Scarcity by design: famine, structural violence, and the biosocial inheritance of political deprivation

Famine is conventionally understood as a crisis of food supply, yet historical and contemporary evidence reveals it as a product of structural violence: political decisions, colonial extraction, and military force that manufacture scarcity and inscribe its consequences onto human bodies across generations. This conceptual analysis examines the intergenerational biology of famine through three cases: the 1944-45 Dutch Hunger Winter, colonial-era famines in India, and the ongoing famine in Gaza. Drawing on the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) paradigm, social medicine, and global health scholarship, we argue that famine's metabolic, immunological, and neurodevelopmental consequences are enabled not only by the severity and timing of caloric deprivation but by the political structures that determine whether deprivation is temporary or sustained, and whether recovery is supported or obstructed. The Dutch case affirms potent within-generation effects partially buffered by postwar welfare reconstruction; colonial India demonstrates how centuries of imperial extraction produced enduring, population-level metabolic vulnerability; and Gaza combines acute starvation with decades of siege, occupation, and infrastructural destruction. A biosocial framework resituates famine as both immediate violence and long-term biological imprinting, urging accountability beyond humanitarian logics of survival to encompass reparative justice, self-determination, and the dismantling of the political systems that produce manufactured hunger.