- A recent study links volcanic eruptions in Japan and Nicaragua in the 1800s to the Agra and Madras famines in India.
- While the volcanos triggered the drought, a combination of El Niño and colonial policies made the impacts worse, resulting in famine.
- The study also points to the dangers of geoengineering the stratosphere which could have similar impacts, leading to food crises.
Two volcanic eruptions — one in Japan, and the other in Nicaragua — spewed sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere in the 1830s. This in turn accelerated cooling and a monsoon failure that triggered droughts across British-administered Agra and Madras, according to a new study.
But while the volcanic eruptions triggered drought, it was decades of colonial over-taxation and environmental degradation that further turned the monsoon failure into famines which saw mass deaths.
Between 1832 and 1838, India witnessed poor monsoon. This period saw weather patterns shift globally. El Niño, a periodic climatic phenomenon in the southern hemisphere, which struck in 1833, was one of them. It affected monsoon circulation thereby bringing an extended spell of dry weather all over India. Droughts broke out in the British-administered Agra and Madras, affecting cultivation of rice, legumes and other seasonal crops. Colonial policies led to economic mismanagement, feeding a famine that left over 900,000 people dead.
The study, that establishes the link between these volcanic eruptions and the resulting famines, was published in the Journal of Historical Geography in December. It finds that the cooling effects of two distant volcanic eruptions — one near Japan in 1831, one in Nicaragua in 1835 — contributed to the severe monsoon failures in India. Because the peak cooling from the 1831 eruption happened to coincide with the El Niño’s onset, the two effects made the resulting drought worse than either would likely have caused on its own.
The new study adds to a “growing body of work from different disciplines that are showing these undeniable connections” between global climatic effects, the local patterns, and societal response, Atreyee Bhattacharya, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, in the United States, not involved in the study, said in an interview.
The volcano eruptions
In 1831, the Zavaritzkii Caldera, a volcano atop Simushir Island in northeast Japan, and three years later, Cosegüina, in northwest Nicaragua’s Chinandega region, erupted, spewing ash and plumes of sulphur aerosols into the atmosphere. While the ash settled within a day, the aerosols hovered in the atmosphere for years, blocking sunlight and cooling the planet by an average temperature of 1 degree Celsius. The drop may seem small, but the effect was far-reaching and devastating. The cooling also took place on the Indian landmass, weakening the temperature contrast between land and ocean that normally drives monsoon winds.
“I found two famines in India, basically straight afterwards,” Richard Warren, a historical geographer at the University of Bern, and the study’s sole author, said in an interview. The study was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation.
Warren has been in the midst of an analysis on establishing a link between the volcanic eruptions in the 1830s and famines across the globe, focusing on South and East Asia, combing through historical records for weather data as well as written accounts for evidence on their nature. The famines weren’t exclusive to India, Warren noted. China and Japan had their own share of them, but Warren’s yet to submit a paper confirming those findings.
To study the prevailing local climatic conditions in Madras and Agra, Warren fed weather data from records gleaned from British-administered India, available in the British Library, to reconstruct the country’s then climatic record, into a state-of-the-art global climate model built from a repository of historical data since the 15th century onwards.
His analysis showed how volcanic eruptions coupled with the El Niño effect and other climate factors caused a poor monsoon in India. During a typical monsoon, many regions in India see heavy rainfall, about 35 inches annually, owing to moisture-laden wind blowing inland from the ocean. But the planet-wide cooling after the volcanic eruptions changed wind patterns, and little moisture-laden air arrived from the ocean. This set up conditions for the major droughts and a decline in agricultural productivity in Madras and Agra.
Economic policies in British administered India
The decline in agricultural productivity would have been a given without the drought conditions in the first place. The economic policies in British-administered India at the same time were exploitative. Warren said the famines may have been prevented had East India Company stored grains and distributed them. Instead, prices soared — the cost of rice and wheat rose 71% — putting basic foods out of reach of hundreds of thousands of people. Even so, the company refused. “They refuse(d) to intervene in the prices,” Warren said. For the East India Company, formed in 1600, had ruled vast swathes of the country, with its standing private army, agriculture was “their main source of income at this point [other] than selling opium to China.”
Warren draws upon the works of economist Amartya Sen, who argued entitlement and not food availability, was the factor behind famines; and that of the environmental historian Mike Davis, who emphasised the role climatic oscillations, especially El Niño have upon them. “I saw a really nice treatment of the historiography of famine,” Siegel said.
To historians, scientific papers haven’t been a resource they tap into because it’s not often they detail underlying economic policies that contribute to famines. By doing so in this study, Warren re-investigates the causes behind the famines, be it the climate or economic policies, and can lead to a better understanding of impacts these policies have on society.
“The climate has been over-determinant in our understanding of agricultural productivity,” Benjamin Siegel, a historian at Boston University and author of Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India, said about the study in an interview. “This paper is really nice in that it says there’s an impact and it’s not dispositive, and it doesn’t override local conditions of politics and economics and commercial life. It’s a really kind of clear-headed assessment of good evidence.”
Warren sees his findings as a way to use history to understand how contemporary administrations can deal with food insecurity driven by anthropogenic climate change. Governmental response to ameliorate or exacerbate climate impacts. “I think that’s quite a valuable lesson to take from those historical things,” Warren said.
Lessons to note
This study is important from not just a scholastic perspective, but also from policy, said Atreyee Bhattacharya at Colorado. Amidst tranches of available data on the Earth’s climatic system, the challenge is predicting weather and climatic conditions locally. “How do we trickle it down to local climate, and how do we tie it down to communities who make decisions?”
Warren expressed concern for the use of such technologies such as solar geoengineering, particularly for agriculture. “One of the big takeaways you can get from the research on volcanic eruptions is that there are big disruptions to the climate if you chuck a load of aerosols into the atmosphere,” he said. “That’s potentially very harmful to an awful lot of people across the world.”
To illustrate, Warren imagined a scenario in which the world experienced a three-degree dip in global average temperature. The resulting impacts may even be worse than the existent climate crisis, he said, and the effects disproportionate. Scandinavian nations could be worse off than India and China in some ways: since northern Europe receives much less sunlight, crops there barely grow as well as they do in equatorial countries. At the same time, countries like India face a greater risk from a disrupted monsoon.
In history, there’s a cautionary tale for attempts in geoengineering, noted Braddock Linsley, a climate researcher at Columbia University, not involved in the study. He told Mongabay-India how frost persisted throughout the year in the New England region in the United States’ east coast, even during the summer months, following the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption in Indonesia. The resulting famines caused many deaths and widespread suffering.
“If we geoengineer the stratosphere and tweak it a little bit too much the wrong way, we could end up generating drought, not drought, but famine in places that require, you know, agricultural crops to grow in the summer,” he said. “We don’t understand a lot of things, and we need to spend more time to understand some of these complicated processes.”
Banner image: The devastating impacts of the famine on people in then Bellary district, Madras, illustrated for The Graphic (a British weekly newspaper) published on October 6, 1877. Illustration by Horace Harral courtesy of National Portrait Gallery via Public Domain.
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