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This article discusses historical famines that have occurred in what is now the Czech Republic. Various famines occurred throughout the Czech lands between 1272 and 1847. Excessive rain, cold temperatures, hail, warfare, and disease are the main causes of famines in the Czech lands.
The first recorded famine in the Czech lands occurred from 1272 to 1282 and was caused by warfare and weather, which decreased the volume of crops harvested in the region. This first instance of famine caught the inhabitants off guard and caused 600,000 deaths, mostly through endemic plagues, although there were some occurrences of cannibalism. Local famines also transpired in Czech regions in 1318, caused by warfare; and then in 1361 and 1366, caused by crop shortage and failures.
The years 1432 through 1434 were known as the hungry years in the Czech lands because they faced climate issues for the duration of the Hussite Wars. The Hussite Wars were fought in Bohemia between the followers of the executed Jan Hus, a contributor to the Protestant movement. This set of wars was one of the first known military actions fought with hand-held firearms. The final two years of this fourteen-year set of wars sparked an increase in the price of grain. At one point grain was six times the price it had been prior to the wars. People in the Czech lands were unable to afford grain until the price returned to an affordable rate.
Around 1560 a decrease in temperature resulted in another disappointing harvest. A famine following the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748 killed 1,200 people in Doksy, a city in the northern Czech lands.
The next recorded famine in the Czech lands was the Great Famine, which lasted from 1770 until 1771. The cause of the Great Famine was a disease of grain monoculture and heavy rains. This famine ended when the Czech lands imported food and increased potato production by 100 percent. The Great Famine killed twelve percent of the Czech lands' population, up to 500,000 inhabitants, and radicalized the countryside, which led to peasant uprisings, like the peasant revolt of 1775 in Bohemia.
The last famine in the Czech lands was in Czech Silesia in 1847. This famine was caused by a potato disease and led to the deaths of over 20,000 people.
The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger, the Famine and the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland lasting from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis and subsequently 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—and 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". During the Great Hunger, roughly 1 million people died and more than 1 million more fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25% between 1841 and 1871. 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.
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 century, Southeast and South Asia, as well as Eastern and Central Europe, suffered the greatest number of fatalities. 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.
The Irish Famine of 1740–1741 in the Kingdom of Ireland, is estimated to have killed between 13% and 20% of the 1740 population of 2.4 million people, which was a proportionately greater loss than during the Great Famine of 1845–1852.
The Hussite Wars, also called the Bohemian Wars or the Hussite Revolution, were a series of civil wars fought between the Hussites and the combined Catholic forces of Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, the Papacy, and European monarchs loyal to the Catholic Church, as well as various Hussite factions. At a late stage of the conflict, the Utraquists changed sides in 1432 to fight alongside Roman Catholics and opposed the Taborites and other Hussite spin-offs. These wars lasted from 1419 to approximately 1434.
The Great Fear was a general panic that took place between 22 July to 6 August 1789, at the start of the French Revolution. Rural unrest had been present in France since the worsening grain shortage of the spring. Fuelled by rumours of an aristocrats' "famine plot" to starve or burn out the population, both peasants and townspeople mobilised in many regions.
The Bengal famine of 1943 was an anthropogenic famine in the Bengal province of British India during World War II. An estimated 0.8–3.8 million people died, in the Bengal region, from starvation, malaria and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions and lack of health care. Millions were impoverished as the crisis overwhelmed large segments of the economy and catastrophically disrupted the social fabric. Eventually, families disintegrated; men sold their small farms and left home to look for work or to join the British Indian Army, and women and children became homeless migrants, often travelling to Calcutta or other large cities in search of organised relief.
The Great Famine of 1315–1317 was the first of a series of large-scale crises that struck parts of Europe early in the 14th century. Most of Europe was affected. The famine caused many deaths over an extended number of years and marked a clear end to the period of growth and prosperity from the 11th to the 13th centuries.
The Vietnamese famine of 1945 was a famine that occurred in northern Vietnam in French Indochina during World War II from October 1944 to late 1945, which at the time was under Japanese occupation from 1940 with Vichy France as an ally of Nazi Germany in Western Europe. Between 400,000 and 2 million people are estimated to have starved to death during this time.
The Great Bengal famine of 1770 struck Bengal and Bihar between 1769 and 1770 and affected some 30 million people. It occurred during a period of dual governance in Bengal. This existed after the East India Company had been granted the diwani, or the right to collect revenue, in Bengal by the Mughal emperor in Delhi, but before it had wrested the nizamat, or control of civil administration, which continued to lie with the Mughal governor, the Nawab of Bengal Nazm ud Daula (1765-72).
The Famine of 1866–1868 was the last famine in Finland, and the last major famine in Northern Europe.
For millennia, agriculture has played an important role in the Chinese economy and society. By the time the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, virtually all arable land was under cultivation; irrigation and drainage systems constructed centuries earlier and intensive farming practices already produced relatively high yields. But little prime virgin land was available to support population growth and economic development. However, after a decline in production as a result of the Great Leap Forward (1958–60), agricultural reforms implemented in the 1980s increased yields and promised even greater future production from existing cultivated land.
The main economic products of Malawi are tobacco, tea, cotton, groundnuts, sugar and coffee. These have been among the main cash crops for the last century, but tobacco has become increasingly predominant in the last quarter-century, with a production in 2011 of 175,000 tonnes. Over the last century, tea and groundnuts have increased in relative importance while cotton has decreased. The main food crops are maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, sorghum, bananas, rice, and Irish potatoes and cattle, sheep and goats are raised. The main industries deal with agricultural processing of tobacco, tea and sugar and timber products. The industrial production growth rate is estimated at 10% (2009).
Agriculture in Ethiopia is the foundation of the country's economy, accounting for half of gross domestic product (GDP), 83.9% of exports, and 80% of total employment.
The Great Famine of Estonia killed about a fifth of Estonian and Livonian population in two years.
The chronology of the Great Famine documents a period of Irish history between 29 November 1845 and 1852 during which time the population of Ireland was reduced by 20 to 25 percent. The proximate cause was famine resulting from a potato disease commonly known as late blight. Although blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, the impact and human cost in Ireland – where a third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food but which also produced an abundance of other food – was exacerbated by a host of political, social and economic factors which remain the subject of historical debate.
The potato was the first domesticated vegetable in the region of modern-day southern Peru and extreme northwestern Bolivia between 8000 and 5000 BC. Cultivation of potatoes in South America may go back 10,000 years, but tubers do not preserve well in the archaeological record, making identification difficult. The earliest archaeologically verified potato tuber remains have been found at the coastal site of Ancón, dating to 2500 BC. Aside from actual remains, the potato is also found in the Peruvian archaeological record as a design influence of ceramic pottery, often in the shape of vessels. The potato has since spread around the world and has become a staple crop in most countries.
Famines in Austrian Galicia were a common occurrence, particularly in the mid to late 19th century, as Galicia became heavily overpopulated. Triggered primarily by natural disasters such as floods and blights, famines, compounded by overpopulation, led to starvation, widespread malnutrition, epidemics, poverty, an average of 50,000 deaths a year, and from the 1870s to the beginning of World War I, emigration.
Agriculture in the Middle Ages describes the farming practices, crops, technology, and agricultural society and economy of Europe from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to approximately 1500. The Middle Ages are sometimes called the Medieval Age or Period. The Middle Ages are also divided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. The early modern period followed the Middle Ages.
The islands of Newfoundland and Ireland, in addition to sharing similar northern latitudes and facing each other across the Atlantic Ocean, also had in common, during the middle of the 19th century, a heavy dependence on a single agricultural crop, the potato—a dependence that allowed the same blight that precipitated the Great Famine in Ireland to wreak havoc on this former British colony as well. Though acute, and the source of great suffering, the famine in Newfoundland lasted for fewer years than its Irish contemporary, which extended from 1845 to 1849. Beginning a year later, in 1846, it ended with the return to prosperity of the local fisheries in the spring and summer of 1848.
Russia suffered from an economic and social crisis in the second half of the 16th century which led to famines, depopulation and the abandonment of agricultural lands. The economic crisis overlapped with the oprichnina and happened at the time when Russia waged the Livonian War. The crisis is considered to be one of the precursors of the Time of Troubles.
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