Development as Freedom (28 page)

For the elimination of hunger in the modern world, it is crucial to understand the causation of famines in an adequately broad way, and not just in terms of some mechanical balance between food and population. What is crucial in analyzing hunger is the substantive freedom of the individual and the family to establish ownership over an adequate amount of food, which can be done either by growing the food oneself (as peasants do), or by buying it in the market (as the nongrowers of food do). A person may be forced into starvation even when there is plenty of food around if he loses his ability to buy food in the market, through a loss of income (for example, due to unemployment or the collapse of the market for goods that he produces and sells to earn a living). On the other side, even when food supply falls sharply in a country or a region, everyone can be saved from starvation by a better sharing of the available food (for example, through creating additional employment and income for the potential famine victims). This can be supplemented and made more effective by getting food from abroad, but many threatening famines have been prevented even without that—simply through a more equal sharing of the reduced domestic supply of food. The focus has to be on the economic power and substantive freedom of individuals and families to buy enough food, and not just on the quantum of food in the country in question.

There is need for economic and political analyses here, as there also is for having a fuller understanding of crises and disasters other than famines. A good example is the kind of predicament that some countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia have recently experienced. In these crises, as in famines, some sections of the population have lost their economic entitlements with unexpected suddenness. The speed and sheer intensity of deprivation in these crises (and also, typically, the unexpectedness of the disasters) differ from the more “regular” phenomenon of general poverty, in the same way that famines differ from endemic hunger.

Hunger relates not only to food production and agricultural expansion, but also to the functioning of the entire economy and—even more broadly—the operation of the political and social arrangements that can, directly or indirectly, influence people’s ability to acquire food and to achieve health and nourishment. Furthermore, while much can be done through sensible government policy, it is important to integrate the role of the government with the efficient functioning of other economic and social institutions—varying from trade, commerce and the markets to active functioning of political parties, nongovernmental organizations, and institutions that sustain and facilitate informed public discussion, including effective news media.

Undernourishment, starvation and famine are influenced by the working of the entire economy and society—not just food production and agricultural activities. It is crucial to take adequate note of the economic and social interdependences that govern the incidence of hunger in the contemporary world. Food is not distributed in the economy through charity or some system of automatic sharing. The ability to acquire food has to be
earned
. What we have to concentrate on is not the total food supply in the economy but the “entitlement” that each person enjoys: the commodities over which she can establish her ownership and command. People suffer from hunger when they cannot establish their entitlement over an adequate amount of food.
²

What determines a family’s entitlement? It depends on various distinct influences. First, there is the
endowment:
the ownership over productive resources as well as wealth that commands a price in the market. For much of humanity the only endowment that is at all significant is labor power. The majority of the world’s people have little resource other than labor power, which may come combined with a variable amount of skill and experience. But in general, labor, land and other resources make up the basket of assets.

Second, an important influence consists of
production possibilities
and their use. This is where technology comes in: available technology determines the production possibilities, which are influenced by available knowledge as well as the ability of the people to marshal that knowledge and to make actual use of it.

In generating entitlements, the endowment in the form of land and labor may be directly used to produce food—as in the case of agriculture. Or, alternatively, a family or an individual may acquire the ability to buy food by getting a wage income. This will depend on employment opportunities and the prevailing wage rates. These too depend on production possibilities—in agriculture, industry and other activities. Most people in the world do not directly produce food, but earn their ability to get food by getting employment in the production of other commodities, which may vary from cash crops, to craft products, to industrial goods, to sundry services, and involve a variety of occupations. These interdependences may be very central to the analysis of famines, since substantial numbers of people may lose the ability to command food because of problems in the production of other goods, rather than food as such.

Third, much would depend on the
exchange conditions:
the ability to sell and buy goods and the determination of relative prices of different products (for example, craft products vis-à-vis staple food). Given the central—indeed unique—importance of labor power as an endowment for much of humanity, it is crucial to pay attention to the operation of the labor markets. Does a job seeker find employment at the prevailing wages? Also, can craftsmen and service providers manage to sell what they try to sell? At what relative prices (vis-à-vis the price of food in the market)?

These exchange conditions can change dramatically in an economic emergency, leading to the threat of a famine. These shifts can occur very rapidly as a result of a variety of influences. There have been famines associated with sharp changes in relative prices of products (or of wage rate vis-à-vis the price of food) due to quite distinct causes, such as a drought, or a flood, or a general shortfall of employment, or an uneven boom that raises the income of some but not of others, or even an exaggerated fear of food shortage that drives the food prices temporarily up, causing havoc.
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In an economic crisis, some services may be hit much harder than others. For example, during the 1943 Bengal famine, the exchange rates between food and the products of particular types altered radically. Other than the wage-food-price ratio, there were big shifts in the relative prices of fish vis-à-vis food grains, and Bengali fishermen were among the worst-affected occupational groups in the 1943 famine. Of course fish is food too, but it is high-quality food, and the
poor fishermen have to sell fish to be able to buy cheaper calories in staple foods (in Bengal, this mostly takes the form of rice) to be able to get enough calories to survive. The equilibrium of survival is sustained by this exchange, and a sudden fall in the relative price of fish vis-à-vis rice can devastate this equilibrium.
⁴

Many other occupations are also acutely vulnerable to shifts in relative prices and sales proceeds. Take a job like haircutting. Barbers are hit by two sets of problems in a period of economic crisis: (1) in situations of distress people find it quite easy to postpone having their hair cut—so that the demand for the product of the barber may fall sharply; and (2) on top of this “quantity” decline, there is also a sharp fall in relative price of haircutting: during the 1943 Bengal famine, the rate of exchange between haircutting and staple food fell in some districts by
70 or 80 percent
. So the barbers—already poor as they are—went to the wall, as did many other occupational groups. All this happened with very little overall decline in food output or aggregate supply. The combination of greater purchasing power of the urban population (who had benefited from the war boom) and fearful speculative withdrawal of food from the markets helped to generate starvation through a sharp distributional change. Understanding the causation of hunger and starvation calls for an analysis of the entire economic mechanism, not just an accounting of food output and supply.
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Entitlement failures that lead to famines can arise from a variety of causes. In attempting to remedy famines, and even more, to prevent them, this diversity of causal antecedence has to be kept in view. Famines reflect a shared predicament, but not necessarily a shared causation.

For those who do not themselves produce food (for example, industrial workers or service providers), or do not own the food they produce (for example, agricultural wage laborers), the ability to acquire food in the market depends on their earnings, the prevailing food prices, and their nonfood necessary expenditures. Their ability to get food depends on economic circumstance: employment and wage rates for wage laborers, production of other commodities and their prices for craftsmen and service-providers, and so on.

Even for those who do produce food themselves, while their entitlements depend on their
individual
food output, there is no similar dependence on the
national
output of food, on which many famine studies standardly concentrate. Also, sometimes people have to sell expensive foods such as animal products to buy cheaper calories from food grains, as poor pastoral people often do: for example, animal-rearing nomads in the Sahel and in the horn of Africa. The exchange-dependence of the African pastoralist in having to sell animal products including meat to buy cheap calories from staple food is rather similar to that of the Bengali fishermen, discussed earlier, in having to sell fish to buy cheaper calories from rice. These fragile exchange equilibria can be ruptured by shifts in exchange rates. A fall in the price of animal products vis-à-vis food grains can spell disaster for these pastoral people. Some African famines with a strong pastoral component have involved a process of this kind. A drought can lead to a fall in the relative price of animal products (even meat) vis-à-vis traditionally cheaper food, since people often shift the pattern of their consumption
against
expensive food (such as meat) and non-necessities (such as leather goods) in a situation of economic distress. This change in relative prices can make it impossible for the pastoralists to buy enough staple food to survive.
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Famines can occur even without any decline in food production or availability. A laborer may be reduced to starvation through unemployment, combined with the absence of a social security system of safety nets (such as unemployment insurance). This can easily happen, and indeed even a large famine can actually occur,
despite
a high and undiminished general level of food availability—perhaps even a “peak” level of food availability—in the economy as a whole.

One example of a famine despite peak food availability is the Bangladesh famine of 1974.
⁷
This occurred in a year
of greater
food availability per head than in any other year between 1971 and 1976 (see
figure 7.1
). The starvation was initiated by regional unemployment caused by floods, which affected food output many months later when the reduced crop was harvested (mainly, around December), but the famine occurred earlier than that and was over well before the affected crop matured. The floods led to
immediate
income deprivation of rural laborers in the summer of 1974; they lost the wages that they would have earned from the transplanting of rice and related activities, and that would have given them the means to acquire food. The local starvation and panic were followed by more widespread hunger, reinforced by a nervous food market and a steep rise in food prices as a result of exaggerated expectation of future food shortage. The future shortage was overestimated and to some extent manipulated, and the price rise was followed later on by a downward price correction.
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But by that time the famine had already taken its heavy toll.

FIGURE
7.1:
Food Grains Availability in Bangladesh, 1971–1975

Source:
Amartya Sen,
Poverty and Famines
(Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1981), table 9.5. The famine occurred in 1974.

Even when a famine
is
associated with a decline in food production (as it clearly was in the case of the Chinese famine of 1958–1961
or in the Irish famines in the 1840s
⁹
), we still have to go beyond the output statistics to explain why it is that some parts of the population get wiped out, while the rest do just fine. Famines survive by divide-and-rule. For example, a group of peasants may suffer entitlement losses when food output in their territory declines, perhaps due to a local drought, even when there is no general dearth of food in the country. The victims would not have the means to buy food from elsewhere, since they would not have anything much to sell to earn an income, given their own production loss. Others with more secure earnings in other occupations or in other locations may be able to get by well enough by purchasing food from elsewhere. Something very like this happened in the Wollo famine in Ethiopia in 1973, with impoverished residents of the province of Wollo unable to buy food, despite the fact that food prices in Dessie (the capital of Wollo) were no higher than in Addis Ababa and Asmara. Indeed, there is evidence of some food moving
out of
Wollo to the more prosperous regions of Ethiopia, where people had more income to buy food.