A famine is a widespread, extreme shortage of food that leads to mass starvation, severe malnutrition, and a sharp rise in deaths across an entire population. It is not simply hunger on a large scale. Famine is a specific, measurable catastrophe with formal criteria, and declaring one triggers an international emergency response. In 2024, more than 295 million people across 53 countries experienced acute hunger, but only a fraction of those situations crossed the threshold into famine.
How Famine Is Officially Defined
The international community uses a five-phase scale called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) to measure food crises. Phase 1 is minimal food insecurity. Phase 5, the most extreme level, is famine. For an area to be classified as famine, three conditions must be met simultaneously: at least 20 percent of households face an extreme lack of food, more than 30 percent of children under five are acutely malnourished, and the death rate in the population has risen to crisis levels, with at least two people per 10,000 dying every day from starvation or related causes.
All three thresholds must be crossed at the same time in the same area. A region can have devastating hunger, with millions of people unable to feed themselves, and still not meet the technical definition if one of those indicators falls short. That is why famine declarations are rare even when food crises are widespread. The classification is deliberately strict so that the word carries the full weight of its meaning: people are actively dying in large numbers, and without immediate outside intervention, the death toll will keep climbing.
What Causes Modern Famines
Famines today are almost never caused by a single factor. They emerge from a collision of forces: armed conflict, extreme weather, economic collapse, and political decisions that block food from reaching people who need it. Of these, conflict is the dominant driver. Most current famines are conflict-related, with armed groups destroying farms, displacing populations, and cutting off supply routes. The number of people facing acute food insecurity has more than doubled since 2019, from 137 million to over 295 million in 2024, and much of that increase tracks directly with the spread of war.
Climate plays a compounding role. Droughts, floods, and erratic rainfall destroy harvests and kill livestock in regions that depend on local agriculture. When a drought hits a country already destabilized by conflict, the combination can push millions from chronic hunger into outright crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine added another layer, driving up global food and fuel prices and making it harder for poor countries to import the grain and cooking oil their populations depend on.
Since 2016, famine has become more frequent. Researchers link this partly to the changing nature of global war economies, where warring parties use control over food as a strategic tool. Destroying agricultural infrastructure, blocking humanitarian aid convoys, and deliberately depriving civilians of food, water, and medicine are all tactics that have been documented in recent conflicts. These acts are explicitly prohibited under the Geneva Conventions and are classified as war crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
What Starvation Does to the Body
When the body stops receiving enough food, it moves through a predictable series of metabolic shifts to keep itself alive as long as possible. In the first day or two, the body burns through its stored sugar (glycogen), mainly from the liver and muscles. It also begins breaking down protein from muscle tissue to convert into glucose for the brain, which cannot run on fat directly.
By the second or third day, a critical transition occurs. The body shifts from burning sugar to burning fat. Fatty acids flood the bloodstream from fat stores, and the liver begins converting them into molecules called ketone bodies, which the brain can use as fuel. This switch is what allows humans to survive extended periods without food. It spares muscle and organ tissue from being consumed for energy, at least temporarily.
Over weeks of continued starvation, the body’s fat reserves shrink and it begins breaking down muscle and organ tissue more aggressively. The heart, which is a muscle, weakens. The immune system collapses, leaving the person vulnerable to infections that a healthy body could easily fight off. In famine conditions, most people die not from starvation alone but from diseases like cholera, measles, or pneumonia that overwhelm a body too depleted to resist. Children under five and the elderly are the most vulnerable, and they die first.
Recent Famine Declarations
Official famine declarations are rare precisely because the bar is so high. In the 21st century, there have been only a handful. In July 2011, famine was declared in parts of southern Somalia after a combination of conflict, drought, and poor rains left roughly 490,000 people in the most extreme category of food insecurity. Tens of thousands died. In February 2017, famine was declared in parts of South Sudan’s Unity State, where nearly 80,000 people faced outright famine conditions and another one million were one step below, in the emergency phase.
In 2020, parts of South Sudan’s Jonglei State were classified as “Famine Likely,” a designation used when evidence strongly suggests famine but full confirmation is not yet possible. Then in July 2024, a famine review committee confirmed that famine was ongoing in Zamzam, a camp for displaced people in North Darfur, Sudan. Each of these declarations followed months or years of warning signs that went unheeded or were impossible to act on because of active fighting.
How Famines Are Predicted
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) monitors food insecurity in the world’s most vulnerable countries, often projecting crises months before they peak. Analysts track a combination of indicators: rainfall and crop conditions using satellite imagery, staple food prices in local markets, household income levels, macroeconomic trends, trade policies, and political stability. When multiple indicators deteriorate at once in the same region, analysts issue escalating alerts.
The goal is to trigger aid before a crisis becomes a famine. Emergency food distributions from the World Food Programme aim to provide 2,100 calories per person per day in contexts where people depend entirely on outside assistance. That number represents the minimum daily energy requirement to sustain an adult. In practice, getting food into famine zones is often the hardest part, especially when roads are destroyed, borders are closed, or armed groups are actively blocking deliveries. The gap between predicting a famine and preventing one is almost always political, not logistical.
Why the Word Matters
The distinction between severe hunger and famine is more than academic. A formal famine declaration puts pressure on governments and international organizations to mobilize funding and resources at emergency speed. It names the crisis as one where people are already dying in large numbers, not one where they might in the future. Before the IPC system existed, there was no standardized way to measure or compare food crises across countries, which made it easier for governments and the international community to downplay or ignore them.
That same precision can also be a limitation. Millions of people in IPC Phase 3 (crisis) and Phase 4 (emergency) are severely malnourished and at risk of death, but because their region has not crossed all three Phase 5 thresholds, they do not receive the same level of attention or funding. The vast majority of hunger-related deaths occur in phases below famine, spread across years rather than concentrated in a single catastrophic event.