Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Clearly, there is no doubt that suh events can and do have profound implica-
tions for levels of hunger; cataclysms caused by weather or human action obviously
impact on people's abilities to feed themselves. However, during the 1980s there was
a dramatic shit in researhers' understandings of the causes of hunger. he 'enti-
tlements' approah, advanced by Amartya Sen (1981), explained hunger not simply
through the prism of food production, but on the political structures that connected
people to food. For Sen, a cataclysm suh as drought or war is not necessarily a cause
of hunger, but a production shok that
triggers
hunger because of the way it may
undermine people's entitlement arrangements.
his approah relected a radically diferent lens into this issue. Sen's researh
into the Bengal famine of 1942-44 overturned prevailing oicial and sholarly ex-
planations. He saw a 'moderate' fall in production being translated into an exponen-
tial number (perhaps three million) of hunger-related deaths because of the specific
nature of prevailing social and political arrangements. These included, firstly, trade
restrictions on rice whih prioritized the maintenance of food stoks in Calcuta over
and above rural areas of Bengal and, secondly, war-related food price inflation that
inhibited landless rural labourers' abilities to access food. Hence, rather than being
a famine afflicting an entire region's population, it was a phenomenon with sharp
social and economic cleavages. Sen argued that dramatic hanges to the politics of
food in Bengal during 1942-44 efectively disenfranhised food access for the rural
poor, leading to his haracterization of the phenomenon as a 'boom famine' (1981,
p75). It was not food deicit that caused starvation, but hanges in the political ar-
rangements that connected vulnerable individuals to the food system.
From this analysis, Sen proposed the concept of
entitlements
as a generalized
way of understanding hunger. This concept sought to explain hunger and famine by
way of asking questions about the social, cultural and economic frameworks that
bestowed rights to ownership within populations. As Sen contended, even the seem-
ingly straightforward notion of possessing a loaf of bread (and thus forestalling one's
hunger) assumes a hain of entitlement relations:
I own this loaf of bread. Why is this ownership accepted? Because I got it by
exhange through paying some money I owned. Why is my ownership of that
money accepted? Because I got it by selling a bamboo umbrella owned by me.
Why is my ownership of the bamboo umbrella accepted? Because I made it with
my own labour using some bamboo from my land. Why is my ownership of the
land accepted? Because I inherited it from my father. Why is his ownership of
