Development As Freedom

Sen says that after people read reports of famines and widespread malnutrition, they tend to make the pessimistic assumption that hunger can never be eliminated. Population growth seems to only make this problem worse. However, he says that the facts do not justify such pessimism, particularly regarding famines. The issue with famine is, surprisingly, not the amount of food that is available, but rather the substantive freedom of individuals and families to gain ownership of food either by growing it or buying it on the market. In most cases, there is sufficient food within a country to prevent people from starving if it were distributed differently—but the poorest people lack access to it. In the minority of cases where this isn’t true, the freedom to buy food on the international market would cover the remaining gap. So, it is the lack of economic power to buy food that causes famine, rather than the lack of food itself.

A family’s ability to earn ownership (or “entitlement”) of food depends on three major factors: Their “endowment” or ownership of productive resources like labor and land, what they can produce using these endowments, and the exchange conditions for selling their labor or their products. Disrupting any of these can cause famines. For example, the relative price of fish and rice dramatically shifted in the 1943 famine in Bengal, in pre-independent India; Bengali fisherman could no longer sell enough fish to buy the cheaper rice that provided most of their calories. As the crisis hit, people postponed services like haircuts, and barbers found their earnings relative to food prices decline up to 80% in some areas; in turn, this drove the barbers into severe hunger. As food prices rose, the ability of the working class to afford it declined. In another example, the Bangladesh famine of 1974 occurred during a year when food production reached a five year high. However, heavy flooding earlier in the year had led to widespread unemployment for poor agricultural laborers, and the fear of crop failures had caused food prices to preemptively skyrocket. The famine itself did not begin with crop failures; rather, food prices rose due to increased urban demand for food, which was, in turn, caused by an evolving war economy.

Other famines clearly coincide with crop failures—these include the famine in Ireland in the 1840s, and the Chinese famine of 1958-1961. However, even in those cases, some sections of the population remained unaffected by the famines while others suffered. Local or class-based inequalities cause some groups to lack the means to acquire additional food, either locally or from other regions and countries. Famines rarely afflict more than 5% of the population. Even if the poorest 10th of the population completely lost their ability to buy food, fully replacing that income would amount to perhaps 3% of GNP—something even a poor country could afford in a temporary emergency. India, Botswana, and Zimbabwe have all successfully fought famines by creating short-term mass employment via public works projects. In practice, famines occur when the government is indifferent to a particular population; instead of supplementing lost income or moving food to the hungry area, they allow a food “countermovement,” in which crops are shipped away from famine-afflicted areas to more profitable markets. This is what happened in Ireland in the 1840s and in Ethiopia’s 1973 Wollo famine. Cultural alienation and prejudice led the British government to blame the 1840s famine on Irish laziness and the 1943 Bengali famine on Indians breeding “like rabbits” (174), thereby letting Britain absolve itself from responsibility to help its subjects.

Therefore, preventing famine relies on nurturing general economic growth, not merely improving agricultural techniques. If famine does occur, it can be stopped by a robust government response—preferably by creating emergency employment so as to minimize disruptions to people’s lives and to the markets. The power of such a public response explains why no modern democratic countries (even poor ones like Botswana and Zimbabwe) have endured famine while dictatorial ones have. The ruling class never goes hungry in a famine, but they will likely lose their status in a democracy if they ignore such visible suffering among the voters that elected them. A free press ensures that this suffering is visible, unlike China’s failed “Great Leap Forward” when the Communist party’s monopoly on news obscured the starvation of millions. Even Mao complained afterward that the government itself didn’t understand rural suffering. Democracies help ensure protective security (a social safety net for the disadvantaged) and the transparency guarantee (a free press and scrutiny of business arrangements)—both of these are valuable to developing countries. Even richer economies need these guarantees, as demonstrated by problems in the financial markets of authoritarian East Asian countries in the 1990s.