A subsistence crisis is a crisis caused by economic factors, and example being high costs for food, which may be caused by either natural or man-made factors.
["The European subsistence crisis of 1845–1850: a comparative perspective", http://www.helsinki.fi/iehc2006/papers3/Vanhaute.pdf, 20 June 2012] This threatens the food supplies and the survival prospects of large numbers of people. If it is extremely severe and many lives are lost, it is considered a famine. A subsistence crisis can be considered genuine if it is visible in
demographic
Demography () is the statistical study of populations, especially human beings.
Demographic analysis examines and measures the dimensions and dynamics of populations; it can cover whole societies or groups defined by criteria such as ed ...
data.
It was in France that the concept of a subsistence crisis was first formulated by Meuvret in 1946, and greatly popularized by Goubert in 1960 through his influential study of the Beauvaisis in
Beauvais
Beauvais ( , ; pcd, Bieuvais) is a city and commune in northern France, and prefecture of the Oise département, in the Hauts-de-France region, north of Paris.
The commune of Beauvais had a population of 56,020 , making it the most popul ...
.
[Walter, John, and Roger S. Schofield. "Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Print., https://books.google.com/books?id=uCERvGiMYdIC&lpg=PA189&dq=france%20subsistence%20crisis&pg=PA48#v=onepage&q=france%20subsistence%20crisis&f=false] The theory of subsistence crises, in its contemporary guise, was first formulated by Meuvret in 1946. As an economic historian and specialist in price history, Meuvret was struck by the coincidence between high prices and the increase in the number of deaths in the region of Gien in 1709–10. He then posed the problem of the nature of demographic crises, very tentatively at first, since he thought it was a hopeless quest to try to distinguish statistically between phenomena that were so closely associated: namely, mortality through simple inanition (starvation); mortality caused by disease, though attributable to malnutrition; and mortality by contagion, which in turn was linked to the scarcity that helped both spawn diseases and spread them through the migration of poor beggars.
Examples of subsistence crises
*France, 1788–1789, in which two years of
crop failures and
low yields caused a
grain
A grain is a small, hard, dry fruit ( caryopsis) – with or without an attached hull layer – harvested for human or animal consumption. A grain crop is a grain-producing plant. The two main types of commercial grain crops are cereals and legum ...
shortage
*The
Year Without a Summer
The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by . Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest on record between the years of 1766–2000. This ...
of 1816
*The
Great Irish Famine
The Great Famine ( ga, an Gorta Mór ), also known within Ireland as the Great Hunger or simply the Famine and outside Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a h ...
, 1845 to 1849
See also
*
Famine
A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, natural disasters, crop failure, population imbalance, widespread poverty, an economic catastrophe or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompan ...
References
{{reflist
Famines
Food politics