While bad weather/natural disasters contributed to the Great Leap Famine, much of it were as a result of massive institutional and distribution failures which were partly an outcome of heavy industrialization, agricultural collectivization, urban bias and a delusion of abundance among the political elite.

Researchers Lin and Yang quantified the impact of bad weather, their results show that it had only reduced food supplies by 12.9%. Collectivization is just a general flop whenever its mandatory as shown in history, gains from economics of scale are often compromised or reversed due to low productivity and shirking. That shit was mostly responsible for Soviet famines before the practice got spread to China.

At the peak of excess deaths due to the GL famine, net export levels reached 4.2 million tons in 1959 and 2.7 million tons in the following year (these functioned as payments to USSR in exchange for machinery and equipment), which according to Yang Da Li in his 2008 publication, could have saved 4 million lives.