“both China and India would suffer famines by 1985”
Had Deng Xiaoping not overthrown the Gang of Four, there almost certainly would eventually have been mass starvation in China, as there had been under Mao. Mao so much wanted to create a Paradise for the Peasants that he let tens of millions of them die. In the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, a prediction of additional mass starvation in China was quite realistic.
India, however, was a completely different story. There had been a famine in Bihar state in India in the 1960s; government intervention (not laissez-faire!) got food to those who needed it. This repeated in Maharashtra in 1972 and in West Bengal in 1980. The parallel with Yosef HaTzadik is notable — rapid and intelligent governmental action can stop famines. The contrast between the success of the interventionist — almost socialist — Indian government with the repeated horrific famines that the laissez-faire British colonial authorities allowed to take place is stiking. (And it wasn’t just in India — laissez-faire policies were responsible for one eighth of the population of then-British-ruled Ireland starving to death during the 1840s.)