Amartya Sen published the following paper in the Cambridge Journal of Economics in March 1977.
Starvation and exchange entitlements:
Starvation is not a matter of entitlement. It is a matter of food availability. If there is enough to go around, no one starves. If there isn't, either there is rationing or some excess mortality.
a general approach and its application to the great Bengal famine
In 1974, there had been a second big famine in Bangladesh. It was obvious that transition to democracy meant increased corruption. In particular, food procured for the public distribution system was diverted to the black market so that some politicians and crony capitalists (e.g. the Ispahanis in the 1940s) made a lot of money.
... Several authors have recently argued that there is evidence of increasing starvation for the world as a whole, and there has been quite an outburst of alarm about the 'food crisis of the world'
Real food prices tended to rise during the Seventies but fell thereafer.
René Dumont has gone so far as to say that 'the biggest famine in history has just begun'.
He was wrong. About everything.
It is with this context in mind that I shall examine the history of the Bengal famine
of 1943—possibly the biggest famine in the last hundred years.
The man-made Chinese famine of the early Sixties was the biggest in world history.
I believe the analysis presented here relates to a key issue in development theory today, viz. the political economy of starvation.
The key issue was corruption. Darkies are as corrupt as fuck. The polite way to say this is 'weak institutions'.
While a variety of causes have been considered in understanding the so-called 'world
wide famine', the most common approach has been that of 'too many mouths and
too little food'.
Only if people were too polite to say 'darkies are greedy bastards. They will beg us for food to feed their starving people but then sell the stuff on the black market. Look at Bengal. They had a big famine on the two occassions when they transitioned to Elected Governments. Military generals did better than Bengali Muslim demagogues.'
In this paper ... I would like to examine whether food availability per capita is a good way of viewing the problem
It isn't if neither the numerator nor the denominator are known. In a poor country, nobody knows either the total number of people nor the total amount of food available. True, some numbers could be made up but everybody would know they didn't mean shit.
I shall argue tha framework within which the problems of famine seriously deficient.
Not having enough food is a serious problem. A deficient framework for studying the probelm of feeling a bit peckish is not a serious problem. It is stupid shit. People will spend good money to alleviate suffering. But money spent on measuring the measuring of suffering is money wasted.
The traditional—and in some ways the most obvious—approach to famines is in terms
of variation of food availability:
both food supply and demand are inelastic butt the former, not the latter, is subjected to exogenous shocks- e.g. drought, disruption of trade routes by war, plant disease etc.
This approach of 'food availability decline' I shall call for brevity (not premature
disrespect) the FAD view.
FAD works best when much of the food eaten by a family happens to be grown by
it without being acquired through exchange.
No. Subsistence farmers eat the 'normal' crop (e.g. wheat or rice) while feeding the 'inferior' crop (e.g. oats or barley) are fed to livestock. In a bad year, humans eat the inferior crop. There is no food availability decline. Rather there is a change in relative prices causing an income as well as a substitution effect- i.e. people spend more in good years and retrench in bad years. One could say that Britain, under Wartime rationing, did not see much decline in food availability though 'superior' goods (e.g. butter, eggs, beef) were rationed.
In an exchange economy, however, the terms of exchange constitute a factor of some importance of its own,
only if a large percentage of income goes on food. But, in that case, the State is likely to be weak (because there isn't enough food to feed bureaucrats) and thus nothing can be done about famine or epidemics or marauding bands of homicidal sodomites.
and a family's ability to buy food depends on the rates at which its labour and commodity possessions can be exchanged into food.
i.e., its income and wealth. But credit too is important as is access to charitable, philanthropic or social insurance schemes.
While food availability will clearly be an important influence on these terms of exchange,
It is the only influence
other forces are also involved,
No.
and famines can thus arise from causes other than food availability decline.
This has never happened.
In an exchange economy, whether a family will starve or not will depend on what it has to sell,
Amartya Sen was living in the UK which has long been an 'exchange economy'. There had been no famine since 1620. The 'Poor Law' was a type of 'risk pooling' which also raised total factor productivity.
whether it can sell them, and at what prices, and also on the price of food.
No. If you are spending a large portion of your income on food, then and only then are you at risk of starvation. If you spend less that ten percent of disposable income on food, you are at zero risk save if there is a massive exogenous shock- e.g. earthquake, tsunami, military invasion etc.
An economy in a state of comparative tranquillity may develop a famine if there is a sudden shake-up of the system of rewards for exchange of labour, commodities and other possessions, even without a 'sudden, sharp reduction in the food supply'.
No. There has to be a sudden sharp reduction in the food supply. This could happen if land is collectivized and so peasants no longer have an incentive to work hard.
An exchange economy implies 'entitlements' related to one's endowments;
No. The fact that you can sell or buy at a particular market price is not, generally speaking, an 'entitlement'. True, this may be undermined by legislation- e.g. you may not be permitted to sell to or buy from only people of a particular race- but there is no 'entitlement'. This is why you can't sell or otherwise alienate the underlying Hohfeldian incident.
Consider the following scenario. I go into a cake shop and ask to buy a chocolate cake. The shop keeper says 'I am sorry. We have run out of chocolate cake.' I reply 'I have the money to purchase the chocolate cake. Thus I am entitled to a chocolate cake. You must give me a chocolate cake or else I will prosecute you.' The shopkeeper tells you to fuck off. He bars you from entering his shop. You go to the police, who tell you to fuck off. At great expense, you bring a law suit against the cake shop owner. You explain to the judge that Prof. Sen says you have an entitlement to chocolate cake'. The Judge says the law recognises no such thing. Nor does Economics. An 'exchange economy' can be 'fix-price' rather than 'flex-price'.
it gives people the ability to change a unit of commodity x into a certain amount of commodity y.
Markets or market-makers confer this ability- up to a point.
These are, of course, not 'rights' in the normative sense (contrast Nozick's 'entitlement theory' of justice).
Rights are wholly normative. Suppose I go into a cakeshop and order a chocolate cake. A bystander says 'what gives you the right to come in here demanding cake you fat freak?' My reply is that I have the money to pay for it. If I am refused service because of some 'protected' trait I have- e.g. being black- then I may have an action in law.
They represent actual possibilities.
It is actually possible that I will commit murder. But I don't have the right to kill anyone.
With an initial endowment x of commodities (including labour),
sadly, what this is can't be known. There are many types of labour I can perform of which I am unaware.
the exchange entitlements offered by a particular set of market configurations
For a set to exist, all its elements must be known. Nobody can know what the set of market configurations is. Thus there is no such set.
(in addition to direct production possibilities) can be seen as the set S(x) of all commodity bundles that can be acquired starting from x.
Sen is assuming no one can borrow or get charity or is covered by any type of social insurance scheme. This is highly unrealistic. Suppose you actually live in such a place. Then, you would seek 'hedges' such that you can get out of the place quickly when things turn to shit. Consider the Dutch "Hunger Marches" (Hongertochten) in 1944. Smarter, richer, people got out quicker and survived.
(Formally, therefore, the set of exchange entitlements can be seen as a mapping S(.) from a given person's endowment vectors to availability sets of commodity vectors.)
Nobody knows their own endowment vector or what commodity vectors are available. One may say 'relative to a particular state of ignorance' such and such vectors and sets are plausible. But they are not unique. Moreover, the moment anybody's knowledge-base changes, the 'naive' set changes. That is why it is epistemic and thus can't be well-defined- i.e. can't be a set.
If S(x) for the relevant x does not include any combination of goods that would give this person (or the family) enough food, starvation will occur.
No. An orphaned infant won't starve. He or she will be adopted or otherwise incorporated into a family or group. Human oikeiosis is highly plastic.
The exchange entitlements
are unknowable because they
depend not merely on the relevant exchange rates, but also on market imperfections and
other institutional barriers,
which will only become known after the fact
as well as on the actual ability to sell or buy the com modities in question (e.g. a frustrated sale of labour resulting in unemployment is not to be ruled out).
Which is why nobody knows what exchange entitlements actually are. Arbitrageurs (market makers) may specialize in getting better information about this but they may make the wrong call.
To analyse the Bengal famine within the limits of the information available, I shall
ask my daddy or Uncle B.R Sen who was in charge of food in '43? They would tell you that Suhrawardy, as Minister of Supply, gave 20 million Rupees to the Ispahanis to procure food for the public distribution system. A lot of this was sold on the black market. The Ispahanis then financed the Muslim League election campaign which is one reason Suhrawardy became Premier of Bengal in 1946.
have to concentrate mainly on exchange rates (even they pose data problems), supple
menting them in a frankly ad hoc way with whatever other relevant information we
have, e.g. on unemployment. (There were, of course, no unemployment benefits.)
Because the country was as poor as shit. Since it was an agricultural country, this meant that agricultural productivity was very low. That's why the great mass of its people were visibly malnourished. What Bengal needed to do was to follow B.R Sen's (or Sen's own father's ) recommendations to raise agricultural yields. Bangladesh produced only about 11 million tons of food in 1974- which is why there was a big famine. In subsequent decades, output quadrupled while populatiion only doubled because of declinging fertility. A Malthusian disaster was averted.
Famines can be the result of fluctuations of exchange entitlements
Sen means that poor people can starve to death if food prices go up. But the reason they go up is an exogenous supply shock- e.g. a flood or drought or America refusing to send food aid.
altering the rules of the game on which the survival of different occupation groups depends.
The rule remains the same- viz. if you have enough cash you can enough food unless the country is Communist or occupied by an enemy army.
For example, the 1974 floods in Bangladesh, which destroyed some of the crop, immediate agricultural labour hard, by drastically reducing the demand for labour and al the exchange possibilities open to labourers, through the development of wide unemployment.
In other words, the fact that there was less food meant that guys couldn't get work in return for food. But the real problem was corruption which led to 'compassion fatigue'. Also, Bangladesh's decision to sell jute to Cuba pissed off Uncle Sam.
This, in fact, ushered in the famine
the floods- i.e. exogenous supply shock- did the ushering in. Bangladesh was Socialist. The Government didn't feed the people because it was corrupt and incompetent. Democracy creates famine in Muslim majority Bengal. Oddly, Military dictators did a better job.
Bengal, in 1943, wasn't a market economy. It was a war economy with price controls & extensive State control of resources. Even wealth White people found their Air Conditioners were requisitioned by the Army. Sen does not understand this.
Concluding remarks This paper has been concerned partly with economic history and partly with economic analysis of problems of relevance today.
To whom? Socialist countries. Not market economies.
The tradition of analysing starvation and famines in terms of over-all food availability, which can be criticised in a general way (see section 1 and also Sen, 1976B), turns out to be particularly unhelpful in under standing the Bengal famine of 1943.
It was very helpful. People understood the need to get food into Bengal and distributing it to poor people through 'langars' (communal kitchens) and 'food for work' programs. Giving tax-payer money to Ispahani did no good. It just enriched the ruling party.
Indeed, contrary to the conclusion of the official report on the Bengal famine and the often-asserted description of it as arising from a decline of over-all food supply in Bengal, 'food availability decline' seems to fail altogether in explaining the famine (see section 3).
Sen admits that reduced food availability caused prices to rise. This meant that a lot of people starved. The solution was to bring in and distribute a lot of food till output recovered.
I have tried to focus instead on what I have called 'exchange entitlements', which include the opportunities the market offers to a person to exchange other commodities into food.
But the market wasn't allowed to function because the whole of India was a 'war-economy'.
For those who do not grow food themselves (e.g. artisans or barbers),
or Sen's daddy & mummy
or those who do grow food but do not possess the food they grow (e.g. cash-wage agri cultural labourers), the vagaries of the market can have a decisive influence on their ability (and that of their families) to survive.
Sen describes how civil servants as well a lot of workers in war-related industries were covered under various procurement schemes. In a war-economy, food is given to those who advance the war effort. It may be denied to those who are too weak or unskilled to be helpful.
There seem to have been sharp movements in exchange entitlements
a ration is not an 'exchange entitlement'. You can't sell your ration book on the open market.
with respect to food in Bengal during 1942 and 1943, both in terms of the saleability of the commodity to be exchanged (especially rural labour)
demand for 'normal goods' fall when income falls. During a war, the real income of almost everybody falls because resources are diverted to the military.
as well as the exchange rates vis-à-vis rice (the principal food),
Sen is saying 'the black market price went up'.
indicating a growing cause for starvation for several occupation groups.
because less food was available
The observed occupational pattern of destitution is consistent with the expected pattern of destitution based on observed shifts in exchange entitlements.
because less food was available
Some preliminary attempts at going one step behind, viz. into the causation of exchange entitlement shifts, have also been presented (see section 6).
Sen admits less food was available
The failure of the government to anticipate the famine,
It anticipated it but didn't give a toss. Bengalis are like that you know. They wouldn't even bury their own dead preferring to leave that job to White soldiers.
and even to recognize it when it revealed itself, seems to have been the result largely of erroneous theories of famine causation,
Everyone knows the true theory- viz not enough food. Everyone also knows that Bengali Muslim politicians will steal all the money allocated to famine relief. At any rate, that is what happened in 1943 and 1974.
rather than mistakes about facts dealing with food availability.
The official statistics were made up. Ian Stephenson, editor of the Statesman, says so in his book 'Monsoon mornings'. Sen had met Stephenson.
Later the facts were squared with theory by 'revising' the facts, by introducing mythical variations in the unobserved item called 'the carry-over from previous years'.
There were no facts. The official figures were made up. Poor countries can't afford to count their population or figure out how much food there is.
The approach of exchange entitlements applied to famines and starvation
is stupid & useless. Sen was pissed off that his Uncle, B.R. Sen, a former head of F.A.O, was getting publicity for helping end global hunger by focussing on the supply side. Why should there not be a UN organization for looking at the Demand side? The Green Revolution was about increasing availability of food. Why not have a Sen-tentious Revolution which focussed on telling people to eat some food otherwise they might starve to death? Indeed, Sen did warn that UK was at risk of a major famine under Mrs. Thatcher! After all, she was a 'milk-snatcher'- right?
directs us towards general interdependences that hold in a market economy,
In 1943, Bengal was a War Economy. In 1974, it was a Socialist economy. In England, since Tudor times, food for the poorest was supplied outside the market. Sen wasn't just stupid, he was wholly ignorant.
away from the focus only on the supply of food, as in the alternative FAD approach.
Smart people- like Sen's dad- a soil scientist- can increase the supply of food. There is no need to tell people to eat some food. Thus the demand side looks after itself.
As B.R. Sen had made clear, the world had the excess food supply & means of transportation to ensure there need be no more big famines. Obviously, a Communist country or other sort of Dictatorship might have one for its own reasons. After all, one can always blame 'class enemies' or 'saboteurs' for famine.
I would like to suggest that the exchange entitlements approach has become more relevant to famines and starvation in recent years because of the growth of the importance of exchange in developing economies.
i.e. markets were expanding as transport improved
There seems to exist an intermediate phase of development in which the dependence on the market increases sharply (given the breakdown of the traditional peasant economy)
Sen forgets that the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 wiped out 3 times as many people
and in which guaranteed entitle ments in the form of social security benefits have yet to emerge:
sadly, such 'entitlements' can collapse if there is a severe enough supply shock. That's why you need smart soil scientists and agronomists to ensure there is a healthy margin to maintain buffer stocks.
An important develop ment in this phase of transition is the emergence of labour-power as a commodity,
this emerged at least ten thousand years ago.
with neither the protection of the family system of peasant agriculture,
It didn't protect 10 million Bengalis in 1770
nor the insurance of unemployment compensation
which didn't protect Dutch people under Nazi occupation
—nor, of course, the guarantee of the right to work at a living wage.
Which Soviet citizens & Chinese citizens had, in theory, at precisely the time when tens of millions of them starved to death.
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