Famine famine, and extreme famine. The number of deaths determines the magnitude designation, with under 1000 fatalities defining a "minor famine" and a "catastrophic famine" resulting in over 1,000,000 deaths. Famine personified as an allegory is found in some cultures, e.g. one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Christian tradition, the fear gorta of Irish folklore, or the Wendigo of Algonquian tradition. Famine A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, inflation, crop failure, population imbalance, or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased
Bengal famine of 1943 the social and administrative conditions at the time, local officials would very likely have overlooked them. Academic consensus generally follows the FEE account, as formulated by and , in describing the Bengal famine of 1943 as an "entitlements famine". On this view, the prelude to the famine was generalised war-time inflation, and the problem was exacerbated by prioritised distribution and abortive attempts at price control, but the death blow was devastating leaps in the inflation rate due to heavy speculative buying. This in turn caused a fatal decline in the real wages of landless agricultural workers, transforming what should have