How useful is Sen's theory in interpreting historical famines? Illustrate your essay with specific examples.

Historical interpretation of famine, tied in with descriptions and analysis of hunger could be seen to seriously begin with the work of Thomas Malthus, who based his work on the relation between population and physical resources. Another significant contributor to the field was Karl Mark, focusing on exploitation and the excess appropriations of capitalism (although, interestingly enough one of the reasons provided for many famines have been the conflict between urban demand for food and the importance of sustaining industry, Marx’s political nursery for political collectivism). Ester Boserup has highlighted the way in which technical innovation stimulates population increase and most importantly as far as this text is concerned, the work of Amartya Sen with his idea of entitlement as a right founded in law and tradition to provide access to food (Newman, 1990).
Sen makes clear that his theory of famine is emphatic that their need not be a shortage of food for hunger to exist. As he puts it,
‘Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough
food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough
food to eat.’ (Sen, 1981, p.1)
Sen concentrates on the ability of people to command food by legal means in a society, this includes the use of production various possibilities, trade openings, entitlement through the state and any other means of getting food. According to Sen, a person, or in reality, up to millions of people, will go hungry if he either is unable to command food, or does not use his ability to get food, although his focus is on the former, rather than the latter. His approach remains general and excludes a number of factors which can play a part in the cause of starvation e.g. looting, inflexible food habits, something for which he has been criticised and is discussed later.
Sen sees food as a ‘primitive property right’ which is governed differently in any given society, his approach deals with each person’s right to a ‘commodity bundle’ as he calls it and the resulting starvation that a failure of this entitlement produces. Using an example from his book, Poverty and Famines; a peasant may have some land, labour, and a few other resources which all together make up his endowment. With that endowment he can make up a bundle of food that is his, or he can sell his own labour and use the currency earned buy other commodities, including food. He could also grow cash crops and like wise use the money to but food and other commodities. There are more possibilities. Sen formally mapped out what he calls the ‘exchange entitlement’ for each endowment bundle relative to the commodity bundle. This ‘E-mapping’ is subject to a number of varying influences from society and the individual’s position in it, be they legal, economic, political, social. Added to this can be other variables such as production, which would then bring in not only the possibilities of production but also those of trade. This E-mapping also takes into account social security measures such as benefits, income supplementation, unemployment guarantees and taxation (Sen, 1981). In Sen’s interpretation, a person may starve when his endowment collapses. This could be because of a fall in the endowment bundle or because of an unfavourable change in the exchange entitlement mapping.
Sen allows that his system is not fool proof and is quick to recognize at least some of its restrictions. There may be uncertainties as to the specification of entitlements, since even in capitalist market economies they may be unclear or ‘fuzzy;’ in pre-capitalist examples there is probably a fair amount of vagueness regarding property rights and connected issues. He highlights the empirical problems of famine analysis by the entitlement approach, discrepancies of data and the fact that actions which fall outside the scope of the approach will lead to a defective analysis (Edkins, 2000). This is tempered by Sen’s point that more recent famines have occurred where law and order were present, that in fact by protecting ownership rights against the demands of the hungry, the legal forces of the state were upholding entitlements and it was starving people’s absence of lawful entitlement that resulted in their hunger. The entitlement approach also does little to take into account other reasons for a significant fall in food consumption. Ignorance, apathy, inflexible food habits also play a part and Sen questions how important the role of theses other factors are in contributing to famine – i.e. how different would an interpretation of famine be if these other factors were taken into account? Sen is also careful to stress that the entitlement approach focuses on starvation and not on mortality due to famine, as many famine deaths are a result of epidemics and follow their own pattern and are influenced not only by starvation but also by elements such as population movement and reduction or collapse of sanitary provision (Sen, 1981).
Most contributors to the field acknowledge that Sen’s work on famine was path-breaking, yet while many are ready to appreciate his work, it is unclear if it has become part of the common understanding of famines. One critic of Sen’s approach puts forward as its main argument as being that Sen’s interpretation misses certain empirical factors that are vital to the understanding of famine, using Sen’s 1974 analysis as an example. While the criticisms are fairly specific, they are also useful for a more general appraisal of Sen’s approach. Most crucially, it has to be asked if Sen’s theory should be seen as ‘an inductively based theory’ or as a ‘theoretically constructed deductive model’ (Sohlberg, 2006). Answering this question is key in evaluating Sen’s approach and how usefully it can be applied to historical famines. Sohlberg questions if there really can be a framework that can be applied ‘trans-historically and trans-culturally’ to all famines (Sohlberg, 2006, p.358). There is also the need to decide whether simple theories can be evolved that are applicable to a wide spectrum of concrete occurrences, resulting in a general understanding, with the ultimate goal of producing universal laws or opposing this is the ideographic idea which provide detailed understanding of individual phenomenon, but without any claim made to generality.
A popular understanding of Sen’s interpretation is that his entitlement approach is the opposite of that of the FAD approach (food availability decline) which tries to explain famines by way of an overall or aggregated lack of food supply – not enough food to feed everybody. Because Sen highlights cases, such as the 1974 famine in Bangladesh, where there was a famine but no food shortage, his theory can be seen to be in direct conflict with the FAD theory. The simple facts of a case such the 1974 one, where there was enough food, yet people starved, is enough to destroy the FAD approach. However, this does not solve the problems that arise from the entitlement approach or how it should be placed in terms of a historic situation. One commentator has touched upon Sen’s ignorance that the role of corruption played in the 1974 famine. While this matter is very relevant to the individual case of Bangladesh in 1974, it remains to be seen how or if corruption should be incorporated into the entitlement approach. It leads back to the dilemma touched on earlier; because corruption is a ‘fuzzy’ and difficult element from which to pull clear statistics or evidence, it does not lend itself easily to the general framework which Sen uses and is perhaps the reason why he left it out in the first place. However, as mentioned and as Dowlah has shown, incorporating the role of corruption into the analysis of the1974 famine adds notable substance and greater detail (Dowlah, 2006).
Another angle on Sen’s work is to see it not as an antithesis to the FAD approach but as including it. Here the entitlement approach can be seen as a specific hypothesis where the cause of contemporary famine is more a result of ‘unfavourable changes in the entitlement mapping of the poor’ than a diminished supply of food. Further to this is the idea that Sen’s theory should be seen as a general framework which can be used to study famine in any given economic situation and that the entitlement approach should not necessarily been seen as a hypothesis into what causes famines but more as a definition. In this way the study of famines would be aimed into two channels, endowment and entitlement mapping (Osmani, 1993).
A strong point of the entitlement approach is its feature of placing attention on the symptoms of demand (and its failure) and taking it away from the conventional side of supply analysis. Conventional approaches tend to be drawn from raw generalizations of aggregates, which often because of their formulation imply an untruthfully equal distribution of food and subsequently ignore the fact that famine is very rarely spread equally through the population. Even where a large area is affected, the wealthy or well-connected usually remain safer and more insulated because of their relatively higher entitlements (Devereux, 1993). The Sen interpretation allows for this and it also avoids the gross generalizations of the conventional method by focusing on individual and group access to food within a society
The entitlement method also allows for the interpretation of famines that occur during both boom and slump periods. Although intuition suggests that famines happen because of a national or regional economic crisis, this may not always be the case. Famines during a boom period can produce different results upon different groups and individuals in a society; a boom can good be good for some members of society and at the same time cause others to become more vulnerable. The 1943 famine in Bengal is a case in point (and also another example which Sen uses). There was no shortage of food at the time but there was hoarding (speculative and precautionary); and a rise in prices due to the war economy meant that prices went up faster that wages leaving agricultural workers much poorer than their urban counterparts who were protected by food rationing at controlled prices (Tauger, 2003). The resulting famine claimed up to three million lives.
Contrary to supply side approaches, entitlement views famine as a consequence of market mechanisms failing to make available sufficient food to those who need it. A serious disruption of the economy is not a prerequisite for famine under the entitlement approach because as markets respond to purchasing power and not to needs, famine almost becomes a predictable outcome. Sen also uses his approach to argue against both ‘Malthusian Pessimism’ and ‘Malthusian Optimism’ the first which sees famine as a result of population growth outstripping food supply and resulting in mislead policies such as reducing the fertility of the poor; the second which fails to predict famine and leads to equally bad policy, inadequate and/or preventative or curative methods and disastrous results. Problems with these earlier systems of analysis lie often in the susceptibility and inaccuracy of the measurements of food distribution (Devereux, 1993). In some cases, where response to starvation has been met with either food handouts or government ‘work for food’ programmes Sen has argued, if not against, then at least along a different line of relief; since famine can occur even when there is no shortage of food, Sen suggests work for cash programmes, or even handing out free cash in order to restore the market based entitlement to food. Critics of this idea have pointed towards the fact that individuals or groups may choose to use the money not for food but perhaps for clothing, shelter and that in the first place, using Sen’s system of evaluation they may already not be starving since they possess livestock or material which they prefer to keep and go hungry, than sell (Devereux, 1993).
Limitations to the entitlement approach have been clearly set down, in spite of its wide acceptance. By limiting his analysis largely within a legalistic framework, Sen leaves out important, sometimes vital factors. His theory is difficult to apply, to give just one example, where issues over landownership or connected market factors play a part in affecting entitlements. As mentioned earlier, Sen’s approach cannot either explain deaths which are not directly related to starvation (such as epidemics) and such elements may be more significant than Sen acknowledges (Newman, 1990). Further to this, Sen does not take into consideration other important factors in his approach. While he states that famine results from changes in entitlement, he does not explain in any detail why these changes come about, which would surely be a good first step in the prevention of famine. Also, since famine invariably affects those on the edge of poverty the worst, only a slight change in entitlement can make a huge difference as to whether they go hungry or not. Leading on from this is the criticism that Sen’s method so broad based as to be useless in practical application.
Amartya Sen’s theory of interpreting famine has not only been recognized as a path breaker but it is significant of his work that he is one of few intellectuals to have meaningfully influenced and contributed to the way in which famine, hunger and starvation are dealt with around the world; evidenced by his notable input towards the Human Development Report produced by the United Nations Development Programme. Not to mention his winning the Nobel Prize. The relevance of Sen’s entitlement approach to interpreting historical famine has had an influential impact in the field of famine analysis both academically and in terms of real policy and has contributed notably to the debate which continues to this day.