Famine

Famine

A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including crop failure, population unbalance, or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality. Nearly every continent in the world has experienced a period of famine throughout history. Many countries continue to have extreme cases of famine.

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Famous quotes containing the word famine:

    They can rule the world while they can persuade us
    our pain belongs in some order.
    Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,
    than a life of famine and suicide ... ?
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    I knew the poor,
    I knew the hideous death they die,
    when famine lays its bleak hand on the door;
    I knew the rich,
    sated with merriment,
    who yet are sad.
    Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

    From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
    Charles Darwin (1809–1882)