The Famine

June 23, 2026 • 1876 to 1878, the El Nino famines • 3 min read

Verified 6 claims · 8 searches · 1 pass

A painterly editorial illustration in dust-ochre, faded colonial white and sombre grey. At a colonial Indian port in 1877, porters load sacks of wheat onto a British steamer while gaunt famine victims watch from the quay, the harbour and a smoke-tinged waterfront beyond. The suffering is rendered with restraint and dignity. The mood is tragic and indicting: food leaving a starving land.

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The Echo

The Late Victorian El Nino famines, and how colonial free-market policy turned drought into mass death (1876 to 1878, the El Nino famines) ↔ In June 2026 the UN's World Food Programme and FAO warned that worsening hunger put 13 hotspots at risk, with a strong El Nino 61 to 87 percent likely by mid-year threatening harvests (rice could fall 20 to 50 percent in parts of South Asia and southern Africa) and the number facing acute hunger potentially returning to the levels of early 2022. But the echo of 1877 is exact: the danger is not only the weather. Funding for global food assistance has collapsed by nearly 60 percent since 2022; the Gulf war has driven up fuel and fertiliser prices (urea up about 46 percent in a month), raising the cost of growing food everywhere. Whether the 2026 El Nino becomes a famine, and where (Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen and Gaza are already at the edge), depends far less on rainfall than on choices: how much aid is funded, whether grain and fertiliser keep flowing, whether those in charge decide distant lives are worth saving. Drought is nature; famine is a decision. (Today)

In 2026, the United Nations is warning that a coming El Nino could push parts of the world toward famine. We tend to hear the word famine and picture drought, bad weather, bad luck. But the deadliest famines in history were not made by the weather. They were made by policy. The last time an El Nino this powerful struck a hungry world, it killed tens of millions of people, and almost none of them needed to die.

Go back to 1876. An El Nino failed the monsoon across India, and the crops withered. But India was not actually out of food. During the famine, under the British viceroy Lord Lytton, India exported a record amount of wheat to England, around three hundred and twenty thousand tonnes, while its own people starved in the fields the grain came from.

Lytton was a true believer in the free market. Interfering with it, he insisted, would do more harm than good, so relief was made deliberately punishing. To earn a ration you had to perform hard physical labour on a diet set below what a prisoner received, a ration so meagre that people died on it. Private charity was actively discouraged by law. And in 1877, at the very height of the dying, Lytton staged the Delhi Durbar, a week-long imperial pageant proclaiming Queen Victoria the Empress of India, a feast of elephants and fireworks, while perhaps millions starved within reach of it.

In India alone, somewhere between six and ten million people died.

And it was not only India. The same 1877 El Nino dried out northern China, where the Great North China Famine killed perhaps nine to thirteen million, and northeastern Brazil, in the catastrophe Brazilians still call the Grande Seca, the Great Drought. Across this linked chain of El Nino famines in the late nineteenth century, the death toll ran into the tens of millions, by some estimates between thirty and sixty million human beings.

The historian Mike Davis gave these events their name, in a book called Late Victorian Holocausts, and made the argument that haunts this whole story. The climate, he said, supplied the drought. But the mass death was manufactured. It was made by colonial governments so committed to the free market that they let grain flow out of starving regions because the ledgers said it should, and let people die rather than break the rules of political economy. Davis argued that this was, quite literally, where the modern Third World was made: prosperous regions hollowed out and broken by being forced, at the worst possible moment, into a global market that valued their grain more than their lives.

Now come back to 2026. The UN's World Food Programme and its Food and Agriculture Organisation are warning that a strong El Nino is likely to form by the middle of the year, that rice harvests across South Asia and southern Africa could fall by anywhere from a fifth to a half, and that the number of people facing acute hunger could jump by tens of millions. They have flagged thirteen hunger hotspots, with Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen and Gaza already at the edge of famine.

But read the warning closely, and the echo is almost exact. The danger is not only the weather. Funding for global food aid has collapsed by nearly sixty percent in just three years. The war around the Gulf has driven up the price of fuel and fertiliser, urea up forty-six percent in a single month, which raises the cost of growing food everywhere on earth. Whether the El Nino of 2026 actually becomes a famine, and where, depends far less on how much rain falls than on choices: how much aid is funded, whether grain and fertiliser are allowed to keep flowing, whether the people in charge decide that distant lives are worth the cost of saving.

That is the hard lesson Lytton's India still teaches, a hundred and fifty years on. Drought is nature. Famine is a decision.

El Nino has never killed anyone. It cannot. It withholds the rain, and then human beings decide who eats and who does not. In 1877, with full granaries within reach and grain ships sailing for England, they decided wrong, and tens of millions died. The rain is about to falter again in 2026. The decision, once again, is entirely ours.

History & Current Events 1876 to 1878, the El Nino famines In June 2026 the UN's World Food Programme and FAO warned that worsening hunger put 13 hotspots at risk, with a strong El Nino 61 to 87 percent likely by mid-year threatening harvests (rice could fall 20 to 50 percent in parts of South Asia and southern Africa) and the number facing acute hunger potentially returning to the levels of early 2022. But the echo of 1877 is exact: the danger is not only the weather. Funding for global food assistance has collapsed by nearly 60 percent since 2022; the Gulf war has driven up fuel and fertiliser prices (urea up about 46 percent in a month), raising the cost of growing food everywhere. Whether the 2026 El Nino becomes a famine, and where (Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen and Gaza are already at the edge), depends far less on rainfall than on choices: how much aid is funded, whether grain and fertiliser keep flowing, whether those in charge decide distant lives are worth saving. Drought is nature; famine is a decision.

Sources & Verification (6 claims checked, 8 searches)

The Great Famine of 1876-78 in British India, triggered by an El Nino-related failure of the monsoon, killed an estimated 6 to 10 million people across the Deccan, the Madras and Bombay presidencies and princely states such as Mysore and Hyderabad, affecting more than 50 million.

en.wikipedia.org — "The Great Famine of 1876-78 in British India, triggered by El Nino-linked drought, caused excess mortality estimated at "

Under Viceroy Lord Lytton, British relief adhered to laissez-faire doctrine: rations were tied to hard labour at a ration set below subsistence, private charity was discouraged, and during the famine British India exported a record amount of wheat (about 320,000 tonnes / 6.4 million hundredweight) to England.

en.wikipedia.org — "Under Lytton, relief required labour for rations on a near-starvation diet and limited free aid on laissez-faire grounds"

At the height of the famine, in January 1877, Lytton staged the Delhi Durbar, a lavish imperial assemblage proclaiming Queen Victoria Empress of India.

en.wikipedia.org — "The 1877 Delhi Durbar, organised under Viceroy Lytton, proclaimed Queen Victoria Empress of India, held amid the Great F"

The same 1877-78 El Nino caused drought and famine beyond India: the Great North China Famine of 1876-79 killed roughly 9 to 13 million people, and northeastern Brazil suffered the Grande Seca (Great Drought) of 1877-79.

en.wikipedia.org — "The 1876-78 El Nino drove famine in India, the Great North China Famine (about 9 to 13 million deaths), and the Grande S"

Mike Davis's 2001 book 'Late Victorian Holocausts' argues that the linked El Nino famines of 1876-78, 1896-97 and 1899-1902 killed between roughly 30 and 60 million people across India, China, Brazil and elsewhere, and that the mass deaths were driven less by drought alone than by the laissez-faire and Malthusian economic ideology of the colonial governments, which kept exporting grain from starving regions.

en.wikipedia.org — "Davis argues that 30 to 60 million famine deaths in the late nineteenth century were caused by the interaction of ENSO c"

In June 2026 the UN's World Food Programme and FAO warned that worsening hunger put 13 hotspots at risk, with a strong El Nino 61 to 87 percent likely by mid-2026 threatening rice and other harvests (potential 20 to 50 percent falls in parts of South Asia and southern Africa), food-insecure numbers potentially returning to 2022 levels, food-aid funding down about 59 percent since 2022, and Gulf-war disruptions driving fertiliser prices up (urea about 46 percent in a month); Sudan, South Sudan, Yemen and Gaza were the most critical.

news.un.org — "A June 2026 FAO-WFP report warns worsening hunger could push millions closer to famine in 13 hotspots, with Sudan, South"
www.cnbc.com — "A 'super El Nino' (61 to 87 percent probability by mid-2026) threatens crop production with possible 20 to 50 percent fa"