The trick is to learn to harness Mother Nature, to learn to use your environment. You can accept famine, which is cyclical as you point out, or you can learn to build with the building blocks your environment affords, or you can migrate. Death is not inevitable if you don't accept it as such.
Its not only a matter of developing technology, its also a matter of developing cultural habits of collaboration that tend toward the modification of the environment rather than living at its mercy. It can be taught, it can be learned. Charity is not enough, it has to be combined with development or we will be right back here in another decade doing it all again.
In the late forties, as part of Truman's Point Four program, my alma mater, Oklahoma State (then Oklahoma A&M) set up a faculty and student exchange program with Ethiopia (then ruled by Haile Selassie). Ethiopia set up an Ag school and extension service, which was initially staffed by Okie Staters, then Ethiopian graduates of Okie State. And, finally, Ethiopian graduates of what we came to know as Ethiopia A&M.
By the mid fifties, Ethiopia was feeding itself -- for the first time ever. By 1960, they had become a net food exporter.
Then, Marxism arrived. And the rest is famine...