The specific claim, iirc, was that almost any famine not associated with a drought, and even many that are, are the result of a deliberate action by someone. It might have been in the book "The Great Big Book of Horrible Things" by Matthew White (apparently retitled "Atrocities" at some point), since it deals with a lot of famines. But's not a scholarly work (although it is based on reasonably solid scholarly practice and is fascinating reading), and the author was surely drawing on someone else's research there, assuming that's where I read the claim.
Thanks in advance!
The closest claim I can think of to this is work by Amartya Sen, the Indian economist and philosopher and Nobel Prize winner in economics.
Sen argues that when famines happen in the cases he examined, there's physically enough food, people starve because they can't afford to buy it. Sen notes that famines disappeared in India after Indian independence and formulates the hypothesis that democracies with a free press create a situation where a government has to respond to a famine and distribute food.
This is obviously not quite the question you asked: Sen's theory is about governments failing to take action to prevent a famine, rather than anyone deliberately taking action to cause one. But it's the closest idea I can think of.
Also this is not to say that no famine ever anywhere wasn't caused by a fundamental shortage of food. Sen is talking about cases where food could have been imported.
Sources Sen, Amartya (August 1976). "Famines as failures of exchange entitlements". Economic and Political Weekly. Special Number. Sen, Amartya (1981). Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. OUP Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-828463-5.