 Historians have long debated whether Stalin's government had intended the famine to occur or not; there are no known documents in which Stalin or his government explicitly called for starvation to be used against the population.The 1931 and 1932 harvests had been poor ones due to weather conditions, and had followed several years in which lower productivity had resulted in a gradual decline in output.Government policies—including the focus on rapid industrialisation, the socialisation of livestock, and the emphasis on sown areas over crop rotation—exacerbated the problem; the state had also failed to build reserve grain stocks for such an emergency.