Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights

T he " Third World " – the division of humanity into haves and have-nots – was shaped by fatal interactions between world climate and world economy at the end of the nineteenth century. Three waves of drought, famine and disease devastated agriculture throughout the tropics and northern China when the monsoons failed. The total human toll could not have been less than 30 million victims. Fifty million dead might not be unre-alistic. Researchers have since found the fingerprints of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) – the vast oscillation in air mass and Pacific ocean temperature – all over these catastrophic climate disasters and crop failures (see Box, p.16). But nature alone is rarely so deadly. Millions of cultivators in India and China had been recently incorporated into webs of world trade as subsistence adversity, caused by various state and imperial policies, had encouraged them to turn to cash-crop cultivation. As a result, peasants and farmers became dramatically more vulnerable after 1850 to natural disasters such as extreme climate events and were at the same time whiplashed by long-distance economic perturbations whose origins were as mysterious as those of the weather. The " Third World " (a Cold War term) is the outgrowth of income and wealth inequalities – the famous " development gap " – that were shaped most decisively in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the great non-European peasantries were initially integrated into the world economy. 1 The famine " prisoners of starvation " were as much inventions of the late nineteenth century as electric lights, Maxim guns and " scientific " racism. Many contemporary policy makers, however, ascribed the nineteenth century famines not just to bad weather but also to Malthu-sian pressures – too many people, too little land, too little food – an explanation which survives today. But Malthusian explanations were not only wrong-headed at the time: they were also contributory causes of the deaths that occurred. Absolute scarcity of food, except perhaps in Ethiopia in 1889, was never the issue. Standing between life and death during these droughts were new commodity markets and price speculation, on one side, and the will and capacity of the state to relieve crop failure on the other. Although crop failures and water shortages were of epic proportion, often