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This is an incomplete list of major famines, ordered by date.

A complete list will almost certainly never become available.

Contents 1 5th century BC 2 5th century AD 3 14th century 4 16th century 5 17th century 6 18th century 7 19th century 8 20th century 9 21st century 9.1 Droughts which have not yet become famines 10 References

• 440 BC famine in Ancient Rome.

• Famine in Western Europe associated with the Fall of Rome and its sack by Alaric I. See Medieval demography.

• 1315-1317 Great Famine in Europe
• 1333-1337 famine in China

• 1567-1570 Famine in Harar in Ethiopia, combined with plague. Nur ibn Mujahid, Emir of Harar, died.
• 1590s famines in Europe

• 1618-1648 famines in Europe caused by Thirty Years' War
• 1630-1631 famine in India (Note: There was a corresponding famine in northwestern China, eventually causing the Ming dynasty to collapse in 1644.)
• 1693-1694 famine in France which killed 2 million people
• 1696-1697 famine in Finland

• 1740-1741 famine in Ireland
• 1770 famine in Bengal
• 1783 famine in Iceland caused by volcanic eruption

• 1816-1817 Famine in Europe (Year Without a Summer)
• 1830s Tenpo famine (Japan)
• 1845-1849 Irish Potato Famine
• 1846-1857 Highland Potato Famine in Scotland
• 1866 famine in India (Bengal and Orissa)
• 1866-1868 Famine in Finland
• 1879 Famine in Ireland
• 1876-1879 Famine in India, China, Brazil, Northern Africa (and other countries)
• 1888-1892 Ethiopian Great famine. Conditions worsen with cholera outbreaks (1889-92), a typhus epidemic, and a major smallpox epidemic (1889-90).
• 1896-1897 Famine in northern China
• 1896-1902 Famine in India

• 1914-1918 Mount Lebanon famine during World War I
• 1921 famine in Russia
• 1921-1922 Famine in Tatarstan
• 1928-1929 famine in northern China
• 1933 famine in Ukraine (Holodomor), other parts of Russia, Kazakhstan and Caucasus area
• 1941-1942 famine in Greece caused by Nazi occupation
• 1943 famine in Bengal
• 1944 famine in the Netherlands during World War II
• 1945 famine in Vietnam
• 1959-1961 Great Leap Forward / Three Years of Natural Disasters (China); this famine is considered the greatest famine in history. It killed more people than all the victims counted in List of massacres. Estimates are in the tens of millions.
• 1968-1972 Sahel drought
• 1973 famine in Ethiopia; failure of the government to handle this crisis led to fall of Haile Selassie and to Derg rule.
• 1974 famine in Bangladesh
• 1984 - 1985 famine in Ethiopia
• 1997 North Korean famine [1] [2]
• famine in Sudan caused by war and drought
• famine in Zimbabwe

• 2003- famine in Sudan/Darfur (Darfur conflict)
• 2005 Malawi food crisis
• 2005-06 Niger food crisis
• 2006 Horn of Africa food crisis

• Livy 4.13
• Famine in China