From: The Australian October 02, 2010
Beyond penance and prayer, starving people have always adopted other and more palpable strategies, and these recourses are similar, famine to famine. Among the images of women that appeared during the Irish famine in the Illustrated London News is the memorable Woman Begging at Clonakilty. Clonakilty is a town in West Cork, a region where the famine was at its most intense. In this renowned engraving, the woman has in her right arm a skeletal baby corpse. In her left hand she holds a begging bowl. The woman in the illustration, with her dead baby in her arms, is described as begging for money to buy a coffin for her dead daughter.
Her utter helplessness, however, her torpid look, hides the truth that, like other women in all famines, she has been an actor in her own tragedy, fighting it by every stratagem she can think of. She has pursued all her options with all her energy on her way to this fatal state. Looking at her and her modern sisters, we feel a primal desire to believe that we could never let ourselves arrive at such a pass as this, that we would never become as passive as she seems to be.
But there is another issue to raise. Even at these final stages of her hunger, is there any possibility that she is still actively pursuing her duty to survive? Apart from her obvious grief, is she using the small corpse as a begging aid? And should these two possibilities -- loss and stratagem -- be mutually exclusive? In the extreme mental derangement that characterises famine victims, in the shrinkage of family feeling, which is one of the marks of starvation, both possibilities can operate together. And if she is begging for money for food as well as a child's coffin, then that is exactly what famine experts call a "coping mechanism".
The Red Cross and World Food Program estimate that the average healthy person needs 2010 calories of energy daily to do their normal tasks and resist disease. Yet one of the first coping mechanisms, from the cabins of Ireland to the huts of Bengal and the farmhouses and tuqals of Ethiopia, is to economise on the amount of food eaten, thus reducing the intake necessary for good health. In East Africa, men and boys are fed first and the mother eats after them, having cut down on the food placed before the family. This is a form of customary practice, profoundly embedded though frowned on in the West, and sometimes condemned in tones that almost question the entitlement to relief of people who practise such cultural faux pas. But it is impossible to alter cultural habits in the span of a famine or even of a century. Besides, it is likely that in the early stages of all famines -- historic, recent and present -- women in families have tended to take the greater portion of hunger on themselves. The result of cutting down on food is, within a few days, a weakening of the immune system. As the family rations itself, keeping next year's seed crop sacredly reserved in a container safe from hungry gaze, it also finds its members have less strength to work. Shortage begets shortage.
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Another coping strategy in famines is the sale of family assets. In Ireland, it was a matter of selling clothes or fishing nets. Sadly, people bringing their goods to town to sell them on market day found prices much lower than they had hoped: many other people were doing the same in a glutted market. People in Bengal exchanged their pots and pans, furniture and trinkets for the fistfuls of food that grain trading pawnbrokers paid them from pouches they carried about with them. One observer says the buyers were always "aprowl" with their small rice bags and, if necessary, cash. Bengalis sold the metal roofs of their huts. They sold their plough cattle to contractors supplying meat to the military forces. They mortgaged or sold their rice-producing land. As a result, more than 250,000 Bengali families lost all the land they possessed.
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