Famine

Famine is a severe, geographically widespread shortage of food acute enough to cause significant excess mortality from starvation and its associated disease. The economist Amartya Sen distinguished famine from mere food scarcity by finding that most historical famines were driven at least as much by a collapse in people's entitlement, their ability to obtain available food through income, trade or transfer, as by an actual shortfall in food production. Its causes, weather failure, war, forced collectivization, trade collapse or deliberate policy, and its death tolls are established case by case for each individual famine event, which this concept sits above as the general phenomenon those events instantiate.