to follow some form of Marxism.
>>>
>> The Great Hunger in 19th century Ireland?
>> Although the importance of the human factor there is a point of debate.
> 
> Indeed.  The Irish had become heavily dependent on potatoes, which were 
> wiped out by a blight.  This led to both a shortage of food and a 
> shortage of money to buy food (since they would have gotten any money 
> they would have had by selling potatoes).  A lot of Irish starved, and a 
> lot went to the United States.
> 
> I do recall reading that the English took steps to withhold grain from 
> the Irish in order to make the problem worse, but I'd want to 
> investigate that further before arriving at any conclusions.  In any 
> event, the chief cause of the starvation was a major crop failure.

There is indeed  a line of thought that the cause for starvation was 
crop failure but that for the mass starvation you needed the English.

> An economist named Henry Hazlitt wrote an interesting book on poverty, 
> and in it he observed that we have become so accustomed to our own 
> prosperity that we look on the poor nations as being exceptional, when 
> in fact it is Western prosperity that, from the historical perspective, 
> is the exceptional situation.
> 
> The Irish of the Potato Famine were poor for the exact same reason that 
> countless societies, for the overwhelming majority of human history, 
> have been poor; the inability of the populace to reliably produce 
> sufficient wealth to live at a higher standard.

And the existence of a group in charge that feels no moral obligation 
other than trying to get rich as fast as one can.

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