Famines in Bangladesh occurred even when per capita food availability had not fallen below previous non-famine years, showing that aggregate supply decline is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce mass starvation. The decisive factor was the collapse of specific groups' command over food, not a nationwide deficit.
Starvation strikes households whose ability to acquire food through wages, sales, or production collapses, even while food sits in the market. Landless laborers and those dependent on selling labor for food are hit first because their entitlement depends on wage-to-price ratios that can crater while total supply holds.
Expectations of future scarcity, triggered by floods, war, or policy signals, can drive speculative hoarding and price spikes that far exceed what the physical supply gap warrants. The resulting price movement, not the harvest itself, becomes the proximate mechanism that prices vulnerable groups out of food.
Reading famine mortality by occupational group reveals that risk tracks how a household earns its food rather than where it lives or how much food the region holds. Agricultural laborers, transport workers, and non-cultivating rural poor show disproportionate death rates because their income sources evaporate precisely when food prices rise.
Separate the triggering event (flood, war, crop loss) from the structural conditions (land concentration, landlessness, weak public distribution) that convert a shock into mass death. The same physical shock produces catastrophe or not depending on the pre-existing distribution of assets and entitlements.
Excess deaths continue well after food prices have returned to normal, because disease, destitution, migration, and depleted assets kill people in the aftermath rather than at the moment of peak scarcity. Measuring famine only by starvation during the price spike systematically undercounts its toll.