The United States did not experience famine conditions during the Great Depression. Consider that a major economic problem during the Depression was that there was too much food. This "excess" supply made food too cheap, which bit into farmers' profits. To address the "problem" of overproduction, the government paid farmers not to plant crops:
The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was a United States federal law
of the New Deal era which reduced agricultural production by paying
farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land and to kill off
excess livestock. Its purpose was to reduce crop surplus and therefore
effectively raise the value of crops.
Obviously, destroying food didn't sit well with many people, so in October 1933 Congress created the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation. The FSRC
aimed to divert commodities such as apples, beans, canned beef and
cotton to local relief organizations. In December 1933, the agency
distributed three million tons of coal to the unemployed of Wisconsin,
Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota and Iowa and in
September 1934 shipped 692,228,274 pounds of foodstuffs to the
unemployed in thirty US states.
The FRSC eventually branched out into school lunches, and by 1939 it was serving lunches to around 900,000 children daily. The FSRC was just one of the many alphabet agencies
created during the New Deal. Other major agencies included the Works Progress Administration employed millions of men and the Civilian Conservation Corps employed 3,000,000 men in nine years,
The basic effectiveness of these poverty relief programs is evident in the fact that historians and economists are consistently unable to find increases in American mortality attributable to the Great Depression (with the exception of suicide).
I'm not claiming that there wasn't poverty, hunger, and hardship during the Depression: there definitely was death due to starvation during the 1930s. But in no sense did the United States experience anything on the scale of the Holodomor. Would Hoover (who helped address Russian famine after WWI) or FDR (father of the modern American welfare state) have allowed around 5% of the population to starve to death when the nation literally had more food than it knew what to do with?
The answer: probably not. The basic humanity of the two presidents aside, the well-known economist Amartya Sen argues that electoral pressures in functioning democracies tend to prevent famine. And indeed, the first presidential election after the start of the Depression brought in an administration and Congress devoted to using the power of the state to distribute food and resources to needy Americans.
