A Million Deaths is a Statistic: A History of Famine Denialism
2024 Toronto Annual Famine Lecture
4 November 2024 | 7 p.m. EST
The Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture will take place in-person in the Campbell Conference Facility, Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, and online via Zoom.
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This year’s Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture will be delivered by world-renowned famine expert Alex de Waal, who will be speaking on famine denialism, both historical and contemporary.
“It’s common for those responsible for famines to deny them, while they are raging and afterwards. This was the case in colonial India and post-colonial China, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Yemen. At the time of the Holodomor, Josef Stalin infamously said, ‘If one man dies of hunger, it is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.’ Denialism takes several forms, including outright factual denial—explaining the calamity as something else and giving a different meaning to starvation in order to justify inflicting it. Today, with internationally validated metrics for measuring food insecurity and determining ‘famine,’ such as the United Nations–accredited Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), denialists have adopted new methods for dealing with inconvenient statistics. The deepest denial is that famines are man-made, profound societal traumas.”
Alex de Waal is a research professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, and leads research programs on African peacemaking and mass starvation at the World Peace Foundation, where he is the executive director.
Professor de Waal is the author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa, and, most recently, New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives. He has led projects on conflict and humanitarian crises in Africa (2006–9), and his scholarly work and practice probe issues related to humanitarian crisis and response, human rights, pandemic disease, and conflict and peace-building. This year de Waal received the Huxley Award of the Royal Anthropological Institute, which recognizes distinguished achievement in anthropological research.
The Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture was initiated in 1998 and is organized by CIUS's Holodomor Research and Education Consortium. It is co-sponsored by the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies (CEES), University of Toronto; Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies; Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Toronto; Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, University of Toronto; and St. Volodymyr Institute – SVI (Toronto).