Why record harvests make famines far rarer — and what still holds us back

If you ever find yourself in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan, turn down Vesey Street toward North End Avenue. You’ll arrive at something unusual: a collection of stones, soil and moss, artfully arranged to look over the Hudson River.

It’s the Irish Hunger Memorial, a piece of public artwork that commemorates the devastating Irish famine of the mid-19th century, which led to the deaths of at least 1 million people and permanently altered Ireland’s history, forcing the emigration of millions more Irish to cities like New York.

The Irish famine is unusual in how heavily commemorated it is, with more than 100 memorials in Ireland itself and around the world. Other famines, including ones that killed far more people like the 1943 Bengal famine in India or China’s 1959–’61 famine, largely go without major public memorials.

It shouldn’t be this way. Researchers estimate that since 1870 alone, approximately 140 million people have died of famine. Go back further in history, and famines become ever more common and ever more deadly. One horrible famine in northern Europe in the early 14th century killed as much as 12 percent of the entire region’s population in a handful of years. Even outside famine years, the availability of food was a constant pressure on the human population.

So, while hunger is still far too common today, famines themselves are far, far rarer — and are much more likely to be the result of human failures than of crop failures. It’s one of the great human achievements of the modern age, one we too often fail to recognize.

The news gets even better: By the latest tallies, the world is on track to grow more grain this year than ever before. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects record levels of production of global cereal crops like wheat, corn and rice in the 2025–’26 farming season. Hidden inside that data is another number that’s just as important: a global stocks-to-use ratio around 30.6 percent — meaning the world is producing nearly a third more of these foundational crops than it is currently using.

The US Department of Agriculture’s August outlook points the same way: a record US corn crop, and even more importantly, a record yield, or the amount of crop grown per acre of land. That last number is especially important: the more we can grow on one acre, the less land we need to farm to meet global demand for food. The FAO Food Price Index, which tracks the cost of an international basket of food commodities, is up a bit this year, but is nearly 20 percent below the peak during the early months of the war in Ukraine.

Zoom out, and the long arc of improvement is starker. Average calories available per person worldwide have been climbing for decades, from roughly 2,100 to 2,200 kcal/day in the early 1960s to just under 3,000 kcal/day by 2022. Meanwhile, cereal yields have roughly tripled since 1961. Those two lines — more food per person, more grain per hectare — have helped carry us out of the old Malthusian shadow.

As with farming, start at the seed. The short-straw wheat and rice of the Green Revolution made the most of fertilizer, hybrid seeds added a yield bonus, genetically modified crops arrived in the ’90s, and now CRISPR lets breeders make surgical edits to a plant’s own genes.

Once you’ve got the seeds, you need fertilizer. The world was once dependent on natural sources of nitrogen that there was a mad dash to harvest nitrogen-rich dried bird poop or guano in the 19th century, but in 1912, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed their process for creating synthetic nitrogen for fertilizer. The Haber-Bosch process is so important that half of today’s food likely depends on it.

Now add water. Where once most farmers had to depend on the weather to water their plants, irrigated farmland has more than doubled since 1961, with that land providing some 60 percent of the world’s cereal crops, and in turn half the world’s calories. Incredibly productive farmland like California’s Central Valley would be unimaginable without extensive irrigation.

And finally, get the food to people. Better logistics and global trade has created a system that can shuffle calories from surplus to deficit when something goes wrong locally.

But this doesn’t mean the system is perfect — or perpetual.

Why do we still have hunger?

While the world routinely grows more than enough calories, healthy diets remain out of reach for billions. The World Bank estimates around 2.6 billion people can’t afford a healthy diet. That number has fallen slightly from past years, but the situation is getting worse in sub-Saharan Africa.

When famines do occur today, the causes tend to be far more political than they are agronomical. The terrible famines in Gaza and Sudan, where more than 25 million people are at risk of going hungry, are so awful precisely because they show the effects of man-made access failures amid a world of abundance. (Though in Gaza, at least, the apparent peace deal is finally providing hope for relief.)

Another threat to progress against famine also has a political dimension: climate change. Though basic crop harvests and yields have so far proven largely resilient against the effects of warming, climate scientists warn that risks to food security will rise with temperatures, especially via heat, drought, and compound disasters that can hit multiple breadbaskets at once. The good news is that adaptation — smarter agronomy, stress-tolerant varieties, irrigation efficiency — can cushion losses up to around 2 degrees Celsius. But our options may narrow beyond that.

A more self-inflicted wound could come via trade restrictions. One of the worst recent food price crises, in 2007 and 2008, happened less because of production failures than political ones, as governments restricted exports, leading to price spikes that hit the poor hardest. That’s a worrying precedent given the Trump administration’s renewed push for tariffs and trade barriers.

The Irish Hunger Memorial is a reminder of how terrible scarcity can be — and how far we’ve come. After thousands of years when hunger was a given, humanity has built a food system that, for all its flaws, feeds eight billion and keeps setting harvest records. For all the challenges we face today and that may come tomorrow, that’s a story worth commemorating.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!