Eli Hess, age 13, of Hattiesburg, Miss., for his question:
WHY DO WE SOMETIMES HAVE FAMINE?
Famine is a prolonged food shortage that causes widespread hunger and death. Every few years throughout history, famine has struck at least one area of the world. Nearly all famines result from crop failures.
The chief causes of crop failures include drought, which is a prolonged lack of rain, too much rainfall with flooding, and plant diseases and pests. Many other factors may also help create a famine.
Certainly the chief cause of crop failure is drought. Certain regions of China, India and Russia have always been those hardest hit by famine and all three have large areas, near deserts, where the rainfall is light and variable. In a dry year, crops in these areas fail and famine may strike.
As an example, in the 1870s dry weather in the Deccan plateau of southern India caused a famine that took about 5 million lives. During the same period, a famine in China killed more than 9 million persons.
' In the late 1960s and early 1970s, lack of rain produced widespread famine in a region of Africa called the Sahel. The estimated number of deaths was about a million. The Sahel lies just south of the Sahara.
Rivers swollen by too much rainfall overflow their banks and destroy farmland. Other crops rot in the field because of the excess water. In the 1300s, several years of heavy rains created widespread famine in western Europe. In 1929 and 1930, flooding along China's Hwang Ho River ruined crops and brought famine that killed about 2 million persons.
Plant diseases and pests sometimes produce famine. A plant disease in the 1840s destroyed most of Ireland's potato crop. Ireland's population dropped by about 2.5 million persons between 1841 and 1851 as a result of starvation, disease and emigration.
Other causes of famine include both natural and human ones. Such natural disasters as cyclones, earthquakes, early frosts and tidal waves may affect a large area, destroying enough crops to cause a famine.
War may result in a famine if many farmers leave their fields and join the armed forces. In some cases, an army has deliberately created a famine to starve an enemy into surrender. The army destroys stored food and growing crops and sets up a blockade to cut off the enemy's food supply.
Poor transportation may also contribute to a famine because of the difficulty of shipping food where it is needed. Many of the famines in China, India and Russia resulted largely from primitive transportation.
As an example, a famine in what is now the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India killed about 800,000 persons in 1837 and 1838. Lack of transportation prevented the shipment of grain from other areas of India.