AMARTYA SEN Poverty and Famines An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation Poverty and Famines Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation This study was prepared for the International Labour Office within the framework of the World Employment Programme. The World Employment Programme (WEP) was launched by the International Labour Organisation in 1969, as the ILO's main contribution to the International Development Strategy for the Second United Nations Development Decade. The means of action adopted by the WEP have included the following: - short-term high-level advisory missions; - longer-term national or regional employment teams; and - a wide-ranging research programme. Through these activities the ILO has been able to help national decision-makers to reshape their policies and plans with the aim of eradicating mass poverty and unemployment. A landmark in the development of the WEP was the World Employment Conference of 1976, which proclaimed inter alia that "strategies and national development plans should include as a priority objective the promotion of employment and the satisfaction of the basic needs of each country's population". The Declaration of Principles and Programme of Action adopted by the Conference have become the cornerstone of WEP technical assistance and research activities during the closing years of the Second Development Decade. Poverty and Famines An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation AMARTYA SEN CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD 1981 Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP London Glasgow Mew York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associate companies in Beirut Berlin Ibadan Mexico City Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, Mew York © International Labour Organisation 1981 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Sen, Amartya Poverty and famines. /. Famines /. Title 363.8 HC7Q.F3 80-42191 ISBN 0-19-828426-8 The responsibility for opinions expressed in signed studies and other contributions rests solely with their authors, and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the International Labour Office of the opinions expressed in them. The designations employed and the presentation of material do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the International Labour Office concerning the legal status of any country or territory or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers. Typeset by Macmillan India Ltd, Bangalore 1 and Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Oxford by Eric Buckley Printer to the University To Amiya Dasgupta who introduced me to economics and taught me what it is about Preface Much about poverty is obvious enough. One does not need elaborate criteria, cunning measurement, or probing analysis, to recognize raw poverty and to understand its antecedents. It would be natural to be impatient with long-winded academic studies on 'poor naked wretches' with 'houseless heads and unfed sides' and 'loop'd and windowed raggedness', to use King Lear's graphic description. And furthermore it may also be the case, as Lear told the blind Gloucester, that 'a man may see how this world goes with no eyes'. There is indeed much that is transparent about poverty and misery. But not everything about poverty is quite so simple. Even the identification of the poor and the diagnosis of poverty may be far from obvious when we move away from extreme and raw poverty. Different approaches can be used (e.g. biological inadequacy, relative deprivation), and there are technical issues to be resolved within each approach. Furthermore, to construct an overall picture of poverty, it is necessary to go well beyond identifying the poor. To provide an aggregate profile based on the characteristics of those who are identified as poor, problems of aggregation have to be squarely faced. Finally—and most importantly—the causation of poverty raises questions that are not easily answered. While the 'immediate' antecedents of poverty may be too obvious to need much analysis, and the 'ultimate' causation too vague and open-ended a question to be settled fully, there are various intermediate levels of useful answers that are worth exploring. The problem is of particular relevance in the context of recent discussions on the causation of hunger and starvation. This monograph is concerned with these questions. The main focus of this work is on the causation of starvation in general and of famines in particular. The basic approach, which involves analysing 'entitlement systems', is introduced in general terms in Chapter i. This is done even before the concepts of poverty are examined in any detail, because that is where the thrust of this monograph lies. In Chapters 2 and 3 problems of conceptualiz- ation and measurement of poverty are examined. The specific viii Preface problem of starvation is taken up in very general terms in Chapter 4., and the 'entitlement approach' is analysed in Chapter 5. This is followed by case studies of famines from different parts of the world: the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 (Chapter 6), the Ethiopian famines of 1973-75 (Chapter 7), famines in the Sahel region of Africa during the early 1970s (Chapter 8), and the Bangladesh famine of 1974 (Chapter 9). In Chapter 10 the entitlement approach is consolidated, taking up general issues of deprivation related to entitlement systems. There are four technical appendices. Appendix A presents a formal analysis of the notion of exchange entitlement—an important aspect of entitlement systems. The relevance of failures of exchange entitlement for the development of famine situations is brought out in Appendix B in terms of some illustrative models. Appendix C provides an examination of the problem of poverty measurement, including a scrutiny of various measures that have been used or proposed. Finally, the pattern of famine mortality is discussed in Appendix D based on a case study of the Bengal famine of 1943. This work has been prepared for the World Employment Programme of ILO. I am grateful for, among other things, their extraordinary patience; the work took a good deal longer than they—and for that matter I—imagined it would. I am also most grateful for helpful discussions with Felix Paukert and others involved in the Income Distribution and Employment Programme. I have also benefited greatly from detailed com- ments of Judith Heyer and Jocelyn Kynch on an earlier draft of this manuscript. For useful suggestions and advice, I am also grateful to Mohiuddin Alamgir, Sudhir Anand, Asit Bhattacharya, Robert Cassen, Dipankar Chatterjee, Pramit Chaudhuri, Amiya Dasgupta, Meghnad Desai, John Flemming, Madangopal Ghosh, David Glass, Ruth Glass, Terence Gorman, Keith Griffin, Carl Hamilton, Roger Hay, Julius Holt, Leif Johansen, J. Krishnamurti, Mukul Majumdar, Ashok Mitra, John Muellbauer, Suzy Paine, Debidas Ray, Debraj Ray, Samir Ray, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Carl Riskin, Joan Robinson, Suman Sarkar, John Seaman, Rehman Sobhan, K. Sundaram, Jaroslav Vanek and Henry Wan, among others. I have drawn on my earlier writings, including articles Preface ix published in Economic and Political Weekly (1973, 1976), Economét- rica (1976, 1977), Review of Economic Studies (1976), Cambridge Journal of Economics (1977), Scandinavian Journal of Economics (1979), Journal of Economic Literature (1979), World Development (1980), and Quarterly Journal of Economics (1981). Finally, a remark on presentation. While some mathematical concepts and notation have been used in Appendices A-C, the text of the monograph is almost entirely informal. Someone concerned with the detailed structures would have to consult the Appendices, but there should be no difficulty in following the main lines of the argument (including the case studies) without reference to them. I have tried to make the book accessible to as wide an audience as possible, since the subject matter of this work is important. I am also immodest enough to believe that the analysis presented in this monograph has a certain amount of relevance to matters of practical concern. A.K.S. Contents 1 Poverty and Entitlements i 2 Concepts of Poverty 9 3 Poverty: Identification and Aggregation 24 4 Starvation and Famines 39 5 The Entitlement Approach 45 6 The Great Bengal Famine 52 7 The Ethiopian Famines 86 8 Drought and Famine in the Sahel 113 9 Famine in Bangladesh 131 10 Entitlements and Deprivation 154 APPENDICES A Exchange Entitlement 167 B Illustrative Models of Exchange Entitlement 174 C Measurement of Poverty 185 D Famine Mortality: A Case Study 195 BIBLIOGRAPHY 2 I 7 INDEXES 25O Chapter 1 Poverty and Entitlements I.I ENTITLEMENTS AND OWNERSHIP Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes. Whether and how starvation relates to food supply is a matter for factual investigation. Food supply statements say things about a commodity (or a group of commodities) considered on its own. Starvation state- ments are about the relationship of persons to the commodity (or that commodity group).1 Leaving out cases in which a person may deliberately starve, starvation statements translate readily into statements of ownership of food by persons. In order to understand starvation, it is, therefore, necessary to go into the structure of ownership. Ownership relations are one kind of entitlement relations. It is necessary to understand the entitlement systems within which the problem of starvation is to be analysed.2 This applies more generally to poverty as such, and more specifically to famines as well. An entitlement relation applied to ownership connects one set of ownerships to another through certain rules of legitimacy.