Bangladesh, devastated by war, was expected to starve in 1972. Massive food aid from abroad averted this outcome. But 'compassion figure' set in. In India's case, drought raised the specter of famine. Previously it had contributed about 700,000 tons of food grain. But then there was widespread drought against a background of political unrest in North India. Thus, in 1974, Bangladesh faced a severe food availability deficit more particularly because millions of refugees had returned and were dependent on the p.d.s. The country needed 12 million tons but produced only 10 millions tons of food grain. The public distribution system used imports to plug the gap but, obviously, this created a profit opportunity to divert p.d.s food to the open market. Naturally, it was the rural poor who lost out while vocal urban populations got their ration cards. By 1974, it was obvious that corruption had become endemic. This contributed to 'compassion fatigue'. Moreover, food shortages around the globe were raising prices. Bangladesh's food imports dropped by two thirds or more. The rural poor who were covered under 'modified rationing' were hard hit because food availability went down from 150,000 tons a month to about 70,000. This meant that the 'entitlement' that the Government wanted to grant to the rural poor, simply did not exist. The long and short of it is that the only way to help Bangladesh was to send a lot of food causing domestic prices to crash. Since it was a Democracy, just killing the corrupt was not possible. Flooding the market with cheap food would remove the incentive to issue bogus ration cards and deprive the deserving. Entitlements are meaningless if availability is lacking. Bangladesh was described as a 'basket case'. Its people responded by working hard and doing sensible things. Food production has quadrupled since those famine years. Industrial production grew even more rapidly after Bangladesh abandoned nationalization and import substitution for privatization and export led growth. However, Bangladesh had learned the lesson of the famine. It did not rely solely on imports. It raised domestic food availability so as reduce vulnerability to exogenous shocks.
Amartya Sen, writing in 1981, took the most foolish possible view of the 1974 famine whose cause was lack of food availability due to a global supply crunch and whose cure was to massively increase domestic food availability by growing much much more food. Sen wrote-
“The food availability approach offers very little in the way of explanation of the Bangladesh famine of 1974. The total output, as well as availability figures for Bangladesh as a whole,
were irrelevant. It was foreign food aid which had prevented famine two years earlier. By March 1973, it was obvious that Bangladesh did not have enough food to feed its people. Kurt Waldheim predicted the famine which began a year later.
point precisely in the opposite direction, as do the inter-district figures of production as well as availability. Whatever the Bangladesh famine of 1974 might have been, it wasn't a FAD famine (Sen 1981b, 141).”
40 percent of Bangladesh was under water during the floods of 1974. This reduced domestic production of food and cash crops. Most Bangladeshis were already malnourished. Thanks to the democratically elected Government having pissed off the US- even a small shipment of 20,000 tons was held back. Pakistan also lobbied the OPEC countries not to help their erstwhile subjects. By the end of 1973, the Government had scarcely any buffer stock and thus the public distribution system in rural areas was hors de combat. India too faced food shortages with thousands dying of starvation and millions suffering severe malnutrition. On the other hand, the population kept growing despite millions having no secure or productive avenue of employment. People starve because less food is available for them. Total food production may rise but if the Government or Charitable or other organizations can't or won't feed those without money to buy food then they may starve. In the case of Bangladesh, what mattered was American food aid. This was denied on the excuse that Bangladesh was supplying jute to Cuba. The result was large famine deaths which could be blamed on Uncle Sam. Similarly, the 1943 famine could be blamed on Hindus or the Brits. But, the truth is, famines don't matter. Voters re-elect Bengali politicians who preside over famines. But, for all we know, voters in the West might show enthusiasm for a party which promises to let the work-shy starve. To his credit, Sen did warn the Brits that a famine might sneak up on them because of Mrs. Thatcher's policies. He genuinely was equal-opportunity stupid.
In his book, 'Poverty and Famines' (1981) Sen shows that he was aware that there was a global food availability decline in the early Seventies. This is what led to the Bangladesh famine. Thankfully, a concerted global effort to increase 'food security' by technocratic means was largely successful from the second half of the Seventies onward.
Sen wrote- 'Famines can strike even when regular starvation is on firm decline. The food crisis of 1972 is a global example of this time contrast. Colin Tudge (1977) describes the development in dramatic terms: The 1960s brought good harvests, augmented by the Third World's 'green revolution', based on American-developed dwarf strains of wheat and rice. The world's food problem was not shortage, apparently, but over-production, leading to low prices and agricultural depression. The US took land out of production, and in the early 1970s both the US and Canada ran down their grain stores. Then the bad weather of 1972 brought dismal harvests to the USSR, China, India, Australia and the Sahel countries south of Sahara. Russia bought massively in the world grain markets before others, including the US, realized what was happening. By mid-1974 there was only enough grain left in store to feed the world's population for three-and-a-half weeks; terrifying brinkmanship. In all this the focus has been on the total availability of food— for the nation as a whole, or even for the world as a whole. But exactly similar contrasts hold for food availability to a particular section of a given community. A sudden collapse of the command of a group over food can go against a rising trend (or against a typically high level of food consumption). Problems of (i) existence of much regular starvation, (ii) worsening trend of regular starvation, and (iii) sudden outbreak of acute starvation, are quite distinct. While they can accompany each other, they need not, and often do not, do so.
The plain fact is global food availability declined. True, Bangladesh could have been spared a lot of excess mortality but it wasn't spared because of global, regional, and local food availability decline. Nothing else changed- not legal entitlements, not capabilities, not structures of power or regimes of ownership or patterns of employment. There was a single factor responsible for the excess mortality. There was much less food left in store to feed the world's population. The real figure may not have been 'three and a half weeks'. It may have been more than that. But there can be no doubt that stockpiles had declined and so, for prudential reasons, less food was available for distribution which itself had become more costly because of the OPEC oil embargo which occurred between October 1973 and March 1974. This meant oil prices tripled. The cost of transporting food to deficit countries had greatly increased.
In a sense, absent a general dearth caused by a global catastrophe, no famine can be a 'food availability deficit famine' provided we assume food can be costlessly transported and redistributed. But this is not the case. People have to have incentives or fear penalties to produce and transport food. But such incentives or penalties may be too costly to generate even supposing the Government is inclined to do so.
Sen's entitlement approach 'concentrates on the ability of people to command food through the legal means available in the society, including the use of production possibilities, trade opportunities, entitlements vis-à-vis the state, and other methods of acquiring food'. Sadly, there are no legal means to 'command food'. Buying or begging does not 'command' anything. The thing is merely a claim. Only when that claim is enforced can we speak of 'command' having occurred. Bernie Madoff's clients only bought themselves a claim to financial security. But the man cheated them. They couldn't actually command anything because their claim to assets could not be enforced either because there were no assets in the first place or because Madoff has hidden that money artfully.
Nor does legality matter one bit. Beef may be banned, Wine may be contraband, but you can get beef and wine- for a price- even in Ahmedabad. This is not legal, but it is what happens. Similarly, there may be a legal obligation on the administration to provide 'food for work' or 'famine relief' but as happened twice in East Bengal during Sen's lifetime, millions died of starvation under elected Muslim governments. That's one reason the Bangladeshis aint too miffed with Biden for not inviting Sheikh Hasina to his Democracy summit. Bangladeshis know that Democracy can cause Famine because a corrupt bastard may get re-elected if his rival is a corrupt, crazy-ass, bastard who will fuck up even more monumentally. An authoritarian regime may be able to transfer rural girls into giant factory dormitories. Why starve people who can make a profit for you? Super-yachts don't grow on trees you know.
It may be that Sen wrote nonsense about entitlements because he fundamentally misunderstood some articles written by Emma Rothschild- later his wife- in the mid to late Seventies. It wasn't the case that there was some sort of American or UN body which had a legal duty to supply food to the hungry. Nor was Bangladesh a free market economy. It was a Socialist economy where 85 per cent of industry had been nationalized. Urban workers were working for the Government. It was not the case that they had benefited from wage inflation and thus could crowd out the poor from the free market for food. The Bangladeshi famine wasn't really man-made. The plain fact is that it was too poor to have incentives and penalties to support a full fledged, 'shared austerity', rationing mechanism in the countryside. No doubt, Uncle Sam could have prevented excess mortality. But America was deploying the 'food weapon' against the Islamic 'oil weapon'. Not that religion mattered very much back then. The Bengalis, like the Vietnamese, were classed as Brown. They needed to learn the hard way that Socialism meant Starvation. But, because the Bengalis, like the Vietnamese, are a spirited people, starvation did not mean submission. It meant pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The Bangladeshis have done it to such good effect that they have overtaken Pakistan and are now ahead of most parts of India. Had Mujib not been assassinated, he probably would have dispensed with 'Democracy' to speed up the process. As things were, the Bangladeshi army didn't have the esprit de corps of the Pakistani army and its coups and counter-coups were destabilizing. Yet, under Mujib's daughter, Bangladesh represents a model to be emulated precisely because it is pragmatic and focused on increasing availability, not talking bollocks about 'entitlements'.
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