Ep 191 Famine: More than starvation

As we learned last week, starvation extends far beyond hunger and what a lack of food does to the human body. Similarly, famine is much more than a food shortage and starvation on a population-level scale. This week, we’re picking up where we left off last episode to explore the definitions, drivers, and many dimensions of famine. We trace famines throughout human history, asking how they have changed either in their incidence, severity, or cause. No two famines are exactly alike, but taking a bird’s eye view of patterns in famine over time gives us insight, especially into the famines of the past 100 years. We conclude the episode with a discussion of the ongoing famine in Gaza and other food insecurity crises in other regions of the world. Tune in for a broad overview of this heavy but incredibly important topic.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I must admit I write this piece while starving, too
hungry to think clearly, too weak to sit upright for long.
I do not feel ashamed, because my starvation is deliberate.
I refuse my hunger, even as it decays me. I
can survive no other way. Famine is no longer a threat.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
It is here.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
Some days, my stomach cramps as I try to revise
a single paragraph. My fingers feel dry and achy, parched
from lack of fluids. Hunger is loud. I read, but
hunger is shouting in my ear. I write, but the
maw snaps with every keystroke. I wonder how can I
keep my mind sharp when my body has gone so

(00:41):
thin and dehydrated. The hunger starts with a rumble, and
it spreads so quickly my legs barely carry me to
the nearest internet cafe. There, I try to keep up
with work and commitments, charge my devices, and catch a
brief connection to the outside world. But with a heavy
laptop bag on my shoulder, the journey feels less like
a short walk and more like crossing a desert. One day,

(01:04):
in particular, I had been working NonStop, pushing through dizziness
and exhaustion, By the time I reached the stairs to
my apartment, my legs were barely holding me up. My
blood sugar had crashed. I collapsed just as I reached
my bedroom. I was rushed to the nearest GP, where
I was given an IVY to stabilize me. The next morning,
I was back at work, not because I had recovered,

(01:27):
but because I felt I could not afford to stop.
The urgency to bear witness outweighed the need to rest.
This is not about ego. It's about refusing to disappear,
about resisting the slow erasure that comes with war and famine,
about insisting that our thoughts and our work continue, even
when it must be done in the ruins in Gaza.

(01:50):
To be an academic today is to refuse to be
reduced to a statistic. There are days when continuing feels impossible.
The body simply gives out. Reading leaves me lightheaded, concentration
slips away, Teaching becomes a battle to remain coherent. The
most basic truth remains difficult to say aloud. We are hungry,

(02:12):
not by accident but by design. When did naming that
become taboo? This is not just about hunger. It is
about being forced to fight for survival in silence. To
generate knowledge in the context of hunger is to think
through pain, To teach students who have not eaten and
still tell them their voices matter. To insist against all

(02:37):
odds that Gaza still thinks, still questions, still creates. That
in itself is an act of resistance.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
It is so horrific what has happened. It's really hard
to have words. Yeah, I don't have them, Like I
can't articulate everything that yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
That firsthand was excerpted from a really incredible article that
I encourage everyone to read that was titled too Hungry
to Think two Week to Sit Upright, Concentration Slips Away,
The Struggle to stay focused as an academic in Gaza
by Ahmed Kamal Janina, and it was published in The
Guardian on August nineteenth, twenty twenty five. We'll link it
in our show notes and on our website as well.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Hi, I'm erin Welsh and I'm erin Arman Updike and
this is this podcast will kill you.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
Welcome to the second episode in our two part series
on starvation and famine.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yes, we're back with part two. This week. We are
continuing our discussion of starvation, famine, hunger, and malnutrition, words
that have been used a lot lately in discussions surrounding
the ongoing genocide and famine that's happening in Gaza, as
well as the conflict that's raging in Sudan.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
So in these two episodes, we are addressing the distinct
meanings of each of these words. And we started out
in last week's episode going through the physiological and psychological
impacts of starvation. So if you haven't listened to last
week episode, it's not entirely necessary for this one, but
it will help provide a lot of the context for
understanding the starvation component of famine.

Speaker 2 (05:11):
And this week we are discussing famine. You know, it's
definition or definitions, what it means to declare a famine,
what causes famine, how famines have changed throughout history, and
what is happening currently with the famine in Gaza and
the food insecurity crises in other regions of the world.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
Yeah, and as with last week's episode, we have quite
a lot to cover, so we are jumping right in
right after the shortbreak.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
As you took us through last week, Aaron, the physiological
effects of starvation or undernutrition or malnutrition go way beyond
simply not having enough to eat and enough energy to
function properly. Every single part of our bodies is impacted.
Our immune systems leaving us more vulnerable to infections, our

(06:25):
hormones affecting our reproductive systems, our organs leading to premature
heart failure, our minds, leaving us foggy and depressed and apathetic.
And just as we can't isolate starvation's impact on one
part of our physiology and ignore its other effects, we
can't pretend that mass starvation happens in a vacuum, that

(06:47):
one day the crops failed and there simply wasn't enough food,
that the cost of famine comes solely down to the
direct physiological effects of starvation multiplied by the number of
people impacted. That's not the way that it works. The
causes and consequences of famines are far more complex than that,
and ultimately each famine is unique, deserving of its own

(07:12):
focused examination. But looking back at the vast history of famines,
which have been with us for all of our species
time on this earth, we can draw out some general
patterns to help us understand the present and the possible future.
This is an enormous area of scholarship, like absolutely enormous,

(07:33):
and there are people who have dedicated many people who
have dedicated decades of their lives to the study of famines.
And I really struggled with how to approach this episode
and also like feeling like I can't, like I'm not
capable of doing this, but you know, I thought you should,
I tell the story of just one famine, should talk
about famines in history, And ultimately what I decided to

(07:56):
do was to break this down into five chapters definition, causes, consequences, trends,
and the future of famine. It's an oversimplified attempt at
trying to understand famine and contextualize what we're seeing. And
this is far from exhaustive coverage of a massive and
massively important topic. But fortunately there are there's some additional

(08:20):
reading that I can point you towards. So for this
episode just wanted to shout out sources in advance. I
mostly relied on a few books, so the book Mass Starvation,
The History and Future of Famine by famine scholar Alex
de Wall, Famine A Short History by Cormick Ograda, Poverty
and Famines An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation by Nobel

(08:40):
Prize winning economist Amartya Sen and Red Famine Stalin's War
on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum, as well as a handful
of papers. So let's get started, yeah. Chapter one. Definition
of famine. What is famine and why is it important
to define it? Famine exists at the extreme end of

(09:02):
a spectrum of food scarcity. Simply put, a population experiencing
famine is not able to access adequate food, leading to
an elevated death rate. It is an event, a deviation
from normal life. Throughout human history, different cultures and languages
have used many different words to signify a famine. The

(09:23):
ancient Roman orator Cicero used Praisin's caritas to mean present
dearness or dearth and future of fames for future famine
fames or I'm not sure how you say it is
where famine comes from its fames and so it's a
Latin word for hunger or starvation. It's like the word famished.

(09:43):
For instance, in ancient Egypt, the word for famine is
combined with is one combined that combines both hunger and plague,
which is I think relevant in the context of how
infectious disease occurs. Alongside oh, yes, Khalian word for famine, keristia,
means dearness, so like things that are scarce and expensive

(10:06):
and difficult to obtain. In medieval England, the word dearth
was used to refer to famine as well as dearness,
and the German word for famine hunger snot and probably
really butchering that pronunciation. It refers to hunger associated with
scarcity of food. Some famines have their own specific name.

(10:28):
There's the holodomor with death by hunger in Ukraine nineteen
thirty two to nineteen thirty three, the Skull Famine in
India seventeen ninety to seventeen ninety one, the Great Hunger
or Black forty seven for the eighteen forty five to
eighteen fifty two famine in Ireland, Metunia or the Scramble
in Tanzania nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty. And that's just

(10:50):
to name a few. Like many, many famines have their
own names. Until very recently, there was no formalized, agreed
upon definition of famine. People didn't need one to recognize
it as it was happening. They didn't need to understand
the physiology of starvation to recognize its effects in themselves,
their children, their neighbors. They didn't need a formal death

(11:12):
toll to grasp the magnitude of devastation. But as we've
discovered in recent decades, having a standard threshold beyond which
we can declare famine is crucial for decision making and
delivering aid, especially as humanitarian aid organizations have grown. In
the early two thousands, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification

(11:35):
or IPC system was developed for the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations, and it consists of five phases,
so phase going from phase one, which is none or minimal,
and that means that households are able to quote meet
essential food and non food needs without engaging in atypical
and unsustainable strategies to access food and income end quote.

(11:58):
And I'm not going to read the deaths of each
of the other phases until phase five. But phase two
is stressed, Phase three crisis, Phase four emergency, and in
phase five, which is catastrophe slash famine quote, households experience
an extreme lack of food and or cannot meet other
basic needs even after full employment of coping strategies. Starvation, death, destitution,

(12:24):
and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident. For famine classification,
area needs to have extreme critical levels of acute malnutrition
and mortality end quote. So these phases are determined at
the household level, whereas famine is an area wide classification.
So how many households are experiencing extreme food scarcity? The

(12:48):
threshold for famine is one in five households or twenty
percent in a specific area facing a complete lack of
food and other basic needs. Starvation is evident with more
than thirty percent of children acutely malnourished, households are destitute,
and death rates exceed two per ten thousand per day

(13:09):
measured as excess mortality. So it's not just like how
many people are dying, it's how many people are dying
above the basisine the average.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
I feel like, what is so thank you for walking
through all of that classification. We will link to those
by the way for people who want to read all
of it. That level, Like that classification is so extreme, yes,
and I feel like that is like an important thing
to just highlight, Like we're talking about twenty percent of

(13:39):
households not having any access to food, thirty percent of
people experiencing severe.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
Acute malnutrition like children. Yeah, that's really extreme.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
It is so a lot of places in the world
currently are in level four, which is emergency, but not famine,
and like that is also very extreme.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
It's extreme. It's just yeah, like the word, I think
the word famine is not used lightly by these organizations.
This is a very deliberate decision to say this is
a famine, and there are criteria that that must be met.
And I also want to just make a note here
about excess mortality, because I think there's tends to be

(14:23):
this idea that famine means Frank, starvation, You're death by starvation,
and it's not. Excess mortality includes and I'm quoting from
Alex D. Wall here, quote anyone who died of any
causes above the baseline. It includes deaths from communicable diseases
often the single biggest cause of death, exposure and exhaustion,

(14:44):
and in some instances violence as well. Including all of
the deaths can be justified because famine is not just
an aggregate of individual cases of starvation. It is a
far reaching social disruption that involves epidemics of an infectious diseases,
movements of desperate people, crime, and an array of other

(15:05):
social disorders. End quote. Famine is more than starvation on
a large scale. Yeah, period, way more, way more. The
IPC classification of famine is very specific and technical, and
that is by design. It makes no reference to the
cause of famine. It is politically agnostic, which is really

(15:27):
important when it comes to delivering humanitarian aid. A declaration
of famine as outlined by those clearly defined criteria allows
humanitarian aid protocols to be enacted. It frees up resources
and funds to deliver aid, and it draws international attention
and action to the crisis, hopefully before it's too late,

(15:49):
although if it's if a famine is declared, it already
is too late for many people, a lot of people.
The IPC system for declaring famine is crucial for acknowledging
the need for public action, but it's not really something
that we can use to identify or describe historical famines,
which often lack the demographic data to determine something like

(16:10):
excess mortality, like how do the estimated six hundred thousand
deaths from the nine hundred and sixty seven CE flood
in Egypt translate into additional mortality. How much of that
is above the baseline for the two nine to two
oh three BCE famine in China that killed eighty to

(16:30):
ninety percent of the population, what was that baseline population?

Speaker 1 (16:35):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah, we needed just a different approach for studying historical famines.
And in two thousand and four, how and Devereaux proposed
intensity and magnitude scales for characterizing famine. And the magnitude
scale is what seems to be the most often used
for historical famines, and it comes down to like total deaths,
not as a proportion of the population or over a

(16:58):
set time period. A great famine is one that has
killed at least one hundred thousand people, and a catastrophic
or calamitous famine I've seen both used is one that
has killed over one million. Between the years eighteen seventy
and twenty ten, at least one hundred and sixteen million

(17:20):
people died in over fifty great and catastrophic famines, a
truly staggering number. One hundred and sixteen million people, jeez,
and just over you know, in one hundred and forty years.
But the vast majority of those one hundred million deaths
happened before nineteen eighty. What changed. I'll get there in

(17:44):
a bit, but first let's talk about the causes of famine.
So Chapter two, Causes of famine. Why do famines happen?

(18:09):
Food shortage from crop failure, other disruptions in the food supply,
rising food prices, armed conflict, political will, more things, sometimes
all of the above, a blend of things. I think
there's often a tendency to think of famine as a
natural force. You know, drought or floods, fire, agricultural pests,

(18:30):
fungal epidemics, volcanic ash blotting out the sun, destroying any
available food and bringing starvation to the land. And historically
that may have occasionally been the case. There may have
been famines that were caused directly by crop sequential crop failures,
solely crop failures. But today, and I think for centuries,

(18:52):
you could argue famine is exclusively man made, started or
perpetuated by political decision, their mismanagement, or malice, not, as
Thomas Malthus claimed in seventeen ninety eight, an inevitable outcome
of uncontrolled population growth, nature correcting itself by bringing down

(19:12):
a population to a more appropriate level. Yeah, Malthus, Yeah,
there's In Alex de Wall's book, he refers to it
as like the Malthust zombie. I think it's like this idea,
this concept that just won't die, that somehow food will
be the only limiting factor. It won't be. There will
be many things before food or contributing and we're not

(19:33):
even close to that. That's a whole separate discussion anyway.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
Should we do a whole episode and how we haven't
reached carrying capacity?

Speaker 2 (19:42):
Okay, no, no, no no, but yet you know, governments
have used Malthus's prediction as an excuse for inaction in
a number of famines in India. For instance, in the
Great Irish Famine of the eighteen forties. During that famine,
that or during all these famines, the English government kind

(20:02):
of just shrugged and went, well, you know, what do
you expect leaving millions to die. It was sort of
this like, well, this is what Mauthas said would happen.
You brought it upon yourselves, upon yourselves. Yeah, nothing we
can do. And in those famines, food was not the
limiting factor. Ireland and oftentimes India was still exporting food

(20:23):
as forced by England or preventing its delivery in India.
If India wasn't actively exporting, famines do not happen, as
Mouth is claimed. Our planet is capable of producing enough
food for the global population. You know, whether climate change
will play a role and shifting that is a question

(20:45):
that remains to be seen. It probably will, but we
are not there yet. We're not there. We're not there yet.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
We have not been there historically. We are not there
currently in the year twenty twenty five.

Speaker 2 (20:56):
Which doesn't mean that climate we shouldn't worry about climate change.
That's under We should, but it's just so many reasons.
It's not Malthus. Yeah, Malthous. Famines happen because people will
them to. In his book Mass Starvation, de Wall makes
note of the word to starve and its multiple meanings.
A person can starve and they can also be starved.

(21:20):
Hunger is a very effective weapon and tool of conquest.
It's deadly, it's demoralizing, it's disruptive. It completely reshapes and
erodes every aspect of your life. Whatever the goal submission, humiliation, suffering, genocide,
many governments have and continue to wield starvation to accomplish

(21:44):
those goals. Like during many colonial conquests by European governments,
like the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in
the early twentieth century, like the Holodomor in nineteen thirty
two to nineteen thirty three, which was intended by Stalin
to destroy Ukrainian identity and culture, like the Nazis used
repeatedly during World War II, including during the Nazi Hunger Plan,

(22:07):
which was not enacted fully but intended to kill a
calculated thirty million people, like the US's World War II
Operation Starvation was actually named that where I'm one hundred
percent serious. They dropped mines into Japanese harbors to disrupt
food shipments and it actually intentionally to cut off food supply,

(22:32):
or during the Vietnam War when they killed all the
crops defoliation with napalm ecoside, like Israeli leaders who use
hunger as a weapon and prevent aid from being delivered
During the two thousand and eight to two thousand and
nine Israeli siege of Gaza. An advisor to the Israeli
Prime Minister is reported to have said, quote, the idea

(22:54):
is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not
to make them die of hunger end quote. I get
that quote. Yeah again, Outright starvation deaths during famine are rare.
People are far more likely to die of infectious disease
or other causes, all of which still constitute famine deaths,

(23:14):
even if the goal isn't outright genocide or submission, and
a famine begins because of you know, say, harmful government
policy and subsequent denial or just like crop failings and
then subsequent denial and inaction in action, yeah right. What
that reveals is that those in power simply did not
care enough to do anything. During the nineteen forty three

(23:37):
Bengal famine that killed two to three million people in
India oh my gosh, which India at the time was
still under British control. Britain denied that there was any
food shortage. They blamed it all on people allegedly hoarding food,
meanwhile requisitioning food themselves for the war effort. And then
they refused to provide relief or allow any transport of

(23:59):
food into India because they were worried about it being
intercepted by Axi's forces, or enact any standard famine relief measures.
They didn't do anything. So, according to scholar Lizzie Collingham quote,
it is difficult to reach any conclusion other than that
racism was the guiding principle which determined where hunger struck

(24:22):
end quote And this famine which the scholar Amartya Sen
lived through and then inspired him to write some of
his ideas about the economics and the impacts of poverty
and famine. I think this it shows, as he pointed out,
how important it is to ask the question, is there

(24:45):
no food to buy? Or is it that there's no
money to buy food? Or is it that you are
prevented from buying food? These are very crucial differences. Malthus
would probably say that famines happened when there's no food
to buy. There's just no food, there's no food. But
in this modern era and likely during Malthus's time, food

(25:07):
is never the limiting factor. It's about access and who
prevents access. There's a classic metaphor to describe the vulnerability
of a peasant throughout history, and it was created by
Richard Tawny in nineteen sixty six, and it's this metaphor
of a peasant standing up to his neck in water
so that even the slightest ripple can drown him. And

(25:30):
thinking about what causes those ripples or waves and what
determines the height of the water in the first place,
I think that can be helpful in thinking about famine.
Maybe a ripple is a bad crop here. Maybe he's
knocked down because of his religious beliefs or just ethnic identity.
Maybe a wave comes in the form of an exorbitant

(25:51):
tax or a case of dysentery. When an entire population
is up to their necks in water, that can make
them max extremely vulnerable to a famine, and that famine
can have devastating consequences. Chapter three, Consequences of famine. What
happens during and after a famine. Like we talked about

(26:15):
last week, starvation profoundly impacts the body and the mind,
making people more vulnerable to a whole host of other
dangers like infectious disease or exposure. And we talked about
that largely in the context of purely starvation. Your immune
system weakens, leaving you open to infection, for example. What

(26:35):
famine does is amplify those dangers one thousandfold. So like
the men in the Minnesota starvation experiment undoubtedly had weakened
immune systems, but they had access to warm water, clean clothes,
medical care, fresh food. They had a safety net that
simply does not exist in a famine. So let's say,

(26:57):
for example, that a person who's moving in famine conditions
is exposed to typhus. Typhus ravages their weakened immune system,
and since hot water and clean clothes are out of
the question, the infected lice carrying the Typhus bacterium will
spread to every member of the household, leaving all of
them too weak to cook with what little food they

(27:19):
may have. And let's say one person is well enough
to venture out to get food. Maybe they'll be shunned
out of fear of the disease, or maybe they manage
to get food, but it's spoiled or it barely resembles food,
it has almost no nutritional content. If they recover from typhus,
food poisoning or dysentery could deliver the death blow. When

(27:40):
political conflict drives famine, many people are forcibly displaced, and
camps set up to house them can be hot beds
of infection. You mentioned crowding and how there tends to
be crowding in famine. That's just like it facilitates the
spread of infectious disease to an astonishing degree combination with malnutrition.

Speaker 1 (28:02):
I feel like we have touched on that in almost
every single infectious disease episode we have ever covered.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
Yep, yes, yes, yes, cholera, typhus, typhoid, measles, malaria, influenza.
These are all frequent occurrences in famines, and so we've
been saying multiple times infectious disease is one of the
biggest killers. Famine deepens vulnerabilities and magnifies social inequalities. Those

(28:31):
who are compromised to begin with are often the first
to die, and they make up the greatest proportion of deaths.
So throughout history, this tends to be the oldest and
the youngest. In Duwall's study of the Darfur famine in
nineteen eighty four to nineteen eighty five, he estimated that
two thirds of the deaths were children under ten, and

(28:52):
half of the deaths were children under five.

Speaker 1 (28:56):
It's also depressing, aaron that in so many of the
statistics when they're measuring like we talked about last week,
severe che malnutrition and things the tiniest of babies, like yes,
newborns to six months old often aren't even included in
those statistics because we don't have like ways to measure
them reliably and things. So it's it's just so heartbreaking.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
It yeah, yeah, this pattern of the oldest and the
youngest being the most likely to die, it doesn't it
doesn't always hold. So for instance, if there are people
who are like certain populations who are targeted, there might
be a deviation from that. But in general, like I
think you could generalize by saying that famine strikes those

(29:41):
who are not deemed worthy of consideration, not deemed worthy
to live. Here's a quote from d wal quote. Famines
strike selectively. It is the poor and politically excluded who
are its first and principal victims. Commonly, it's only ones
star relentlessly hunts out outsiders and marginalized minorities. Or, to

(30:05):
phrase it more accurately, those in power administer famines so
as to target these people. In a large number of
the famines in our catalog, including all the most recent cases,
the victims have been constituencies identified as subversives or enemies
of the state. Today's resurgence of xenophobia and resource nationalism

(30:26):
across the world bodes ill for the politics of feminogenesis.
End quote. Ah yeah, this is heavy, arin, I know.
Beyond the physical effects of starvation, those in a famine
also grow increasingly apathetic. Beyond despair, they disengage or become

(30:49):
a social survival just shuts everything else out. The cost
of famine is often reported as the number dead, But
just as starvation is merely one component of famine, the
death toll in a famine represents just one devastating outcome.
What about the lives forever altered, The trauma, the lasting

(31:11):
physical harm, the cognitive impairments, the drop in birth rate,
the horror of watching your family, your friends, your neighbors
perish while the world just looks on or turns away.
The damage that famine causes spans generations. Adults that were
exposed to famine while in the womb are at higher

(31:31):
risk of certain diseases like type two diabetes, as well
as mental health issues. A famine is an event. It
has a start and an end, murky though they may be,
but that event stays with those who lived through it
for the rest of their lives, Even if, like those
who lived through the holodomor or the Great Leap Forward

(31:52):
famine in China in the nineteen fifties. You are forbidden
from discussing it. How can it be forgotten? One visitor
to Ukraine a decade after the famine in nineteen thirty
two to nineteen thirty three reported that quote ten long
years had been unable to erase those murderous traces and
to disperse the expiring sounds of the innocent children, women

(32:14):
and men, of the dying of young people enfeebled by famine.
The sad memories still hang like a black haze over
the cities and villages, and produce a mortal fear among
the witnesses who escaped the starvation end quote. Those and
those two famines that I just mentioned, the Holodomor and

(32:34):
the Great Leap Forward, Those mark the two most extreme
famines of the twentieth century. They killed three point three
million and thirty two million people, respectively. Jeez aren. Many

(33:02):
modern scholars of famine believe that the age of catastrophic
famines like these that number in the millions or multiple millions.
They believe that it might be over. Is it like?
What patterns are we seeing? Chapter four? Trends in famines?
How have famines changed over time, famine has always been

(33:25):
with us. The story goes that when many human societies
gradually began their transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture
and livestock, food production went up, infectious disease went up,
and dietary deficiencies went up due to over dependence on
certain staple foods like grains. The sedentary lifestyle may have

(33:46):
sheltered agrarian societies from fluctuations in food supply. You know,
whether they were truly more sheltered than hunter gatherer societies,
It's up for debate. Interesting, But at the same time,
their dependence on crops may have also made them more
susceptible to sequential crop failings. So, for instance, repeated crop

(34:06):
failure and livestock disease led to the Great European Famine
of thirteen fifteen to thirteen seventeen that killed ten percent
of the population. And this is just a few decades
before the Black Death would carry off thirty percent more.
Can you just yeah. The age of European colonialism, beginning

(34:28):
in the fourteen nineties and lasting at least through World
War One, led to many famines, either as a direct
result of the upheaval and violence imposed on those populations. Remember,
hunger is a weapon, or indirectly as imperial conquest destroyed
the buffers that people had in place to protect against famine,
so like when European governments would force people to farm

(34:52):
European crops rather than indigenous plants that they had been growing.
The severity of these col colonial era famines was deepened
by the fact that the colonizing governments rarely provided any
sort of relief. The lives of those who suffered did
not matter. So for instance, there was an enormous famine
in South Asia following the British East India Company's conquest

(35:15):
of Bengal in the seventeen seventies that led to the
death of one third of the population. This famine was
not the exception, it was the rule, and famines like
these followed into the late eighteen hundreds and early twentieth century.
The causes were multifaceted and dependent on the region, so

(35:37):
there might be like severe drought, crop light foods, disruption
of economic structure by colonialism, culture erasure via colonialism, a
combination of everything, But what followed seemed fairly consistent. The
lack of any relief. Instead of easing the tax burden,
colonial governments continued to extract brutal taxes under the threat

(35:59):
of violence. Instead of stopping the export of food from
a country starving to death, the export continued. Instead of
providing adequate food and relief programs, in an effort to
stop or slow the famine, government handed out quantities of
food that matched the rationing in Nazi concentration camps, so
it'd be like, here's four hundred calories. Yeah. Over the

(36:22):
first few decades of the twentieth century, the age of
colonial famines was supplanted by those created by totalitarian regimes.
So the Holodomor in Ukraine, which I've mentioned a few
times now. Raphael Lemkin, who was the person to coin
the term genocide in nineteen forty four, he considered this
famine to be genocide by starvation. The Nazi hunger planned

(36:44):
which was intended to kill thirty million quote unquote useless
eaters in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union via starvation.
Japanese occupied territories like Burma, Indonesia, and Vietnam all suffered
mass starvations since food prioritized to feed the occupier. But
even these famines would pale in comparison to the Great

(37:07):
Leap Forward Famine in China between nineteen fifty eight and
nineteen sixty two, which killed at least twenty five to
over thirty million people, the largest famine in history. I mean,
I don't know how you can even begin to wrap
your mind around numbers like that. Oh you can't, it can't.

(37:28):
And while environmental factors contributed somewhat to this famine, the
lion's share of the blame goes to Mao Zedong's policies.
Farmers were forced to leave their farms to work in
factories to try to match the economic growth of what
was seeing in some of the other in some Western countries,
for instance, like steel factories. And this actually was the

(37:49):
Great Leap Forward Famine, was a situation where outright starvation
was actually often the cause of death for many, and
silence was the rule. The true scope of this famine
wasn't realized for twenty years after it ended due to
censorship policies, so no one knew and that it was

(38:09):
just like the numbers just kept growing and growing. A
few more catastrophic totalitarian famines with over one million deaths
occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century in
Cambodia and North Korea. But then the trajectory of famines
began to shift more often famines were occurring in Sub

(38:30):
Saharan Africa. Drought played a role, but the leading driver
was war, associated of course with like armed conflict, poverty,
harmful economic policies and displacement. Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Darfur, the
DRC and other regions have all experienced these famines. The
nineteen eighty three to nineteen eighty five famine in Ethiopia

(38:53):
that killed six hundred thousand people was among the first
to draw an international humanitarian aid respects. You know, like
Bob Geldof and band aid the song do they know
It's Christmas? Which like is just the most you don't
know that song. I don't know that song. Oh God,
it's like, do they know it's It was sung it
was like so it created a lot of money. It like,

(39:15):
you know, brought in a lot of money for humanitarian aid.
But the lyrics of that song are so condescending. No,
do they know it's Christmas? First of all, Ethiopia is
one of the places of like the oldest Christian religion
like sects in the world anyway, Yeah, okay, many of

(39:35):
which many yeah, yeah, Well, I mean it's like band
aid and these songs like yeah, do they know it's Christmas?
Et cetera. They were instrumental in raising awareness and in
raising money for humanitarian aid response. There is this is
a really like complicated humanitarian aid in general, and the

(39:58):
shifts in humanitarian aid responses and crisis over chronic food insecurities,
you know what draws more money. There's a lot of
complications there.

Speaker 1 (40:10):
It's a hodgepodge of messy mess it is.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
But it did mark a huge turning point in terms
of how famines were considered at the on the international scale,
on the international like international politics, and so the expansion
was crucial to help to help relieve the famine in
Ethiopia and in subsequent crises. But yeah, there's another quote

(40:33):
from the Wall where he says, quote, it is not
driven by the needs of the hungry, but by the
political demands of its donors, chiefly Western governments end quote.
And some governments have used aid not necessarily through like
these international humanitarian aid programs, which tend to be more
a political but different governments have used aid as like

(40:54):
a carrot, you know, on the stick to accomplish certain
political goals. So in the US withdrew aid from Bangladesh
in the nineteen seventies until they agreed to fall in
line with US politics, and by the time they reinstituted aid,
it was too late, like there was no point to it.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
Yeah, and this, we just don't have any usaid, so.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Exactly, exactly and so. And this is also not to
discount the countless lives that humanitarian aid has saved or
the famines that it has directly averted. And like the
IPC system, much humanitarian assistance is a political so resources
can get to people who most desperately need it. By

(41:34):
the end of the twentieth century, international reporting on famines
and the development of a professional international humanitarian aid system
meant that we had the ability to recognize famine and
do something about it as long as there was also
the WILL. Chapter five, The future of famine is the

(41:56):
end of famine in sight? Asking that seems like a
ridiculous question when there is literally a famine happening in Gaza,
when there have been famines in Somalia, South Sudan and
Sudan in the past twenty years. But it is a
valid question. When you look at a graph of famine

(42:16):
deaths over time starting in eighteen seventy, there is a
noticeable sharp downward trend starting around the nineteen eighties. Why
have famines declined in magnitude and by magnitude, I mean
fewer people dying overall compared to the century's earlier multimillion
death toll famines. It's a combination of different things, public

(42:41):
health advances, humanitarian aid responses, and political action and will
so think again of that metaphor of the guy who's
standing up to his neck in water. The water level
has on average around the globe declined thanks to things
like economic growth, improvedments in agriculture, functioning markets, and public health.

(43:05):
These factors might reduce how vulnerable an entire population is
to famine or the number of vulnerable individuals. They might
help reduce deaths due to communicable or other preventable diseases.
They might help in getting aid more quickly to a
population because there's awareness of that agricultural productivity has increased.

(43:25):
The impacts of the Green Revolution haven't been all positive,
and increased productivity doesn't necessarily translate into more access to food,
but it has helped thanks to global trade, local food
shortages can more easily be remedied. Again, the global food
supply is not the limiting factor here. Maybe one day

(43:45):
climate change will put us bring us closer to the edge,
but it hasn't yet. We have the tools to prevent,
to minimize, to end famine. So maybe the more appropriate
question is why does famine still happen? Why has the
threat of famine actually increased within the last five years

(44:08):
with more people living with severe hunger and malnutrition. While
the globe on average might have the water level lowered,
averages can be deceiving, and there are still millions of
people standing up to their necks and water. And this
is also not like geographically evenly distributed, right, So a

(44:31):
lot of the biggest famines throughout the twentieth century tended
to take place in Asia, and that's not the case now.
Now most of the food crises are happening in the
Middle East and Sub Saharan Africa, and so in these
most vulnerable regions there are still millions of people who

(44:52):
are at risk of drowning, you know. Using this metaphor
again with a ripple caused by a job loss year,
violent conflict and escalation of hatred against people of your
religion or ethnicity. Rising food prices, forced migration, hostility to refugees,
extreme weather events, and I think most worryingly is the

(45:15):
apathy that seems to be on the rise. Humanitarian aid
giving way to nationalism quoting again from Mass Starvation by
Alex D. Wall quote and this was written in twenty seventeen.
Over the last thirty years, we have assumed benevolent governance
that the default option in the international order is to

(45:37):
promote humane values and act against needless human suffering. That
era may now be passing, and the default setting for
global politics may return to the older premise that far
away human suffering, including mass starvation, can be tolerated or ignored.
End quote. So that was twenty seventeen, and I mean

(46:01):
is prediction has come true. To go from George Bush
having a no famine on my watch policy literally that
was like the policy to first George Bush, No, this
is George w sorry, Yeah, to Donald Trump slashing USAID,

(46:21):
which has played a huge role in famine prevention and relief.
I mean, George Bush is a war criminal. This just
shows like how far things have fallen, right, Yeah, yeah,
I mean it shows how wanting to reduce human suffering
it used to be a given like that was like,

(46:41):
of course you want to reduce It wasn't even that
it was political. It was like every person was like
this is you couldn't I just it wasn't. One side
wanted to reduce human suffering and the other side wanted
to promote it. That's what it is now. You know,
maybe suffering sometimes does seem like an openly declared goal,
but even if it's not, that it is, suffering is permitted,

(47:04):
it is acceptable with this administration, and not just with
this administration, but in many places around the world. It's
what we've seen happen currently happening in Gaza. Famine was
officially declared on August twenty second of this year, not
caused by food shortages, but food and other aid being
withheld by the Israeli government. Not just food also but

(47:27):
clean water, housing, sanitation, healthcare, and fuel. Everything just broken down,
leading to the intentional, preventable deaths of thousands of people
in Gaza. So I guess to go back to the
question of whether the end of famine is here the
answer seems to be no. It is theoretically within our grasp,

(47:50):
but there is a widening gulf between that theoretical possibility
and the reality that we face. And what separates those
two is political will, shame, a conscience, the conviction to
do the right thing. Can we bridge that gap? I mean,
I want to say yes, but how we can begin

(48:11):
to is another question. Yeah, Aaron, I don't know what
else to say, So I'm going to turn it over
to you to update us and the goings on in
the world today.

Speaker 1 (48:23):
Yeah, I am going to kind of bring us up
to speed with specifically the two areas that the IPC
has said that there are two areas in the world
that have met famine criteria right now essentially. But like
we talked about in last week's episode, food insecurity and

(48:48):
malnutrition overall are not uncommon globally. The World Food Program,
which is a humanitarian aid organization that is one of
the largest the World Food Program a S stimated in
the middle of twenty twenty five that over three hundred
million people we're facing acute food insecurity, like just in

(49:10):
the short term, seventy percent of which are the direct
result of conflict and violence, and the World Health Organization
in Fao recently put out a report that estimated that
over six hundred million people experienced hunger overall in twenty
twenty four. So this is obviously a very widespread problem,

(49:33):
and especially a problem in areas where we see conflict
and violence, even in places that we maybe think of
as not facing food insecurity initially.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
So, for example, in Ukraine, where war has been raging
for nearly four years now, at least one third of
residents in areas of high conflict are still reliant on
humanitarian food aid for subsistence. So even in areas where
we haven't seen or we haven't met criteria for famine,
there is a lot of parts of the world that

(50:09):
are experiencing severe food shortages and insecurity. But to wrap
us up for this episode, I want to focus on
the two places in the world that have currently met
the IPC threshold for famine, and that is Sudan and Gaza.
And just like we have seen in most of the
modern famines that you walked us through Arin prior to

(50:32):
this classification of famine, many people living in Gaza and Sudan,
prior to this declaration, we're already facing food insecurity, and
that plays a huge role in how we got to
where we are today. So starting with Sudan, the world's
largest humanitarian crisis is currently happening across all of Sudan.

(50:56):
There is a conflict there, and I'm not going to
get into the drivers of these conflicts. That's way beyond
my scope. But it had been ongoing for several years
and escalated in April of twenty twenty three. So since
April of twenty twenty three, at least twelve million people
have been internally displaced, over half of those children. And

(51:17):
the World Health Organization actually their estimate was slightly different
than IPCs, and they estimated ten point five million internally
displaced and four million people displaced across borders into neighboring countries.
And this internal displacement as well as external like displacement
outside of your countries, has led to lack of work opportunities,

(51:37):
so that families have no reliable income. Food in this
region has become substantially, like exponentially more expensive in part
due to scarcity, and that scarcity is very multifactorial. There
have been years of low crop yields, there has been flooding,
but there are also checkpoints in place. There's difficulties in
transporting food. There is ongoing con in these areas, like

(52:01):
a truly horrific amount of conflict, and this has also
made it even more difficult for humanitarian aid to reach
the areas that are at most at need. Right The
other thing that I just want to mention that the
IPC includes in you can read these reports where they
go through all of the details of how they came
to this conclusion when they say that they meet the

(52:22):
criteria for famine in these areas. They also look at
food utilization because in these areas, including in Sudan right now,
even when food is available, there are difficulties in actually
using or consuming it, or being able to like your body,

(52:43):
being able to utilize what you have consumed, okay, and
this is because of a lot of different reasons. There's
damage to let's say, water facilities, so that you don't
have access to clean water to be able to cook
your food or clean your you know, things to be
able to cook your food with. There's outbreaks of diarrheal diseases,
including as of April twenty twenty five in Sudan, a

(53:07):
cholera outbreak of over sixty thousand cases and at least
sixteen hundred deaths, and that cholera outbreak is not limited
to Sudan. It has actually also spread to South Sudan,
where there have been at least one point one million
people who have fled into South Sudan from Sudan, and
the cholera outbreak there has affected an additional fifty four

(53:29):
thousand people and caused over one thousand deaths. So this
is like really huge, and that obviously on top of
just causing disease, makes it difficult for people to absorb
any food that they are actually eating. So overall in
Sudan right now, we don't have a reliable way to
quantify the extent of mortality that all of this has caused.

(53:52):
We don't really have reliable data that is coming out
of there right now. But the most recent report that
was published was published by the IPC in December of
twenty twenty four and projected out through May of twenty
twenty five, and at that time they estimated that five
different areas within Sudan were experiencing famine. That IPC Phase

(54:16):
five classification, which was nearly six hundred and forty thousand
people at least and over half the population, and estimated
twenty four point six million people across Sudan were facing
at least Category three or four very high levels of

(54:37):
acute food insecurity. So even before the escalation of this conflict,
the global malnutrition rates in children under the age of
five in Sudan were estimated at around thirteen percent, and
now in many of these areas they're up to thirty percent,
which is again what classifies it as famine, and the

(54:59):
World Health Organzation estimates that in Sudan five million children
and pregnant people are acutely malnourished and over seven hundred
thousand kids under the age of five will have meet
criteria for severe acute malnutrition this year. It's pretty horrific
and it is still ongoing. Most of the reports, like

(55:22):
art have not been updated. I assume that we will
have updated reports maybe by the time this comes out.
I'm not really sure, but the projections were even grim like,
they were very grim.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
We're recording this, by the way. I don't know if
we've said this in any episode, but did in September eleventh.

Speaker 1 (55:37):
September eleventh, twenty twenty five, So that's the most recent
data that we have on all of these in Gaza.
The most recent IPC report, as you mentioned Aaron, was
updated August twenty second of twenty twenty five, and I
actually want to start out by reading an excerpt from
this particular report because the intro is actually pretty striking.

(55:57):
They start out with quote, this report marks the fifth
time the Famine Review Committee has been called to review
an analysis on the acute food security and nutrition situation
in the Gaza Strip. Never before has the Committee had
to return so many times to the same crisis, a
stark reflection of how suffering has not only persisted, but

(56:19):
intensified and spread until famine has begun to emerge. So
in this report they outlined that famine the famine conditions
have been met at least by the time of this
report in August in Gaza Governant, and they projected that
by the end of September, so by the end of

(56:40):
this month that we're recording, it will likely have spread
to several other governates in the south across Gaza Strip,
affecting an estimated six hundred and forty thousand people already
and at least one million people facing emergency or IPC
Phase four levels of food insecurity. In the Guardian, there

(57:04):
was an article that came out earlier in September that
reported that in the last two weeks of August alone,
seven thousand children under the age of five were hospitalized
specifically to treat severe acute malnutrition. How many seven thousand kids?
And they actually estimated that by the time that they
calculated the rest of the numbers from August, it could

(57:26):
have been up to fifteen thousand children hospitalized. And remember
that we try not to hospitalize children. That's only when
they are extremely ill. Right.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:39):
Already by July of twenty twenty five, the food system
that had existed in Gaza had collapsed. And I think,
obviously the it is an understatement to say that the
history of the conflict of Palestine in Israel goes back
farther than I am going to get into. We don't

(58:00):
need to get deep into the scope of that conflict,
but we do need to understand a little bit of
the context just prior to this, and that is that
since at least two thousand and seven, the Gaza strip
was already under a blockade in which Israel had essentially
all of the borders of Gaza Strip restricted. There was

(58:24):
restrictions and total control on importations into Gaza Strip that
included food, medicine, gas, all supplies and.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
Under control above somebody else that yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:38):
Yep, yeah, exactly, And that was already in place for
you know, the last sixteen years prior to this, in
part because of those importation restrictions and because of how
densely populated Gaza Strip is. It's one of the most
densely populated areas in the world. There's an estimated two
point one to two point three million residents. There's maps

(59:01):
if you haven't looked at like what the size of
Gaza Strip is compared to other major cities, but I
have a link to a maps online. But in part
because of how densely populated this region was and is,
and because of these controls on importations, residents in Gaza
prior to this current conflict primarily relied on imported food,

(59:23):
and there was already a very high prevalence of malnutrition.
An estimated ninety percent of preschoolers were not getting adequate
daily energy intake. Ninety percent was the numbers that I saw.
And this is most of this data is coming from
very recent reports, but that was actually from an article
in a peer reviewed journal, so it was like a

(59:43):
not just a news article. And before these last two years,
seventy five percent of the people living in Gaza depended
on UN food assistance. So that is similar to how
I said that in Sudan there was a i'd spread
prevalence of malnutrition prior to this. The same was true

(01:00:04):
in Gaza, right, And that's an important context to understand
the current situation and how things got so severe so quickly.
It also is the case that prior to this conflict,
residents of Gaza had access to about twenty one liters
of drinking water per person per day, which is a
little more than what the World Health Organization recommends should
be provided to everyone in emergency situations, but is not

(01:00:28):
enough to be able to engage in things like agriculture, sanitation, cleaning.
All of that you need upwards of seventy plus leaders
per person per day. But despite all of that, prior
to this, there was still domestic production of things like eggs, fish, meat, oils.
Right now, there is no capacity for domestic production, so

(01:00:50):
Gaza is entirely dependent on outside food. Much of the
cropland over ninety percent of it was damaged and only
one point five five percent of it is actually undamaged
and also accessible. And all of the animals that were
used for food sheep, cattle, goats, poultry, like the statistics
on how many of them have survived is horrific. And

(01:01:11):
fishing has also been severely restricted because access to coastal
areas is very restricted right now. So from March till
May there was actually no food at all that entered Gaza,
and since that time the amount has fallen far short
of the bare minimum that is required to keep people alive.

(01:01:35):
And as we discussed both last week and this week,
when someone has been under conditions of extreme malnutrition for
a long time, their body needs more in order to
make up for that difference. So even the bare minimum
would not be sufficient at this time, and we're not

(01:01:55):
even getting that at least as of September twenty twenty five.
And in the face of such desperate conditions, there have
been more and more instances of the few times that
food has been allowed in that food is not necessarily
even making it to much of the population because there
has been either intercepting or in many cases violence including

(01:02:16):
from Israeli forces at these food distribution sites. There have
actually been two three hundred and thirty nine fatalities among
aid seekers people trying to get food at militarized distribution
sites just since May of this year. And even in
the cases where food is available, prices have risen exponentially.

(01:02:40):
And when you combine that with the fact that almost
the entire population of Gaza has been displaced multiple times,
many of them have no ability to work, they cannot
access that food. There has also been limitations on access
to water, to cooking gas, to utensils, and many of
the humanitarian aid food packages that have been delivered are

(01:03:02):
composed of foods that you have to cook in order
to make edible, right rice. Yeah, so yeah, it's like
saying that the situation is die or doesn't quite honestly,
saying that it is famine doesn't even quite get at
the real truth of the situation, right. And like you mentioned, Aaron,

(01:03:25):
the debts due to starvation are a very small part
of what we are seeing. And yet at least three
hundred and sixty one human beings three hundred and sixty
one Palestinians have died due to malnutrition and starvation alone,
including one hundred and thirty children as of September tenth,

(01:03:48):
twenty twenty five. I will also point out that that
number is over one hundred more people than the estimate
I saw from August, and that does not capture the
that starvation has on the body.

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):
And the other huge.

Speaker 1 (01:04:05):
Complicating factor in Gaza specifically has been the intentional targeting
of the healthcare infrastructure. Ninety four percent of hospitals have
been damaged or destroyed. Medical supplies were also withheld and
not able to cross borders for many months, and they
are still in short supply. So even as the food
situation may improve, hopefully we don't know yet, there is

(01:04:29):
still a very real risk of refeeding syndrome for so
many people, especially kids in Gaza, given how long they
have been subject to under nutrition and the fact that
we have limited hospital availability to treat them.

Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
It's yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:04:47):
And if anything, like you mentioned, Aaron, the current genocide
happening in Gaza, the conflict that is raging across Sudan,
spreading into South Sudan, food insecurity across so much of
this glow, it is very likely that things will get worse.
Given that the US has dismantled USAID, which used to
provide quite a lot of humanitarian relief, and not just

(01:05:09):
in times of conflict, but we have seen other disasters
in recent months, like the earthquake in Afghanistan. There was
a recent landslide in Sudan which barely got reported on.
There was an earthquake in meand Mar. There's a very
long list of places where aid is just not making
it in. And it's not just funding cuts. It's also

(01:05:30):
the dismantling of the capacity building that had existed to
be able to do the kind of humanitarian work that
is needed well.

Speaker 2 (01:05:39):
And I think that the other thing too, is that
the ultimate goal of many of these aid organizations is
to create infrastructure so that it's not an emergency response
situation time and time again, and that you can actually
prevent emergencies before they happen. And yeah, the dismantling of
USAID has been so devastating. People are dying, like it's

(01:06:04):
I just yeah, it's a yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:10):
I am amazed at all of the incredible people who
are out there doing the work, doing the humanitarian work,
working with Doctors Without Borders, working with World Central Kitchen
and the World Food Program, and so many.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
Others reporting on this, letting the rest of us. I
mean this is because this is the type of these
famines in general are often because they are man made, silenced,
and so the people who are risking their lives to
deliver aid in whatever capacity and to let the rest
of the world know is just it can't it's it's unbelievable. Yeah, So, if.

Speaker 1 (01:06:46):
You would like to read a lot more about the
history of famines and also the current situation that is
ongoing across the world, but especially in Sudan and Gaza,
we have a lot of sources for you, because we
did not come up with this on our own.

Speaker 2 (01:07:00):
Oh my god, I mean yes, I have. I have
a bunch of books that I shouted out at the beginning.
I'm going to shout out again. Alex Da Wall's Mass Starvation,
The History and Future of Famine, published in twenty seventeen,
another paper published in twenty twenty four. More recently, The
History and Future of Famine, also by alex Da Wall,

(01:07:20):
then by Tizanos Fasquez. Why do Famine still occur in
the twenty first century? A Review on the Causes of
extreme food Insecurity published twenty twenty five and published in
twenty twenty one. Vaserman and Lushchek Prenatal Famine Exposure and
Adult Health Outcomes and Epigenetic link just to kind of

(01:07:41):
trace the generational trauma that famines can cause. And also
the IPC website has incredible resources infographics. I mean, it
is just a wealth of information. I've linked to a
few infographics specifically, but there's plenty more there.

Speaker 1 (01:07:58):
I also have the link to the two most recent
IPC reports that I was quoting from, so the one
from August twenty twenty five that was the Famine Review
Committee's report on the Gaza Strip, and then the one
from December twenty twenty four that was the Famine Reviews
Committee on Sudan. There's a few other ones as well too,
and I also have a bunch of World Health Organization
public Health situation analysis reports as well, where I got

(01:08:20):
a lot of those numbers from, as well as UN
news reports. I also because I usually try and rely
on peer review journal articles, which are hard to find
when things are ongoing, but I did find at least
a few. There was one that I really enjoyed that
was published of course this year, in twenty twenty five,
by hasun at All from Sustainable Futures that was titled

(01:08:42):
the Implications of the Ongoing War on Gaza for Food Sustainability,
and there were several others, so we will as always
post the link to our sources on our website, This
podcast will Kill You dot Com.

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):
Under the episode's tab, we will thank you to Bloodmobile
for providing the music for this episode and all of
our episodes.

Speaker 1 (01:09:04):
Thank you to Leanna and Tom and Pete and Brent
and Jessica and everyone else at exactly right for making
this all possible.

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
Yes, thank you, and thanks to you listeners, watchers people
who follow this podcast will kill you in some capacity,
you you know, allow us to do this, so thank you.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:09:24):
Yeah, and as always a special thank you to our patrons.
Your support really does mean the world to us. Thank
you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
It does. Well. Until next time, wash your hands you
feel the animals