At the start of the twenty-first century famine persists. Why? ‘New Famines’ are unexpected, unprecedented and highly politicised. It is a paradox that the increasing potential to eradicate famines goes hand-in-hand with an increasing potential to cause them. This Bulletin argues that recent famines could have been prevented but were not, because of bad policies. Previous Northern approaches externalise and isolate the famine process. Here the authors instead unravel another layer of analysis to understand the conditions that increase vulnerability to famine. Studying ‘hidden’ famines in Mongolia, Iraq and Madagascar they ask how these could have been overlooked – and why only some famines make headlines in our increasingly globalised world. The Bulletin also speculates on the future nature of famines. Will they continue to reflect the complexity of the contemporary world; will they be different from those that have gone before? Or, most unlikely of all, will they be eradicated altogether?