Famine

Thematic stamp collecting along conceptual lines  has never really caught hold. There was a great gold medal collection making the rounds of the APS Champion of Champion shows well over a decade ago entitled “Murder” where the collector sought to portray how murder was shown on stamps from individual murderers to genocide (such as the Holocaust). But few other thematic collections have tried the “concept” route and today we are mostly stuck with thematics such as Birds on Stamps or Disney which really only use stamps as pictures in a scrapbook to illustrate the collection’s thematic point. Famine, however, would be a great “concept” thematic. The collection could trace the history of food with various stamps illustrating different grains and the impact that the discovery of the America’s made on food production worldwide and the help that potatoes and corn had in feeding the world. Revenues for taxes on foodstuffs could be included.  The collection could touch on climate and how warming and cooling trends affect food production and how droughts create famine. The Irish potato famine would be a great specialized collection within the main collection along with the Irish diaspora, immigration to America and the Irish contributions to this country which all came about because of the Potato Famine. The collection could touch on the difference between climate caused famines and political famines and their relation to genocide (the two greatest famines of the twentieth century being Stalin’s 1920s collectivization in Russia and Mao’s Great Leap Forward (which was anything but) in the late 1950s and early 1960s). The collection would combine history, postal history and stamps in a novel and interesting way and tie our hobby into what is happening in the world at large. This is a connection which traditional philately has sorely lacked.