Famine scales

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Famine scales are tools that measure how food secure a population is, from a normal situation with enough food to a full famine. There has long been debate about what exactly counts as a famine, because the word carries strong emotional and political meanings and there isn’t one agreed-upon definition.

Early ideas treated famine as an event. One of the first systems, the Indian Famine Codes from the 1880s, split food insecurity into near-scarcity, scarcity, and famine. Famine meant things like a big rise in food prices and large numbers of people dying or moving in search of food. In some codes, famine was declared when death seemed imminent. These codes influenced later warning systems but stayed focused on famine as a single event.

In northern Kenya, the Turkana District Early Warning System shows how a system can track a crisis over time. It uses indicators such as rainfall, cereal prices, livestock health, rangeland conditions, and people joining food-for-work programs. It designates three crisis levels—alarm, alert, and emergency—and ties each level to a planned response to prevent things from getting worse.

From the 2000s, international agencies created their own measures. In 2002, the World Food Programme (WFP) added “pre-famine” indicators for Ethiopia and mixed them with nutrition data to guide action. In Somalia, the Food Security Analysis Unit (FSAU) used four levels: Non-alert (near normal), Alert (needs close monitoring), Livelihood Crisis (basic social structures at risk), and Humanitarian Emergency (widespread mortality risk requiring urgent help). This work helped lead to a broader five-phase system called the IPC, which distinguishes between saving lives and saving livelihoods. Over time, relief work recognized that families’ ability to support themselves often weakens before people start dying, so famine is seen as a social problem as well as a food problem.

Nutrition and health also play a role. Researchers look at various indicators and cutoffs to decide when a situation is a famine. Some argue a certain death rate signals a full emergency, while others note that children are often checked first, and that malnutrition can be caused by disease or poor care as well as a lack of food. Also, malnutrition does not always line up perfectly with available food.

In 2004, Howe and Devereux proposed a practical framework that uses two ideas: intensity (how bad the situation is in a place) and magnitude (how widespread it is overall). They assign each famine a Magnitude level and then different Intensity levels for areas within the affected region. For example, the 1998 Sudan famine was described as Major Famine with high intensity in some areas, while the 2000 Ethiopian famine was Moderate. The framework has been widely used to discuss famine warning and relief, and organizations like the WFP use it to determine when a crisis reaches a certain level.

Today, many agencies distinguish between saving lives and saving livelihoods when they assess a famine. This helps them decide whether to focus on immediate hunger relief or on protecting people’s ability to support themselves in the longer term.

As of 2025, Sudan and Afghanistan are categorized as catastrophic and at the highest level of famine intensity, indicating extreme hunger and the need for urgent, large-scale help.