The dispute thus centred on the value of visual evidence from different observers during the famine and in the past.
The severity of famine gradually increased in the east which slowly proceeded from west through the decades.
How could the effects of these famines have been so severe and what lessons can we learn from those terrible events?
For such communities, strategies of risk aversion, as well as customary responses to famine, would still have mattered.
Although before this there had been a history of food-for-work conservation measures, especially following the 1973 famine, these really took off from the mid1980s.
However, specific empirical critiques of the making and implementing of famine policy were more effective.
Some even predicted a near-global meltdown with famines stretching across our globe.
Abnormally high motality may be the hallmark of famine, but societal breakdown is its essence.
