Question 1

What is a famine?

Accepted Answer

A group of international organizations and charities known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative uses a five-tier system to determine whether a famine should be declared in a certain region. A famine is declared when the fifth tier is reached; the third and fourth tiers are “crisis” and “emergency,” respectively. U.N. officials and the Famine Review Committee, a U.N.-affiliated expert panel, define a famine in an area when at least 20 percent of households are facing an extreme lack of food, at least 30 percent of children are suffering from acute malnutrition and 2 people in every 10,000 are dying each day because of outright starvation or disease. The “use of an agreed definition is a relatively recent development. Before the 2000s, we did not have a technical definition,” Paul Howe, the director of Tufts University’s Feinstein International Center and a former U.N. World Food Program official, said in an email. But concerns “that the lack of an agreed definition delayed humanitarian responses, made it difficult to prioritize resources across different contexts, and complicated efforts to deter future famines” spurred the creation of the IPC scale, he added. The declaration of a famine, which is made by the local government or top U.N. official in the area, however, carries no binding obligations on the United Nations or its member states. It primarily serves as a way to raise global awareness about the severity of a food crisis.

Question 2

What are ‘hunger,’ ‘malnutrition’ and ‘starvation’?

Accepted Answer

“Hunger” can refer to short- and long-term conditions, Catherine Bertini, an emeritus professor of international affairs at Syracuse University, said in an email. A person can be hungry if they haven’t eaten all day, she said, while a child can be hungry if they have missed meals or have little food over a longer period of time. “Malnutrition is what it says — bad nutrition. A person can be malnourished because they eat too much of the wrong kinds of food or because they don’t have enough food to eat,” Bertini said. “Starvation” is the process that leads to death when someone does not have enough calories or food balance. “So hunger becomes severe malnutrition, which leads to starvation, which leads to death. When deaths occur within a certain population, especially of children, due to starvation, this could become a famine,” she said.

Question 3

What’s happening with food aid in Gaza?

Accepted Answer

Most of Gaza’s population is facing a severe shortage of food, according to the United Nations. Since the conflict began on Oct. 7, daily food and aid shipments have fallen well short of the estimated 500 truckloads of supplies required every day to meet the basic needs of the enclave’s 2 million people. The 300 trucks that entered Gaza on Nov. 28 were the most in a day since the war started, according to the United Nations. In February, 20 or fewer trucks entered the enclave on seven days. A humanitarian aid ship made the first delivery by sea to Gaza, the nonprofit World Central Kitchen said Saturday, while a second aid ship is preparing to sail from Cyprus. Israel, which controls most of Gaza’s borders, faces criticism that it is restricting food and critical supplies from entering. “The problem is that famine, like the response to it, is ultimately a political thing. Would a declaration of famine stop the conditions? No. The war is the cause of the famine, and so long as it continues, so too will starvation,” said Tylor Brand, an assistant professor of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland.

Question 4

Is there famine in Gaza?

Accepted Answer

U.N. officials said late last year that about 377,800 people, or roughly 17 percent of the enclave’s population, should be considered as being in the fifth tier of its food insecurity scale. This means they were facing the same conditions as people in areas previously declared as famine zones.

Question 5

What were some recent famines?

Accepted Answer

The United Nations first declared a famine under the thresholds set by the IPC in Somalia in July 2011. At least 250,000 people, half of them under 5, died in that famine, The Washington Post reported. In some areas of the country, deaths of children under that age exceeded 6 per 10,000 every day, according to Mark Bowden, a U.N. official at the time. In February 2017, the United Nations declared a famine in South Sudan under the IPC thresholds, saying 100,000 people were facing starvation. The deadliest food crisis in modern human history was the 1959-61 famine in China, which killed more than 20 million people, according to the official Chinese government estimate.

Is Gaza heading into famine? How experts define that grim term.