Starvation in the context of Summermatter cycle

A famine is a widespread scarcity of food caused by several possible factors, including, but not limited to: war, natural disasters, crop failure, widespread poverty, an economic catastrophe or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality. Every inhabited continent in the world has experienced a period of famine throughout history. During the 19th and 20th centuries, Southeast and South Asia, as well as Eastern and Central Europe, suffered the greatest number of fatalities due to famine. Deaths caused by famine declined sharply beginning in the 1970s, with numbers falling further since 2000. Since 2010, Africa has been the most affected continent in the world by famine. As of 2025, Haiti and Afghanistan are the two countries with the most catastrophic and widespread states of famine, followed by Sudan.

In ancient times, exposition (from the Latin expositus, "exposed") was a method of infanticide or child abandonment in which infants were left in a wild place either to die due to hypothermia, starvation, animal attack or to be collected by slavers or by those unable to produce children.

Following exposure, the infants usually died, were taken by slave traders, or were adopted by others.

Tardigrades (/ˈtɑːrdɪɡreɪdz/ ), known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets, are a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals. They were first described by the German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773, who called them Kleiner Wasserbär 'little water bear'. In 1776, the Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani named them Tardigrada, which means 'slow walkers'.

They live in diverse regions of Earth's biosphere – mountaintops, the deep sea, tropical rainforests, and the Antarctic. Tardigrades are among the most resilient animals known, with individual species able to survive extreme conditions – such as exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures (both high and low), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and starvation – that would quickly kill most other forms of life. Tardigrades have survived exposure to outer space.

Food security is the state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, healthy food. The availability of food for people of any class, gender, status, ethnicity, or religion is another element of food protection. Similarly, household food security is considered to exist when all the members of a family have consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. Food-secure individuals do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. Food security includes resilience to future disruptions of food supply. Such a disruption could occur due to various risk factors such as droughts and floods, shipping disruptions, fuel shortages, economic instability, and wars. Food insecurity is the opposite of food security: a state where there is only limited or uncertain availability of suitable food.

The concept of food security has evolved over time. The four pillars of food security include availability, access, utilization, and stability. In addition, there are two more dimensions that are important: agency and sustainability. These six dimensions of food security are reinforced in conceptual and legal understandings of the right to food. The World Food Summit in 1996 declared that "food should not be used as an instrument for political and economic pressure."

Immurement (from Latin im- 'in' and murus 'wall'; lit. 'walling in'), also called immuration or live entombment, is a form of imprisonment, usually until death, in which someone is placed within an enclosed space without exits. This includes instances where people have been enclosed in extremely tight confinement, such as within a coffin. When used as a means of execution, the prisoner is simply left to die from starvation or dehydration. This form of execution is distinct from being buried alive, in which the victim typically dies of asphyxiation. By contrast, immurement has also occasionally been used as an early form of life imprisonment, in which cases the victims were regularly fed and given water. There have been a few cases in which people have survived for months or years after being walled up, as well as some people, such as anchorites, who were voluntarily immured.

Notable examples of immurement as an established execution practice (with death from thirst or starvation as the intended aim) are attested. In the Roman Empire, Vestal Virgins faced live entombment as punishment if they were found guilty of breaking their chastity vows. Immurement has also been well established as a punishment of robbers in Persia, even into the early 20th century. Some ambiguous evidence exists of immurement as a practice of coffin-type confinement in Mongolia. One famous, but likely mythical, immurement was that of Anarkali by Emperor Akbar because of her supposed relationship with Prince Saleem.

The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger (Irish: an Gorta Mór [ənˠ ˈɡɔɾˠt̪ˠə ˈmˠoːɾˠ]), the Famine and the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland lasting from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis and had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. The most severely affected areas were in the western and southern parts of Ireland—where the Irish language was dominant—hence the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, which literally translates to "the bad life" and loosely translates to "the hard times".

The worst year of the famine was 1847, which became known as "Black '47". The population of Ireland on the eve of the famine was about 8.5 million; by 1901, it was just 4.4 million. During the Great Hunger, roughly one million people died and over one million more fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25% between 1841 and 1871, with some towns' populations falling by as much as 67%. Between 1845 and 1855, at least 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also on steamboats and barques—one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history.

The East Timor genocide refers to the campaign of systematic killings, repression and state terrorism against the East Timorese people by Indonesia's New Order regime between 1975 and 1999, during the invasion and subsequent occupation of East Timor.

The Indonesian military framed their counter-insurgency operations as "pacification" and "anti-communist stabilisation" while operating with total impunity and engaging in a large-scale extermination of the East Timor's population, including mass killings, forced displacement, starvation, and the destruction of East Timor's social and political fabric. During the occupation period, the Indonesian government received diplomatic and military support from Australia and the United States.

Democratic Kampuchea was the official name of the Cambodian state from 1976 to 1979, under the general secretaryship of Pol Pot and the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), commonly known as the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge's capture of the capital Phnom Penh in 1975 effectively ended the United States-backed Khmer Republic under Prime Minister-later President Lon Nol.

From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge's one-party regime killed millions of its own people through mass executions, forced labour, and starvation, in an event which has come to be known as the Cambodian genocide. The killings ended when the Khmer Rouge were ousted from Phnom Penh by the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN). The Khmer Rouge subsequently established a government-in-exile in neighbouring Thailand and retained Kampuchea's seat at the United Nations (UN). In response, Vietnamese-backed communists created a rival government, the People's Republic of Kampuchea, but failed to gain international recognition.

Starvation of a civilian population is a war crime, a crime against humanity, and/or an act of genocide according to modern international criminal law. Starvation has not always been illegal according to international law; the starvation of civilians during the siege of Leningrad was ruled to be not criminal by a United States military court, and the 1949 Geneva Convention, though imposing limits, "accepted the legality of starvation as a weapon of war in principle". Historically, the development of laws against starvation has been hampered by the Western powers who wish to use blockades against their enemies; however, it was banned in 1977 by Protocol I and Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions and criminalized by the Rome Statute. Prosecutions for starvation have been rare.

Agriculture in Mesoamerica dates to the Archaic period of Mesoamerican chronology (8000–2000 BC). At the beginning of the Archaic period, the Early Hunters of the late Pleistocene era (50,000–10,000 BC) led nomadic lifestyles, relying on hunting and gathering for sustenance. However, the nomadic lifestyle that dominated the late Pleistocene and the early Archaic slowly transitioned into a more sedentary lifestyle as the hunter-gatherer micro-bands in the region began to cultivate wild plants. The cultivation of these plants provided security to the Mesoamericans, allowing them to increase surplus of "starvation foods" near seasonal camps; this surplus could be utilized when hunting was bad, during times of drought, and when resources were low. The cultivation of plants could have been started purposefully, or by accident. The former could have been done by bringing a wild plant closer to a camp site, or to a frequented area, so it was easier to access and collect. The latter could have happened as certain plant seeds were eaten and not fully digested, causing these plants to grow wherever human habitation would take them.

As the Archaic period progressed, cultivation of plant foods became increasingly important to the people of Mesoamerica. The reliability of cultivated plants allowed hunting and gathering micro-bands to establish permanent settlements and to increase in size. These larger settlements required a greater quantity of food, consequently leading to an even greater reliance on domesticated crops. Eventually, the Mesoamerican people established a sedentary lifestyle based on plant domestication and cultivation, supplemented with small game hunting. This sedentary lifestyle reliant on agriculture allowed permanent settlements to grow into villages and provided the opportunity for division of labor and social stratification.

The Turnip Winter (German: Steckrübenwinter, pronounced [ˈʃtɛkʁyːbn̩ˌvɪntɐ]) of 1916 to 1917 was a period of profound civilian hardship in Germany during World War I, named for the resulting use of turnips as a famine food.

The Turnip Winter occurred during the winter of 1916–1917. Continually poor weather conditions led to a diminished harvest, most notably in cereal production. An ongoing blockade by the Allies of World War I had also reduced Germany's food imports. The food shortages were also attributed to a seizure of horses for the Imperial German Army, the conscription of a large part of the agricultural workforce, and a shortage of farming fertilizers caused by the diversion of nitrogen to the production of explosives. In response to the food shortage, the German government introduced food rationing through the then-new War Food Office. In the summer of 1917, the food allocated offered only 1,560 calories (6,500 kJ) daily diet and dropped to 1,000 calories per day in winter. The Imperial Health Office (renamed "Reich Health Office" in 1918) required 3,000 calories (12,600 kJ) for a healthy adult male, three times what was available in winter. German soldiers relied for their survival on the availability of turnips. Driven by starvation, children started breaking into barns and looting orchards in search of food. Such disregard for authority effectively doubled the youth crime rate in Germany. Historian G.J. Meyer noted that, according to a report from a prominent Berlin physician, "eighty thousand children had died of starvation in 1916". Worker strikes were also common during this time as food shortages often directly led to labor unrest.

The Blockade of Germany, or the Blockade of Europe, occurred from 1914 to 1919. The prolonged naval blockade was conducted by the Entente during and after World War I in an effort to restrict the maritime supply of goods to the Central Powers, which included Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The blockade is considered one of the key elements in the eventual Allied victory in the war. The restricted supply of strategic materials such as metal ores and oil had a detrimental effect on the Central Powers' war effort, despite ingenious efforts to find other sources or substitutes.

However, through a sequence of events, the Allies declared foodstuffs contraband and it is this aspect of the blockade that remains most controversial. In December 1918, the German Board of Public Health claimed that 763,000 German civilians had already died from starvation and disease caused by the blockade. An academic study done in 1928 put the death toll at 424,000, with similar or lower numbers given by more recent scholars, noting however complications with the degree of attribution of Spanish flu deaths. Around 100,000 people may have died during the post-armistice continuation of the blockade in 1919. However, it has been pointed out that there was an even slightly larger civilian excess mortality during the war in the United Kingdom and France, both countries that were much less affected by food shortages (although this can also be attributed to the influenza epidemic and diseases such as bronchitis and tuberculosis which were not strictly nutrition-related).

The virtual water trade is the hidden flow of water in food or other commodities that are traded from one place to another. Other terms for it are embedded or embodied water. The virtual water trade is the idea that virtual water is exchanged along with goods and services. This idea provides a new, amplified perspective on water problems. It balances different perspectives, basic conditions, and interests. This concept makes it possible to distinguish between global, regional, and local levels and their linkages. However, the use of virtual water estimates may offer no guidance for policymakers seeking to ensure they are meeting environmental objectives.

For example, cereal grains have been major carriers of virtual water in countries where water resources are scarce. So cereal imports can compensate for local water deficits. However, low-income countries may not be able to afford such imports in the future. This could lead to food insecurity and starvation.