Famine, UNRRA, and the Future of French Indochina

The 1945 Great Famine in Indochina killed between 1 and 3 million people in the space of a few months – more than died during the Vietnam war. It also occurred at a pivotal moment in the history of international relations. This talk considers the tragedy as at once one of the last colonial famines and one of the first international ones, marking a shift in responsibility for the subsistence of non-Western people from empires to the United Nations. At the end of World War II, Vichy France, the provisional French republic, the Japanese, the allied powers, the newly-created United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist Viet Minh all tried to position themselves to influence the future of Indochina. This contest for influence and sovereignty played out largely in the realm of famine relief. The French republic, which had no physical presence in Japanese-occupied Indochina, seized on famine relief as a way to perform sovereignty for an international audience. Famine prevention became a sovereign right that the French sought to claim for themselves while deflecting international scrutiny and intervention from UNRRA, and nationalist propaganda from the Viet Minh. The responsibility, and the right, to alleviate famine played a pivotal role in the international struggle over the shape of the postwar global order.