PHD, Kent State University, 2018, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Geography

This study investigates the relationship between the reorganization of food provisioning systems and large-scale food crises through a comparative historical analysis of three famines: Hawaii in the 1820s, Madagascar in the 1920s, and Cambodia in the 1970s. The study identifies and analyzes the structural transformations–that is, changes to the relationships between producers and consumers–that make food provisioning systems more vulnerable to failure. Up to now, economic and political explanations for food crisis have dominated the literature. These approaches tend to focus on a small set of spatially and temporally proximate conditions and neglect important socio-ecological interactions. Using approaches from comparative historical analysis, political ecology, and Marxist political economy, this study focuses on the role of large-scale and long-term socio-ecological processes in famine genesis. For each case, the study identifies the causal mechanisms and interactions that precipitated famine. These results are compared using contextualized mechanistic analysis to reveal structural similarities and differences between cases. On this basis, the study develops a novel framework for crisis evolution that identifies two distinct temporal phases and five different types of causal mechanisms involved in food system failure. The framework contributes to current work in food studies and offers the potential for structural indicators of future crisis. With current food systems undergoing dramatic transformation in response to population growth and movement, political upheaval, climate change, and market expansion, it is imperative that policy makers identify and eschew the structural changes that are precursors to disaster.

Committee: James Tyner PhD (Committee Chair); Mandy Munro-Stasiuk PhD (Committee Member); Victoria Turner PhD (Committee Member); Joshua Stacher PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography; History