The lack of a British response was written about at the time.
A deliberate negligence could be considered genocide.
The Georgia (Capital: Tbilisi, not Atlanta) famine in the early 1930s was a natural event exacerbated by the Stalin regime's deliberate indifference to the plight of the Georgian people in order to subjugate them. Most historians call it a genocide.
Similarly, in Ireland in the 1830s, there was a growing political movement to oppose British suppression. Then came the potato famine, which the British government ignored, until it was shamed into doing something, but only after roughly one-quarter of the population was dead, and another quarter of the population emigrated to the USA -- where they faced persecution and discrimination because they were Roman Catholic.