Crop failures are natural disasters. Famine's are political disasters.
The Indian economist Amartya Sen wrote a book in 1999, _Development as Freedom_ which argues, relatively convincingly, that famine's don't happen in functioning democracies among their own citizens. The book makes the observation that famines happened regularly in British colonial India, every few decades, but basically stopped in democratic, self-governing India. (1) And, as far back as the Romans, Egyptians, and Chinese many of the stories told about what good governance looked like involved beating famines- either because they were able to organize shipments of food from unaffected areas or because they stored up enough grain in the good times to survive the crop failures.
It is the general consensus among people who study this sort of thing that, as the United Nations OHCHR wrote in 2023, "Hunger and famine did not arise because there was not enough food to go around; they were caused by political failures, meaning that hunger and famine could only be addressed through political action." (2) Yes, a particular crop failure can be a natural disaster, but a famine happening requires a political failure on top of that (and the research does seem to indicate causation: the political failure is not caused by the crop failure but was pre-existing, and caused the crop failure to turn into a famine).
So, basically, yeah, the general consensus of people who study famines today and in the past is that the British government made choices that turned a crop failure into a famine. The same with the Great Famine of India, the Bengal Famine, the Soviets and the Holdomor, etc.
1: Generally, my understanding is that people who look at this think that Sen was basically correct. There might be a couple of occasions where a democracy failed to govern and suffered a famine, but, the way that democracies distribute power makes it far more unusual for them to fail so catastrophically that they can't deliver food to an area experiencing crop failure. This is one of the reasons that democracies are better than authoritarian governments!
The Indian economist Amartya Sen wrote a book in 1999, _Development as Freedom_ which argues, relatively convincingly, that famine's don't happen in functioning democracies among their own citizens. The book makes the observation that famines happened regularly in British colonial India, every few decades, but basically stopped in democratic, self-governing India. (1) And, as far back as the Romans, Egyptians, and Chinese many of the stories told about what good governance looked like involved beating famines- either because they were able to organize shipments of food from unaffected areas or because they stored up enough grain in the good times to survive the crop failures.
It is the general consensus among people who study this sort of thing that, as the United Nations OHCHR wrote in 2023, "Hunger and famine did not arise because there was not enough food to go around; they were caused by political failures, meaning that hunger and famine could only be addressed through political action." (2) Yes, a particular crop failure can be a natural disaster, but a famine happening requires a political failure on top of that (and the research does seem to indicate causation: the political failure is not caused by the crop failure but was pre-existing, and caused the crop failure to turn into a famine).
So, basically, yeah, the general consensus of people who study famines today and in the past is that the British government made choices that turned a crop failure into a famine. The same with the Great Famine of India, the Bengal Famine, the Soviets and the Holdomor, etc.
1: Generally, my understanding is that people who look at this think that Sen was basically correct. There might be a couple of occasions where a democracy failed to govern and suffered a famine, but, the way that democracies distribute power makes it far more unusual for them to fail so catastrophically that they can't deliver food to an area experiencing crop failure. This is one of the reasons that democracies are better than authoritarian governments!
2: https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2023/03/conflict-and-violence-...