Development as Freedom (29 page)

Or, to take a different type of case, food prices may shoot up because of the increased purchasing power of some occupational groups, and as a result others who have to buy food may be ruined because the real purchasing power of their money incomes may have shrunk sharply. Such a famine may occur without any decline in food output, resulting as it does from a rise in competing demand rather than a fall in total supply. This is what started off the famine in Bengal in 1943 (discussed earlier), with urban dwellers gaining from the “war boom”—the Japanese army was around the corner and the British and Indian defense expenditures were heavy in urban Bengal, including Calcutta. Once the rice prices started moving up sharply, public panic as well as manipulative speculation played its part in pushing the prices sky high, beyond the reach of a substantial part of the population of rural Bengal.
¹⁰
The Devil, then, took the hindmost.
¹¹

Or, to take yet a different type of case, some workers may find their “occupations gone,” as the economy changes and the types and locations of gainful activities shift. This has happened, for example, in sub-Saharan Africa, with changing environmental and climatic conditions. Erstwhile productive workers may then be without work
or earnings, and in the absence of social security systems, there would not be anything else to fall back on.

In some other cases, the loss of gainful employment can be a temporary phenomenon, with powerful effects in initiating a famine. For example, in the Bangladesh famine of 1974, the first signs of distress were found among the landless rural laborers, after the summer floods, which disrupted the employment of labor for transplanting rice. These laborers, who led a hand-to-mouth existence, were forced to starve as a result of the loss of wage employment, and this phenomenon occurred much
before
the crop that was adversely affected was to be harvested.
¹²

Famines are highly divisive phenomena. Attempts to understand them in terms of
average
food availability per head can be hopelessly misleading. It is rare to find a famine that affected more than 5 or 10 percent of the population. There are, to be sure, alleged accounts of famines in which nearly everyone in a country had to go hungry. But most of these anecdotes do not bear much scrutiny. For example, the authoritative
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, in its vintage eleventh edition, refers to the Indian famine of 1344–1345 as one in which even “the Moghul emperor was unable to obtain the necessaries for his household.”
¹³
But that story runs into some problems. It is sad to have to report that the Moghul empire in India was not established until 1526. Perhaps more important, the Tughlak emperor in power in 1344–1345—Mohammad Bin Tughlak—not only had no great difficulty in securing necessaries for his household, but also had enough means to organize one of the more illustrious programs of famine relief in history.
¹⁴
The anecdotes of unified starvation do not tally with the reality of divided fortunes.

Since famines are associated with the loss of entitlements of one or more occupational groups in particular regions, the resulting starvation can be prevented by systematically re-creating a minimum level of incomes and entitlements for those who are hit by economic changes. The numbers involved, while often absolutely large, are usually small fractions of the total population, and the minimum levels of purchasing power needed to ward off starvation can be quite
small. Thus the costs of such public action for famine prevention are typically rather modest even for poor countries, provided they make systematic and efficient arrangements in good time.

Just to get an idea of the magnitudes involved, if potential famine victims constitute, say, 10 percent of the total population of the country (they usually affect a much smaller proportion than that), the share of total income going to these typically poor people would not in normal circumstances exceed, say, about 3 percent of the GNP. Their normal share of food consumption may also, typically, not be greater than 4 or 5 percent of the national food consumption. Thus the resources needed to re-create their
entire
income, or to resupply their entire normal food consumption, starting from zero, do not have to be very large provided the preventive measures are efficiently organized. Of course, famine victims typically have some resources left (so that their entitlements do not have to be re-created from zero), and the
net
resource requirement can thus be even smaller.

Also, a good deal of the mortality associated with famines results from diseases unleashed by debilitation, breakdown of sanitary arrangements, population movements, and infectious spread of diseases endemic in the region.
¹⁵
These too can be sharply reduced through sensible public action involving epidemic control and communal health arrangements. In this field too, the returns on small amounts of well-planned public expenditure can be very large indeed.

Famine prevention is very dependent on the political arrangements for entitlement protection. In the richer countries, such protection is provided by antipoverty programs and unemployment insurance. Most developing countries do not have any general system of unemployment insurance, but some of them do provide emergency public employment at times of massive loss of employment caused by natural or non-natural disasters. Compensatory government expenditure in creating employment can help to avert a threatening famine very effectively. Indeed, this is the way potential famines have been prevented from occurring in India since independence—mainly through countervailing employment creation. For example, in 1973 in Maharashtra, to compensate for the loss of employment associated with a severe drought, 5 million temporary jobs were created, which is really a very large number (when account is taken of the workers’ family members too). The results were extraordinary: no
significant rise in mortality at all, and even no great deterioration of the number of undernourished people, despite a dramatic decline (in many areas 70 percent or more) in food production over a vast region.

The political economy of famine causation and prevention involves institutions and organizations, but it depends, in addition, on perceptions and understandings that accompany the exercise of power and authority. It depends particularly on the alienation of the rulers from those ruled. Even when the immediate causation of a famine is quite different from this, the social or political distance between the governors and the governed can play a crucial role in the nonprevention of the famine.

It is useful, in this context, to consider the famines of the 1840s that devastated Ireland about 150 years ago, killing a higher
proportion
of the population than any other famine anywhere in recorded history.
¹⁶
The famine also changed the nature of Ireland in a decisive way. It led to a level of emigration—even under the most terrible conditions of voyage—that has hardly been seen anywhere else in the world.
¹⁷
The Irish population even today is very substantially smaller than it was in 1845 when the famine began.

What did cause this calamity, then? In George Bernard Shaw’s
Man and Superman
, Mr. Malone, a rich Irish American, refuses to describe the Irish famines of the 1840s as “famine.” He tells his English daughter-in-law, Violet, that his father “died of starvation in the black 47.” When Violet asks, “The famine?” Malone replies: “No, the starvation. When a country is full of food and exporting it, there can be no famine.”

There are several things wrong with Malone’s spiked statement. It is certainly true that food was being exported from famished Ireland to prosperous England, but it is not true that Ireland was full of food (indeed, the coexistence of hunger and food exports is a common phenomenon in many famines). Also, while the expressions “starve” and “starvation” can certainly be taken in their old, proactive sense—now largely defunct—of
making
people go without food, in particular
causing
their death from hunger, it is hard to deny
that there
was
a famine (as the term is commonly understood) in Ireland at that time.

Malone was making a different—and rather profound—point, admittedly with some literary license. The focal issue concerns the role of human agency in causing and sustaining famines. If the Irish famines were entirely preventable, and in particular, if those in public authority could have prevented them, then the charge of “starving” the Irish would have perspicuity enough. The accusing finger cannot but point to the role of public policy in preventing or not preventing famines, and to the political, social, and cultural influences that determine public policy. The policy issues to be examined concern acts of
omission
as well as of
commission
. Since famines have continued to occur in different countries even in the modern world of unprecedented overall prosperity, questions of public policies and their effectiveness remain as relevant today as they were 150 years ago.

Turning first to the more immediate reasons for the Irish famines, there clearly was, in this case, a reduction in the food output in Ireland, mainly because of a potato blight. However, the role of overall food supply in generating that famine can be assessed in different ways depending on the coverage of our food statistics. Much depends on the area over which food output is considered. As Cormac O Grada has pointed out, if the food output and supply over the entire United Kingdom are considered, then there were no crises of food output or supply, in contrast with what happened specifically in Ireland.
¹⁸
Certainly food could have moved from Britain to Ireland if the Irish could have afforded to purchase it. The fact that this did not happen, and exactly the opposite occurred, relates to the poverty of Ireland and to the economic deprivation of the Irish victims. As Terry Eagleton puts it in his forceful literary treatment of the Irish famines,
Heathcliff and the Great Hunger:
“In this sense it can be reasonably claimed that the Irish did not die simply for lack of food, but because they largely lacked the funds to purchase food which was present in abundance in the kingdom as a whole, but which was not sufficiently available to them.”
¹⁹

In analyzing the causation of famines, it is important to study the general prevalence of poverty in the country or region involved. In the case of Ireland, the poverty of the Irish in general and the modest
size of their assets made them specially vulnerable to the economic decline that occurred with the blight.
²⁰
In that context, focus has to be placed not only on the endemic poverty of the people involved, but also on the special vulnerability of those whose entitlements are particularly fragile when there are economic changes.
²¹
It is the general defenselessness of the very poor, combined with additional misfortunes created by economic variations, that produces the victims of drastic starvation. The small Irish growers of potatoes were severely hit by the blight, and through the increase in the price of food, others were too.

As far as food itself is concerned, far from there being a systematic import of food into Ireland to break the famine, there was (as mentioned earlier) the opposite movement: the export of food from Ireland to England (especially of food of a somewhat higher quality). Such a “food countermovement” is not altogether rare in a class of famines—the so-called slump famines—in which there is an overall slump in the economy, which makes the purchasing ability of the consumers go down sharply, and the available food supply (reduced as it is) fetches a better price elsewhere. Such food countermovement happened, for example, in the Wollo famine in Ethiopia in 1973 mentioned earlier. Residents of that province were unable to buy food, despite the fact that food prices there were no higher—often substantially lower—than elsewhere in the country. In fact, it has been shown that food was moving
out of
Wollo to the more prosperous regions of Ethiopia where people had more income and thus had greater ability to buy food.
²²

This did happen on quite a large scale in Ireland in the 1840s, when ship after ship—laden with wheat, oats, cattle, pigs, eggs, and butter—sailed down the Shannon bound for well-fed England from famine-stricken Ireland. The export of food from Ireland to England at the height of the famine has been a subject of great bitterness in Ireland, and even today continues to influence the complex mistrust between England and Ireland.

There is no great economic mystery behind the movement of food from Ireland to England during the Irish famines. The market forces would always encourage movement of food to places where people could afford to pay a higher price for it. The prosperous English could do just that, compared with what the impoverished Irish could
do. Similarly, in 1973, the residents of Addis Ababa could buy food that the starving wretches in Wollo could not afford.

One must not jump from this to the conclusion that stopping market transactions would be the right way to halt a famine. In some special cases, such a stoppage can serve a limited goal (it could have helped Irish consumers if the food countermovement to England had been restrained), but in general that would still leave untouched the basic problem of the poverty and destitution of the famine victims. To change that, more positive policies would be needed—not the purely negative one of banning market transactions of certain kinds. Indeed, with positive policies of regenerating the lost incomes of the destitute (for example, through public employment programs), the food countermovement could have automatically been reduced or stopped, since the domestic purchasers could have commanded food more affluently.

We know, of course, that very little help was provided by the government of the United Kingdom to alleviate the destitution and starvation of the Irish through the period of the famine. There have been similar occurrences in the empire, but Ireland was distinguished in being part of the British Isles itself. This is where
cultural alienation
, as opposed to purely political asymmetry, is of some significance (though cultural alienation is “political” as well, in a broad sense).