Chapter 6 focuses on individual and household coping strategies, and investigates important famine markers such as crime, black-market trade, food expeditions, and the hunt for fuel. It explains how the severe food and fuel deprivation during the final months of war prompted urban dwellers in the occupied west to take matters into their own hands. Because of the transportation difficulties, urban black-market prices rose astronomically. Since most households did not have the means to purchase or barter on black markets regularly, anyone socially and physically capable ventured out into the countryside in search for food. Overall, the strategies pursued clearly demonstrate that the crisis was essentially a transportation problem, and not the result of actual food availability decline.