ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contested Knowledges of Climate, Food and Famine

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

In 2021, World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley claimed that a crisis in Madagascar was the first modern famine caused ‘solely by climate change alone’. However, others including food systems geographer Stian Rice (2022) argued that, in fact, colonial era agricultural policies continued into the present day, and the construction of Madagascar’s environment as ‘prone’ to natural disasters, have produced long standing cyclical famines on the island that cannot be attributed to climate change alone. These contested claims are indicative of the plural epistemological frameworks which make explanatory statements about the relationship between climate, food and famine in the present day. This panel explores four historical case studies which explore how the relationship between climate and famine was understood at specific points in the past, and how ideas of climate have been used by different parties, including governance in the British Empire, to advance various worldviews and political aims in relation to famine and food supply. While climatic determinist frameworks, which see human action and experience as defined by climate, have been deployed throughout these examples from the modern era, from the mid-1800s to the 1970s, competing frameworks which emphasise the capacity for political action to prevent famine have also been utilised by a range of actors. This panel emphasises the historical continuity of these ideas, and promotes the value of on-the-ground perspectives in exploring both food/famine events and longer term climate-food interactions, which have immense value for understanding the contested understandings at play in today’s world.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Robert Naylor, University of Manchester

Individual Presentations

• “Hunger in a heating world”: Oxfam, famine aid and climate science - Eleanor Shaw

• ‘What Care These Men if India Is Starving?’: Hill stations, Climate and Famine Critique in Colonial India - Joseph Manock, University of Manchester

• Epistemologies of Food and Climate During the Great Irish Famine - Aoife O’Leary McNeice, University of Galway

• Climate, Food Security and Risk in Colonial Malaya, c. 1890-1939 - Fiona Williamson, College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University

Session Organizer

• Eleanor Shaw