Sen's prescription could end famines

By a Special Correspondent

Indian economist Amartya Sen bagged the Nobel prize for economics this year for looking at the recurring phenomenon of famines in a totally different light. His in-depth study of a number of famines, had enabled him to challenge entrenched beliefs based on Malthusian principles.

If his precise policy prescriptions are followed, one of the biggest killers in the history of man, may well become a thing of the past.

Conventional thinking on why famines occur is influenced by Robert Malthus who in the first half of the 19th century said that famines occurred when the population outstripped food supply. He attached primary importance to per capita food supply in a statistical sense. Malthus was pessimistic about mankind ever seeing a world free of famine because, according to him, food supply tended to lag behind population growth. If food output grew in arithmetic proportion, population grew in geometric proportion, he said.

Sen disagreed with Malthus's premise. He also did not go along with Malthus' pessimistic view that there would always be a gap between the total number of mouths to feed and the amount of food available. Malthus had not anticipated modern technological advances in food production.

However, the fundamental issue between the two was the utility of the per capita food availability criterion. Sen feels that it is this formulation of Malthus which has survived as a force in the minds of economists and government leaders and prevented a rational and practical approach to the problem. In his path- breaking 1981 work "Poverty and Famines", Sen argued that per capita adequacy of food in statistical terms was no guarantee against famine.

The 1943 Bengalfamine, arguably the most devastating one in this century with three million perishing, did not take place in a bad year in terms of per capita availability of foodgrains. 1941 was much worse, but there was no famine then. One reason why the then British government took no relief measures quickly was that as per the statistics available with it, the food supply was adequate "per capita". By the time the government woke up to the reality of deaths, one million had already died.

Blinded by Malthusian theory, the government had failed to see that a population's ability to "access" the food was as important as the "availability" of it. Lack of purchasing power due to unemployment, loss of markets, unfavourable terms of trade and rising prices were as important. Food prices had shot up because of a war-time boom in demand.

But rise in prices is not all important either. In the 1973 Ethiopian famine, hundreds of thousands died even though food prices had not gone up. During the 1974 Bangladesh famine, prices had not gone up much, but people had lost purchasing power because of unemployment caused by floods. Landless wage labourers suffered more than landed peasants. In the 1943 Bengal famine, the urban population had escaped unhurt thanks to government rationing.

Sen says that there has never been a famine in which every section of society had suffered, as distribution of food or access to food has never been even. There have always been differences in terms of access and entitlement between soci-economic classes and between occupational groups depending upon a variety of factors. In other words, famines have always been a product of the political economy rather than population and the quantum of food production.

Sen suggests that governments should anticipate famines, prevent them and provide relief when they do come. Food should be made available and affordable. He advocates the Food for Work programme, a socially useful way of enhancing the peoples' purchasing power. He is for a good well stocked Public Distribution System (PDS). The Bengal famine was worsened by low government stocks and a PDS which was confined to the urban areas.

Sen is all for land reforms which would put land, an asset, in the hands of a larger number of people. He pleads for a social security net for the weak and the disadvantaged so that large-scale human tragedies could be avoided. He grants that a social net is expensive, but points out that Sri Lanka (before 1983) and China have both shown that the costs are bearable. Both countries have been richly benefited by being welfare states, Sen says.

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