This file is a brief polemical essay in political economy, written amid public debate over famine relief, especially in Ethiopia. Rothbard’s central thesis is that famine is not primarily a natural disaster but a political consequence of socialist and statist assaults on agriculture. He opens by rejecting the media frame of drought, relief logistics, and governmental blame-shifting, insisting that the deeper question is institutional: why famine appears where states cripple food production.
The root of famine lies not in the gods or in the stars but in the actions of man.
The essay’s structure is simple and cumulative. Rothbard first challenges climatic explanations, then links famine to state control of agriculture, then generalizes from communist Russia, China, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and postcolonial Africa, and finally concludes with a libertarian remedy. His core conceptual move is to treat peasants and farmers as the productive class and the state bureaucracy as a parasitic ruling class.
Given causes yield given effects, and it is an ineluctable law of nature and of man that if agriculture is systematically crippled and exploited, food production will collapse, and famine will be the result.
For Rothbard, the Third World is especially vulnerable because agriculture is central and foreign food cannot easily be bought in emergencies. Statist policy is therefore most destructive precisely where farming needs the greatest freedom and security. He portrays Marxist and postcolonial regimes as extracting wealth from rural producers to support urban bureaucrats and political clients.
The root of the problem is the Third World, where (a) agriculture is overwhelmingly the most important industry, and (b) the people are not affluent enough, in any crisis, to purchase foods from abroad.
The essay adapts a class-conflict vocabulary against Marxism itself: the exploiters are not capitalists but state officials, planners, and urban beneficiaries of cheap food. Rothbard argues that taxation, compulsory sales to the state, collectivization, and price controls destroy incentives and reduce output.
Yet, wherever there is production, there are also parasitic classes living off the producers.
His historical examples are sharply compressed: pre-Communist Russia exported grain, while the Soviet Union imported it; communist Russia and China killed or displaced productive farmers; Ethiopia and Mozambique suffered under Marxist-Leninist rule. The relevance of the essay lies in this interpretation of famine relief politics: humanitarian crises, Rothbard argues, cannot be separated from the political systems that produced scarcity.
The answer to famine in Ethiopia or elsewhere is not international food relief.
Rothbard’s conclusion follows directly from his diagnosis. Because relief is handled by recipient governments, he contends, it strengthens the very bureaucracies responsible for rural impoverishment and diverts food toward urban constituencies. The remedy is therefore not better aid administration but the dismantling of coercive controls over farming.
The answers to famine are private property and free markets.
The essay is thus both an intervention in the 1980s famine debate and a concise statement of Rothbard’s broader libertarian economics: famine is made by politics when states violate property, suppress prices, and exploit producers; abundance depends on freeing agriculture from state domination.
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