FAMINE, extreme and general scarcity of food, causing dis tress and deaths from starvation among the population of a dis trict or country (Lat. fames, hunger) . The causes of famine are partly natural and partly artificial. Among the natural causes may be classed all failures of crops due to excess or defect of rainfall and other meteorological phenomena, or to the ravages of insects and vermin. Among the artificial causes may be classed war, and economic errors in the production, transport and sale of food stuffs, etc.
The natural causes of famine are still mainly outside our con trol, though science enables agriculturists to combat them more successfully, and the improvement in means of transport allows a rich harvest in one land to supplement the defective crops in another. In tropical countries drought is the commonest cause of a failure in the harvest, and where great droughts are not uncommon—as in parts of India and Australia—the hydraulic engineer comes to the rescue by devising systems of water-storage and irrigation. It is less easy to provide against the evils of excessive rainfall and of frost, hail, and the like. The experience of the French in Algiers shows that it is possible to stamp out a plague of locusts, such as is the greatest danger to the farmer in many parts of Argentina. But the ease with which food can nowadays be transported from one part of the world to another minimizes the danger of famine from natural causes, as we can hardly conceive that the whole food-producing area of the world should be thus affected at once. (See GRAIN PRODUCTION AND