The Famine Developing in Gaza Follows a Clear Pattern
Famine is affecting an increasing number of people in Gaza, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere around the globe, and its development follows a clear pattern
Palestinian children collect free food handouts from a volunteer hospice in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Sunday, Dec. 17, 2023.
Ahmad Salem/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The following essay is reprinted with permission from 
The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
The United Nations’ latest report on hunger makes for grim reading. On April 24, 2024, the international body released its annual Global Report on Food Crises, showing that 281.6 million people faced acute hunger in 2023.
And indications for 2024 suggest worse may be to come. In March, the United Nations’ highest technical body for assessing food and nutrition crises warned of an “imminent famine” in Gaza. The U.N. also raised the alarm about situations in Sudan, Haiti and other countries around the world.
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To those of us who study global hunger issues, the situations in Gaza, Sudan, Haiti and a host of other countries reflect a growing trend in which severe crises – often, but not only, related to conflict – have the potential to become famines.
But how and under what conditions do famines form?
Recent academic thinking suggests that famines can be viewed as complex systems. As a scholar who researches hunger and humanitarian relief efforts, I wanted to see if it was possible to identify a consistent underlying pattern in the way these systems formed.
So in 2018 I developed a famine systems model that identifies five elements that describe the evolution of these crises. First,…
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