417
They’d gotten out. India was trying desperately to help these many refugees. But
India also had her own problems.
By the time Rahman and numerous members of his family were assassinated on
the early morning of August 15, 1975, in an army coup, the population of Bangladesh
was over 70 million, with a Total Fertility Rate of 6.82.
4
I was one of the very last westerners in Bangladesh during the height of the famine and remember skirting corpses being eaten by dogs on city streets. At a refugee
camp in Tongi, Dhaka’s northern border, I helped one of the few remaining oversees
charitable organizations handing out packets of milk powder and biscuits to tens of
thousands of mostly women and children who had been rounded up. There were
rotting bodies everywhere.
One sees in those too weak to stand in line to collect food supplements, but no
food per se, the very definition of the final stages of starvation in humans and other
vertebrates: “Apathy, withdrawal, listlessness, increased susceptibility to disease…
flaky skin, changes in hair color and massive edema in the lower limbs and abdomen, causing the person’s abdomen to seem bloated. During the process of starvation, the ability of the human body to consume volumes of food also decreases.”
5
Add up all the estimates of human mortality from the documented 250 famines,
between 2200 BCE and 2017, and the numbers exceed 300 million dead. This figure
does not come close to capturing co-morbidity data. The largest coefficients, both in
magnitude of mortality and in the sheer number of famine events, rapidly escalate
from the time of the great Chinese famine of 1849/1850, when some 20 million
people perished, and the world’s population exceeded 1.2 billion.
6
46.3 A Continuing Crisis
Alex de Waal, author of Mass Starvation, is somehow a guarded optimist about the
currents moving forward, pointing out that approximately 100 million people have
died of famine since 1850, but, since 1980, famine has all but been eliminated,
despite near-famine conditions persisting across war-torn areas from Yemen and
Syria to the Sudan (as of 2020). Nearly 70% of Yemen’s population remains at
severe risk of malnutrition, 3.3 million children under five, and lactating mothers
4 The World Bank, “Fertility Rate, total (births per woman) – Bangladesh,” https://data.worldbank.
org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=BD, Accessed April 27, 2020.
5 “Disabled World,” by Thomas C. Weiss, https://www.disabled-world.com/fitness/starving.php,
Updated October 29, 2018.
6 See “Fearfull Famines of the Past,” by Eduardo Ferreyra, http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/Polit/
Famines.html; Cornelius Walford, “On the Famines of the World, Past and Present” (Journal of the
Statistical Society, 1878–1879); Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating
Catastrophe, 1958–1962, by Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury USA, 2010; The Great Irish Famine: A
History in Documents, From the Broadview Source Series, by Karen Sonnelitter, Petersborough,
Canada, 2018.
46.3 A Continuing Crisis
They’d gotten out. India was trying desperately to help these many refugees. But
India also had her own problems.
By the time Rahman and numerous members of his family were assassinated on
the early morning of August 15, 1975, in an army coup, the population of Bangladesh
was over 70 million, with a Total Fertility Rate of 6.82.
4
I was one of the very last westerners in Bangladesh during the height of the famine and remember skirting corpses being eaten by dogs on city streets. At a refugee
camp in Tongi, Dhaka’s northern border, I helped one of the few remaining oversees
charitable organizations handing out packets of milk powder and biscuits to tens of
thousands of mostly women and children who had been rounded up. There were
rotting bodies everywhere.
One sees in those too weak to stand in line to collect food supplements, but no
food per se, the very definition of the final stages of starvation in humans and other
vertebrates: “Apathy, withdrawal, listlessness, increased susceptibility to disease…
flaky skin, changes in hair color and massive edema in the lower limbs and abdomen, causing the person’s abdomen to seem bloated. During the process of starvation, the ability of the human body to consume volumes of food also decreases.”
5
Add up all the estimates of human mortality from the documented 250 famines,
between 2200 BCE and 2017, and the numbers exceed 300 million dead. This figure
does not come close to capturing co-morbidity data. The largest coefficients, both in
magnitude of mortality and in the sheer number of famine events, rapidly escalate
from the time of the great Chinese famine of 1849/1850, when some 20 million
people perished, and the world’s population exceeded 1.2 billion.
6
46.3 A Continuing Crisis
Alex de Waal, author of Mass Starvation, is somehow a guarded optimist about the
currents moving forward, pointing out that approximately 100 million people have
died of famine since 1850, but, since 1980, famine has all but been eliminated,
despite near-famine conditions persisting across war-torn areas from Yemen and
Syria to the Sudan (as of 2020). Nearly 70% of Yemen’s population remains at
severe risk of malnutrition, 3.3 million children under five, and lactating mothers
4 The World Bank, “Fertility Rate, total (births per woman) – Bangladesh,” https://data.worldbank.
org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=BD, Accessed April 27, 2020.
5 “Disabled World,” by Thomas C. Weiss, https://www.disabled-world.com/fitness/starving.php,
Updated October 29, 2018.
6 See “Fearfull Famines of the Past,” by Eduardo Ferreyra, http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/Polit/
Famines.html; Cornelius Walford, “On the Famines of the World, Past and Present” (Journal of the
Statistical Society, 1878–1879); Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating
Catastrophe, 1958–1962, by Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury USA, 2010; The Great Irish Famine: A
History in Documents, From the Broadview Source Series, by Karen Sonnelitter, Petersborough,
Canada, 2018.
46.3 A Continuing Crisis