Introduction to Special Issue of Food and Foodways.pdf

CENTRE FOR ECONOMIC RESEARCH WORKING PAPER SERIES 2004 Introduction to Special Issue of Food and Foodways Cormac ó Gráda, University College Dublin WP04/09 May 2004 DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN BELFIELD DUBLIN 4 INTRODUCTION1 TO SPECIAL ISSUE OF FOOD FOODWAYS Cormac ó Gráda University College Dublin Email: cormac.ograda@ucd.ie 1 Earlier versions of three of the papers featured in this issue of Food Foodways were presented at the conference on Famine: interdisciplinary perspectives from the past and the present, held at Les Treilles, 22-28th May 2003. The organizers are grateful to the Fondation des Treilles for hosting the conference and to the European Science Foundation for helping to fund it. I thank Chris Friedrichs, Karl Gunnar Persson, and Martin Bruegel for comments on an earlier draft of this introduction. Famines are, and have always been, a hallmark of economic backwardness. Europe and the rest of todays developed world have been spared major famine in peacetime since the 1860s, and there have been no major death-dealing famines in Great Britain since the 1690s. The correlation between underdevelopment and famine is by no means perfect, however. Even though the world was a much richer place in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth, famines nonetheless caused an estimated seventy million excess deaths in the past century (Devereux 2000). Two of the four famines described in the articles that follow highlight how twentieth-century famines differ from those of earlier centuries. In earlier centuries famines were usually associated with serious harvest shortfalls, with what Cornelius Walford over a century ago dubbed natural causes (Walford 1879: 20). Even economies which were resilient enough to withstan