http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Years_of_Natural_Disasters
Causes
The causes and extent of the disaster are keenly debated. Until the early 1980's, the Chinese Government's stance, reflected by the name "Three Years of Natural Disasters", was that the famine was largely a result of a series of unfortunate natural disasters compounded by some planning errors. Researchers outside China have tended to focus on the massive institutional and policy changes which accompanied the Great Leap Forward as being important factors in magnifying the effect of adverse climatic conditions. Since the 1980's there has been greater official Chinese recognition of the importance of policy mistakes in causing the disaster, claiming that the disaster was 30% due to natural causes and 70% by mismanagement.
During the Great Leap Forward, farming was organized into communes and the cultivation of private plots forbidden. Collectivisation substantially reduced the incentives for peasants to work diligently and productively. Moreover, iron and steel production was identified as a key requirement for economic advancement and millions of peasants were ordered away from tending crops to increase iron and steel production through mining iron ore and limestone deposits and establishing small scale foundries fuelled by local firewood and in many cases smelting existing iron objects in order to boost output figures.
Along with collectivisation, the central Government decreed several changes in agricultural techniques based on the ideas of Russian pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko. One of these ideas was close planting, whereby the density of seedlings was at first tripled and then doubled again. The theory was that plants of the same species would not compete with each other. In practice they did, which stunted growth and resulted in lower yields. Another policy, this time based on the ideas of Lysenko's colleague Teventy Maltsev encouraged peasants across China were urged to plow deeply into the soil (up to one or two meters), believing that the most fertile soil was deep in the earth or that this would allow extra strong root growth. However, useless rocks, soil, and sand were driven up instead, burying the topsoil.
These radical changes in farming organisation coincided with adverse weather patterns including droughts and floods. In July of 1959, the Yellow River flooded in East China. According to the Disaster Center[1], it directly killed, either through starvation from crop failure or drowning, an estimated 3 million people, while other areas were affected in other ways as well. It is ranked as the seventh deadliest natural disaster in the 20th century.
Originally posted by XanthosNZyour sentence looks jumbled.
How does a flood kill people via crop failure that isn't starvation?
in looking at "either through starvation from crop failure or drowning" from the original post, are you not treating "starvation from crop failure" as a single clause?
("crop failure" due to flooded crops.)