Subsistence crisis

Subsistence crisis

A ‘subsistence crisis’ may be defined as an economic crisis which threatens the food supplies or, more precisely, the survival prospects of large numbers of people. Although one can argue about ‘threatens’ and ‘large numbers', what is clear is that a genuine subsistence crisis has to show up in demographic data. [http://www.helsinki.fi/iehc2006/papers3/Vanhaute.pdf]

An example is the European subsistence crisis of 1315-1317.