Blain's Farm & Fleet is a regional chain of 38 retail stores in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa.
Even so, work by Yang and others has proved that senior leaders in Beijing knew of the famine as early as 1958. To distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward, Mao warned colleagues a year later. When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death.
The Great Famine in Ireland has been compared to the Holodomor (hunger plague) which took place in the Ukraine under Stalin in 1932. Like Ireland, the Ukraine is a fertile region, and the 1932 famine has been the subject of similar controversy and debate.