Great Famine

The **Great Famine** was a period of mass starvation and disease on Earth lasting between 2023 to 2033. Estimates of the death toll vary, but ranging from 100 million to half a billion deaths. The famine led to worldwide revolutions and social unrest, and was only stopped by the mass market adoption of vat grown meats and improved agriculture conditions in the northern hemisphere.

The proximate causes of famine was sea level rise and ocean desalination which ravaged fishing yields throughout the North Atlantic during the late 2020s and 30s, and destroyed billions of acres of arable land. However, the global impact was disproportionate, as 17% of the global population were dependent of Fish as a staple food source and only the desalination largely impacted the North Atlantic before water salinity evened out, thereby impacting fish harvested in North American and European markets more severely than in Asia, which only saw a 22% reduction in fishing yields compared to the North Atlantic's 70%. The impact on arable land was also disproportionate as rice farming was far more heavily impacted than other forms of agriculture. This is believed to have been the chief cause of the Great Famine as 3.5 Billion people depended on Rice for 20% of their daily calories. Production of Rice in 2027 was cut in half and would not recover to pre-flood levels until 2079. The damage done to Bangladesh alone reduced Rice production by 9%.

The famine and its effects permanently changed the demographic, political, and cultural landscapes of many countries. For both the local populations and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory and became a rallying point for revolutionary and separatist groups. The already strained relations between many Chinese peasants and the Communist government in Beijing soured further, heightening ethnic and sectarian tensions in Pakistan, and boosted nationalist sentiment and political action in Europe and America.

The Great Famine forced tens of millions of families to abandon their farms. Many of these families migrated north into former Russia and the Americas to find that the worldwide recession had rendered economic conditions there little better than those they had left.

The Great Famine has been the subject of many cultural works, notably the novel *The Chain* (2035) by Zillur Haque, the documentary *Hunger* (2041), and photographs depicting the conditions of migrants by photographers the world over.

## Causes and contributing factors

While today treated as a single period of starvation and food insecurity, until the end of the 21st century the Great Famine was identified as 3 separate events: the Famine of 2022-2024, the Great Famine of 2027, and the American Famine of 2029-2031. While these famines impacted specific regions of the world for only the aforementioned periods, worldwide food insecurity and starvation did not end until the technologies that led to the Third Agricultural Revolution went global.

### **Supply China Interruptions**

The 2020s saw the collapse of a global economic system that had emerged at the end of the Second World War, commonly referred to as the Breton Woods System. This collapse is generally accepted to have begun with the COVID-19 pandemic, however at the time most associated it with the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022 and subsequent collapse of the Russian Federation. Prior to the Russo-Ukrainian War, Russia was the world's largest exporter of wheat and fertilizers, and Ukraine was the world's 5th largest exporter of wheat. The war, beginning at the start of the 2022 planting season, interrupted the export of fertilizer at the start of planting season, and limited the export of grain to the wider world during the Fall of 2022. The subsequent global famine caused a global famine that killed some 40 million people from 2022 to 2024.

The period of famine starting in 2027 resulting from the Flood, while primarily associated with the loss of arable land and ocean desalination, also saw the destruction of most of the world's largest port cities, severely limiting international maritime shipping of both food and agricultural inputs.

The American phase of famine, resulting directly from the White Tide, was unique among the prior famines as it was primarily limited to the production and export of livestock feed, of which the United States was the world's primary producer.

## Government response

By 2027 the United Nations finally came to an agreement to reduce barriers to adoption of GMOs and improve the speed of research for Genetic Engineering and cloning.