Introduction
At family dinners growing up, after everyone laid down their chopsticks, my grandfather would always take one last glance at the few grains of rice left at the bottom of his bowl. At the time, I took this to be a habit of thrift, but as a teenager, I realized it came from his experience of China’s Great Famine between 1958 and 1962. The severe hunger and loss of life not only caused permanent damage to the Chinese nation but also affected the lives of survivors for years to come.
South African revolutionary and President Nelson Mandela once said, “Freedom is meaningless if people cannot put food in their stomachs.” When a person constantly worries about how to access the next meal, it makes them less able to engage in, or reflect upon, other activities. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs places physiological needs at the base, suggesting that when people lack food, they are not truly free to pursue higher needs such as belonging, esteem, and self-actualization (McLeod).
However, Mandela’s claim captures only half of the relationship between freedom and hunger. While having enough food is required to practice many types of freedom, freedom is also necessary to preserve one’s right to obtain food. Drawing on interviews with my grandfather and a woman in Bangladesh, this essay will explore how a lack of freedom exacerbates food insecurity, in particular how guarantees of democratic elections and rights like freedom of speech and assembly allow people to stand up for their families’ needs, leading to policy changes.
How Political Freedom Could Have Prevented the Great Famine
To some extent, my grandfather’s experience during the Great Famine supports Mandela’s view that hunger restricts freedom by reducing a person’s choices to a basic struggle for survival. Between 1958 and 1962, the Great Famine killed an estimated 30 million people due to a combination of collectivization, perverse policies, and suppression of criticism (Fan et al. 1). Speaking to me in Chinese, my grandfather explained,
People became thinner every month. Adults stopped talking because speaking wasted energy. Children cried less and less because they didn't have the strength anymore. I remember walking several kilometers just to collect wild purslane. Even tree bark was sometimes scraped off because people believed it could fill their stomachs. (Xie)
One of my grandfather’s relatives, an elder in his family, committed suicide to save more food for the younger ones. With no energy to do anything but search for food, most freedoms were meaningless for victims of the Great Famine.
However, the Great Famine also reveals that a lack of political freedom can aggravate hunger by encouraging false reporting and allowing failed policies to go unchallenged. Under political pressure to demonstrate the success of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s program of rapid industrialization and modernization, local officials reported record-breaking harvests even as actual production declined. A study of reports from 22 provinces in China in 1958 found that every province overstated its grain output, with Shandong overreporting by 307.8% and Sichuan inflating by 100%. Because the central government used these inflated figures to determine grain procurement quotas, it collected grain that rural families needed for survival, turning political repression and false reporting into widespread hunger (Fan et al. 34).
That same political repression created an atmosphere of silence that prevented the famine from being corrected, as officials who exposed policy failures were systematically punished. At the 1959 Lushan Conference, Minister of National Defense Peng Dehuai wrote a private letter to Mao in which he delicately pointed out the problems with the Great Leap’s implementation (Yang 51–52). Peng’s suggestion was rejected, and he was stripped of his post. The political movement against "rightist opportunism" also expanded. Later, the official data released indicated that over three million Communist Party members were classified or disciplined in this movement (Yang 52). If someone as powerful as the Minister of National Defense could not speak freely, local officials and ordinary farmers were even less likely to believe their voices would be protected. Power and authority here restricted not only criticism but also the development of the information channels needed to correct policies and prevent more people from going hungry.
If Peng’s voice had been heard, the situation could have been addressed before it reached such horrifying proportions. Independent media could have exposed the deaths hidden behind reports of a “record-breaking harvest.” Moreover, if political leaders faced competitive elections, their neglect of starvation would put them at a disadvantage. Amartya Sen thus argued that “no substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic and independent country” (Sen). Sen's theory is not that democracy can prevent crop failures or create food out of thin air but rather that free media, political opposition, and election accountability will prevent the government from easily covering up famine and keep victims from bearing the cost of policy failure alone (Massing). If these mechanisms had existed during the Great Famine, the false production figures would have been exposed earlier, excessive grain requisitioning would have been reduced, and relief supplies would have reached starving areas more quickly. Political freedom might not have been able to prevent every shortage, but it would likely have prevented the shortage from evolving into a massive famine that forced relatives to sacrifice their own lives to save their children. Thus, while Mandela is right that hunger can make freedom feel meaningless in the moment, freedom remains meaningful by providing a path toward truthful information and accountability.
How Freedom and Female Empowerment Can Reduce Hunger in the Developing World
Unlike mid-twentieth-century China, contemporary Bangladesh is not in the grip of a national famine, yet about 16 million people in Bangladesh face severe food insecurity, and approximately 1.6 million young children suffer from acute malnutrition (World Food Programme). I interviewed Farhama, a 35-year-old mother from southern Bangladesh whose family has struggled to afford food since a cyclone damaged their fishing business in 2020, pushing them into debt. “Producing food does not mean having control over it,” she told me on a video call, speaking through an interpreter. “Fish passes through my hands every day, but this does not mean that it will eventually end up on the children's plates” (Farhama). When she couldn't afford the usual amount of food, she would decline meats, eggs, and vegetables. Her greatest hope is that her children remain healthy, finish school, and pursue the dreams she never could. Farhama may have the legal right to receive education, work, and participate in public life. But poverty and food insecurity forced her to put all her efforts into survival. In this sense, Mandela’s quotation is partially correct because freedoms guaranteed by law mean less when hunger leaves a person unable to exercise them.
Nevertheless, greater political freedom would still matter for families facing hunger like Farhama’s because it would let them demand effective assistance and economic development. In Farhama’s case, the lack of effective political accountability resulted in her family’s food insecurity. Even though Bangladesh has electoral institutions, it was rated only “partly free” by Freedom House in 2026 (Freedom House). That same year, Bangladesh ranked 152 out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index (Reporters Without Borders). Food insecurity could further escalate if the government carries out repression of protesters in a similar manner to that of Maoist China. For instance, the UN Human Rights Office estimated that during 2024’s wave of protests, up to 1,400 people were killed (United Nations Human Rights Office). Such political repression deepens food insecurity because when journalists or opposition groups cannot criticize ineffective policies, leaders face less pressure to direct public resources toward disaster relief and food assistance. Moreover, by giving them a voice in the press and elections, freedom gives vulnerable families hope that they have not been forgotten.
Political corruption has further exacerbated hunger's impact on society, not only weakening economic development but also diverting resources from employment, disaster relief, and social assistance for vulnerable families. The Index of Economic Freedom rated Bangladesh mostly unfree, writing, “corruption and judicial inefficiency undermine the rule of law” while weak governance constrains development (Heritage Foundation). A government-commissioned white paper estimated that approximately $234 billion left the country through illegal financial flows between 2009 and 2023, with about 77% of this amount related to false reporting of import and export prices (White Paper Committee 330–31). When large amounts of capital leave the country, resources for domestic investment, job creation, post-disaster assistance, and social security will decrease. For families like Farhama’s, already burdened by debt after the cyclone, fewer economic opportunities make recovery even harder. When citizens cannot challenge corruption or influence policy, it becomes even harder to demand that public resources be directed toward disaster relief and food aid that benefits them.
Gender disempowerment exacerbates the issue of female hunger because it restricts their control over family resources, and social norms require them to sacrifice their own nutritional needs for the sake of their families. As a Bangladeshi woman and mother, Farhama is confined within the family. She takes on the responsibility of meeting her husband's daily needs, supervising her children's education, and caring for the elderly in the family. When food is scarce, Farhama often gives her portion to her husband and children. “Sometimes I tell them I ate while cooking,” she explained, “but they will never know we don’t have enough food supplies today” (Farhama). According to a 2019 study,
Gender norms prescribe that females receive small meal portions and make sacrifices in food consumption so that male family members can eat more … An inferior social position makes adolescent females living in food-insecure households vulnerable to undernutrition, with factors affecting food deprivation increasing as they approach childbearing. (Blum et al.)
Poverty limits the entire family, but the gender roles within the family make women bear even more severe consequences. Empowering women, conversely, has been shown to correlate with decreased household hunger. A study of 4,195 rural families in Bangladesh, for example, found that women's control over assets, participation in social groups, and smaller gender power gaps within the family were all associated with higher household calorie intake and a more varied diet (Sraboni et al.). For Farhama, freedom is therefore meaningful not merely as an abstract right but also as the practical power to feed herself in the family.
Conclusion
Mandela's words contain an undeniable truth: when hunger takes hold of a person's body and mind, the scope of their freedom also shrinks. However, my grandfather's and Farhama's stories reveal the other side of this relationship. In mid-twentieth-century China, political repression concealed false grain reports and silenced criticism, allowing failed policies to turn food shortages into a catastrophic famine. Decades later in Bangladesh, weak political accountability, corruption, and gender inequality leave families like Farhama’s vulnerable to hunger and cycles of debt. In different eras, countries, and political systems, this dynamic between freedom and hunger repeats itself. People need food to achieve freedom, and at the same time, they need freedom to expose hunger, hold leaders accountable, and secure their right to food. As my grandfather explained:
When I was hungry, I didn't think about freedom. I thought about tomorrow's breakfast. If someone had offered me a full bowl of rice, nothing else would have mattered at that moment. But after many years, I realized something else. Food keeps people alive, but truth helps prevent the same tragedy from happening again. A country needs enough food, but it also needs honest information, responsible leadership, and the courage to admit mistakes. Otherwise, hunger can return. (Xie)
Works Cited
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