(n.) General scarcity of food; dearth; a want of provisions; destitution.
Example Sentences:
(1) Somalia has faced drought; famine; decades of conflict, now involving the Islamist rebels of al-Shabaab among other groups; the absence of an effective, central authority; and spiralling food prices.
(2) Those areas remain under the control of al-Shabaab, the Islamist insurgents, who have restricted access to those affected by famine because they view western aid agencies with suspicion.
(3) Stephen O’Brien, the UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, told the security council in New York on Friday that more than 20 million people in four countries – Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan and north-east Nigeria – were facing starvation and famine, numbers that would make this the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of the second world war.
(4) If you have a second generalised failure of crops across the region you will certainly have the early set in of a food crisis or possibly a famine in the Sahel,” he said.
(5) Hagere Selam remains a modest place of mudwalled shops with corrugated roofs, cows, donkeys and sheep wandering unpaved streets and children idling away an afternoon at table football – a generation with no memory of the famine that killed hundreds of thousands and woke up the world.
(6) In 1830, the Celtic seaboard nations made up nearly 40% of the United Kingdom; that dropped throughout the 19th century due to the Irish famine and emigration.
(7) Famine is stalking Somalia after a year of poor rains and heavy fighting, with more than a million lives at risk and little sense of urgency from the international community, the top UN envoy to the country warned.
(8) Effects on health include an increase in mortality rates, famine and infectious disease epidemics.
(9) The UN warns that 800,000 children could die from starvation, and last week declared a famine in some parts of the country.
(10) The alternative is a famine akin to that seen in Ethiopia 30 years ago.
(11) Natural "bridges" could also be created to help the pandas escape from a bamboo famine.
(12) "What ends up happening is we only intervene when the malnutrition gets to a famine level or a humanitarian emergency level, and then what's the cost of that?"
(13) Since the mid-1970s, the mental health treatment system in the U.S. has faced budgetary famine.
(14) That television news report by the BBC's Michael Buerk in 1984 framed Ethiopia for a generation as a place of famine and in need of salvation.
(15) When drought struck India in 1877 and 1878, the British imperial government insisted on exporting record amounts of grain, precipitating a famine that killed millions .
(16) Famine has already been declared in parts of South Sudan .
(17) There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, famine and mass displacement that will fuel more conflict for decades.
(18) After all, it was the state system that allowed an estimated one million people to starve during the ‘arduous march’ famine of the late 1990s .
(19) According to Unicef, some 250 children die from malnutrition daily in Yemen and scenes in Mazrak at times resemble a famine.
(20) She worked in the highly infectious “red zone” near Freetown and wrote in a diary for the Scotsman how she had been inspired to become a health worker after seeing images of the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s.
Famish
Definition:
(v. t.) To starve, kill, or destroy with hunger.
(v. t.) To exhaust the strength or endurance of, by hunger; to distress with hanger.
(v. t.) To kill, or to cause to suffer extremity, by deprivation or denial of anything necessary.
(v. t.) To force or constrain by famine.
(v. i.) To die of hunger; to starve.
(v. i.) To suffer extreme hunger or thirst, so as to be exhausted in strength, or to come near to perish.
(v. i.) To suffer extremity from deprivation of anything essential or necessary.
(a.) Smoky; hot; choleric.
Example Sentences:
(1) The peculiar features of SBH are discussed by means of optical, cytochemical, electron microscopical investigations which point out the polymorphous aspect of these "famished" macrophages.
(2) In a new study of hunger's effects on the mind, neuroscientists pieced together what happens in the brain that makes us buy more food when we are famished.
(3) After 30 years I now understand the words that a character in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road says to the white man who complains he hasn’t been able to leave Africa: you can get out of Africa, when you can get Africa out of you.
(4) Even in those most crucial final moments, irreverent presenters Mel and Sue sidled around the marquee, minesweeping offcuts like two St Trinian’s gels totally famished after lacrosse.
(5) And from there we proceeded with the Prijedor police chief and camp commander Zeljko Mejakic through the gates of Omarska, to behold men in various states of shocking decay emerging from a great hangar, being drilled across a yard and into a canteen, where they wolfed down watery bean stew like famished dogs.
(6) Catton takes the youngest winner title from Ben Okri who was 32 when The Famished Road won the Booker prize in 1991.
(7) Last week, a famished woman whose benefits were stopped was prosecuted and fined more than £300 for stealing a 75p pack of Mars Bars.