Government-sanctioned starvation policies aren't new either. Canada's first prime minister John A. Macdonald was a despicable man who used starvation as a weapon to force the western plains nations onto reserves.
Later, Western European settlers began to complain that natives were being given preferential treatment because of obligations the government had under the treaties (sound familiar?) and the government came up with the utterly depraved "peasant farming" policy that was written into the federal Indian Act. This made it illegal for natives to use modern farming implements or own more than one cow. Sowing and harvesting had to be done by hand without plows or draft animals, which led to the widespread abandonment of any attempt at industrial agriculture, keeping natives starving and under the thumb of the government.
http://esask.uregina.ca/entry/aboriginal_reserve_agriculture_to_1900.html
These calculated policies are behind the decades of social ills that plague many First Nations to this day.