Severe droughts have been a continuing feature of the earth’s climate for millennia, but you wouldn’t know that from the brouhaha in the mainstream media over last summer’s drought in Europe. Not only was the European drought not unprecedented, but there have been numerous longer and drier droughts throughout history, including during the past century.

Because droughts typically last for years or even decades, their effects are far more catastrophic for human and animal life than those of floods which usually recede in weeks or months. The consequences of drought include crop failure, starvation and mass migration. As with floods, droughts historically have been most common in Asian countries such as China and India.

One of most devastating natural disasters in Chinese history was the drought and subsequent famine in northern China from 1928 to 1933. The drought left 3.7 million hectares (9.2 million acres) of arable land barren, leading to a lengthy famine exacerbated by civil war. An estimated 3 million people died of starvation, while Manchuria in the northeast took in 4 million refugees.

Typical scenes from the drought are shown in the photos below. The upper photo portrays three starving boys who had been abandoned by their families in 1928 and were fed by the military authorities. The lower photo shows famine victims in the city of Lanzhou.

The full duration of the drought was extensively covered by the New York Times. In 1929, a lengthy article reported that relief funds from an international commission could supply just one meal daily to:

 only 175,000 sufferers out of the 20 million now starving or undernourished.

and    missionaries report that cannibalism has commenced.

A 1933 article, an excerpt from which is included in the figure above, chronicled the continuing misery four years later:

Children were being killed to end their suffering and the women of families were being sold to obtain money to buy food for the other members, according to an official report.

Drought has frequently afflicted India too. One of the worst episodes was the twin droughts of 1965 and 1966-67, the latter in the eastern state of Bihar. Although only 2,350 Indians died in the 1966-67 drought, it was only unprecedented foreign food aid that prevented mass starvation. Nonetheless, famine and disease ravaged the state, and it was reported that as many as 40 million people were affected.

Particularly hard hit were Bihar farmers, who struggled to keep their normally sturdy plow-pulling bullocks alive on a daily ration of 2.7 kilograms (6 pounds) of straw. As reported in the April 1967 New York Times article below, a U.S. cow at that time usually consumed over 11 kilograms (25 pounds) of straw a day. A total of 11 million farmers and 5 million laborers were effectively put out of work by the drought. Crops became an issue for starving farmers too, the same article stating that:

An official in Patna said confidently the other day that “the Indian farmer would rather die than eat his seed,” but in village after village farmers report that they ate their seed many weeks ago.

The harrowing photo on the lower right below, on permanent display at the Davis Museum in Wellesley College, Massachusetts, depicts a 45-year-old farmer and his cow dying of hunger in Bihar. Children suffered too, with many forced to subsist on a daily ration of four ounces of grain and an ounce of milk.

The U.S., like most countries, is not immune to drought either, especially in southern and southeastern states. Some of the worst droughts occurred in the Great Plains states and southern Canada during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.

But worse yet was a 7-year uninterrupted drought from 1950 to 1957, concentrated in Texas and Oklahoma but eventually including all the Four Corners states of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, as well as eastward states such as Missouri and Arkansas. For Texas, it was the most severe drought in recorded history. By the time the drought ended, 244 of Texas' 254 counties had been declared federal disaster areas.

Desperate ranchers resorted to burning cactus, removing the spines, and using it for cattle feed. Because of the lack of adequate rainfall, over 1,000 towns and cities in Texas had to ration the water supply. The city of Dallas opened centers where citizens could buy cartons of water from artesian wells for 50 cents a gallon, which was more than the cost of gasoline at the time.

Shown in the photo montage on the left below are various scenes from the Texas drought. The top photo is of a stranded boat on a dry lakebed, while the bottom photo illustrates once lakeside cabins on a shrinking Lake Waco; the middle photo shows a car being towed after becoming stuck in a parched riverbed. The newspaper articles on the right are from the West Australian in 1953 (“Four States In America Are Hit By Drought”) and the Montreal Gazette in 1957.

Reconstructions of ancient droughts using tree rings or pollen as a proxy reveal that historical droughts were even longer and more severe than those described here, many lasting for decades – so-called megadroughts. This can be seen in the figure below, which shows the pattern of dry and wet periods in drought-prone California over the past 1,200 years.

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