The quantity of food can be increased over time. Proteins may be administered intravenously to raise the level of serum proteins. For worse situations, hospice care and opioid medications can be used. Organizations
Many organizations have been highly effective at reducing starvation in different regions. Aid agencies give direct assistance to individuals, while political organizations pressure political leaders to enact more macro-scale policies that will reduce famine and provide aid. Statistics
According to estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization, between 720 and 811 million people were affected by hunger globally in 2020. This was a decrease from estimated 925 million in 2010 and roughly 1 billion in 2009. In 2007, 923 million people were reported as being undernourished, an increase of 80 million since 1990–92. An estimated 820 million people did not have enough to eat in 2018, up from 811 million in the previous year, which is the third year of increase in a row.As the definitions of starving and malnourished people are different, the number of starving people is different from that of malnourished. Generally, far fewer people are starving than are malnourished. The proportion of malnourished and starving people in the world has been more or less continually decreasing for at least several centuries. This is due to an increasing supply of food and to overall gains in economic efficiency. In 40 years, the proportion of malnourished people in the developing world has been more than halved. The proportion of starving people has decreased even faster.
In Sweden in 1317, King Birger of Sweden imprisoned his two brothers for a coup they had staged several years earlier (Nyköping Banquet). According to legend they died of starvation a few weeks later, since their brother had thrown the prison key in the castle moat. In Cornwall in the UK in 1671, John Trehenban from St Columb Major was condemned to be starved to death in a cage at Castle An Dinas for the murder of two girls. The Makah, a Native American tribe inhabiting the Pacific Northwest near the modern border of Canada and the United States, practiced death by starvation as a punishment for slaves. Concentration camps and ghettos
Many of the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps were murdered through deliberate maltreatment, disease, starvation, and overwork, or were executed as unfit for labor. Many occupants of ghettos in eastern Europe also starved to death, most notoriously in the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland. Prisoners were transported in inhumane conditions by rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination. The prisoners were confined to the cattle cars for days or even weeks, with little or no food or water. Many died of dehydration in the intense heat of summer or froze to death in winter. Nazi concentration camps in Europe from 1933 to 1945 deliberately underfed prisoners, who were at the same time forced to perform heavy labour. Their diet was restricted to watery vegetable soup and a little bread, with little to no dietary fats, proteins or other essential nutrients.