The last western country I can think of that had a famine was the Ukraine in the 1930s. Have there been any since then?
I am not certain the United States has ever had a famine, but in the 1870s the destruction of the bison herds certainly caused great hardship among the Plains Indians; did they reach actual famine conditions?
The U.S. hasn’t had a nationwide famine that I’ve been able to find. There have been localized ones, but the U.S. is a very big country and it produces a lot of food from all parts of the country.
In WW2, rationing was the norm throughout Europe and food got steadily scarcer as you moved east. Probably a goodly number of the deaths in eastern Europe (10% of the Soviet Union overall; 20% of the prewar population of Poland) were due to either overt starvation or else lack of food was a contributing factor to death by cold, disease, or overwork.
More recently there’s the conflict in Bosnia, but I don’t know about that for certain.
Western Europe and the U.S. has been pretty free of famine, with two exceptions that I can think of: the Irish Potato famine and I guess the Dust Bowl in the US in the 30s, though the human toll was obviously much more destructive in Ireland.
Europe was regularly hit with localized famines throughout its early history. A modern historian’s rule of thumb for the Middle Ages is that there was a bad crop one out of seven years.
Famines tapered off during the 17th and 18th centuries, but didn’t entirely disappear. History buffs will recall the role that hunger and high bread prices played in the French Revolution.
The potato famine of the 1840s hit hardest in Ireland, but also affected many other areas, including Scotland and Scandinavia.
So far as I know, the Dust Bowl never reached the level of a famine.
Re: US famines. Don’t forget that the early settlments all had very rough starts. The beginning of Jamestown was known frankly as the “starving time.”