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Drought and entitlements

EVEN as drought hits Maharashtra, and other parts of the country, one is compellingly reminded of that great scourge of our colonial past: famine.

Drought and entitlements

Famines are often the consequence of generalised and large-scale entitlement-failures



S Subramanian

EVEN as drought hits Maharashtra, and other parts of the country, one is compellingly reminded of that great scourge of our colonial past: famine. In contemporary economics, we owe it to Amartya Sen for having brought this issue back into the domain of relevant discourse through his book, published in 1981, Poverty and Famines. Sen provided detailed empirical accounts of the Bengal famine of 1943-44, the Chinese famine during The Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, and the famines of the 1970s in Bangladesh and in Ethiopia.

The great value of Sen’s work, apart from its obvious historical and empirical significance, lies in the theoretical framework which he employed to explicate the phenomenon of a certain type of famine. My reference is to his notion of ‘entitlements’, which determine the final consumption of goods and services — or just ‘food’ in the context of relevance here — which a person is able to achieve. How much food an individual or household is able to command would depend on the individual’s initial endowment of ‘wealth’ (including ‘assets’ and labour-power); on the technology of production available whereby endowments can be converted into output for self-consumption or exchange in the market; on the terms of exchange, which are mediated by prices and wages; and by the legal framework, and its implementation, that circumscribe the means of access to final output. These factors, together, define one’s entitlements. There are circumstances in which the factors can conspire to ensure that one's entitlement to food is insufficient to escape starvation; and famines are often the consequence of generalised and large-scale entitlement-failures.

Entitlement-failure, as Sen pointed out, can happen without ‘food availability decline’. That is to say, a famine is not necessarily caused by an aggregate supply deficiency of food: as Sen puts it, starvation can happen not because of there not being enough food to go around but because of some people not having adequate access to it. This could happen for a number of reasons: a sudden decline in endowments (such as loss of livestock in a pastoralist economy); or a sudden fall in wages because of deficiency of aggregate demand; or a sudden rise in the price of foodgrains (such as happened during the Bengal Famine because of the surge in demand for foodgrains caused by the war effort). It is not just in the matter of famine, or other ‘natural’ disasters, but also in the ordinary run of economic vicissitudes, that ‘entitlement theory’ is of assistance in focusing attention on those most vulnerable to entitlement-failure, namely the poor and the dispossessed.

A free Press and parliamentary democracy have been found to be effective deterrents to large-scale famine. This is easily discernible from India's pre- and post-Independence records of famine. It is also evident in the great Irish famine of 1845-50, which was foreseen more than a century earlier in Jonathan Swift’s savagely satirical indictment of the British government’s heartless indifference to the plight of starving Irish folk. In 1729, the author of Gulliver’s Travels published the tract titled ‘A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland, from Being a Burden on their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick’ — now known simply and famously as ‘A Modest Proposal’.  Swift’s horrifyingly modest proposal was that poor Irish parents should sell their infants, when the latter reached the age of one year, at ten shillings an infant, to landlords, in the cause of the latter’s consumption of ‘…a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome Food, whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boyled, [which]…will equally serve as a Fricasie, or Ragout.’ Why landlords? Because ‘I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for Landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the Parents, seem to have the best Title to the Children.’ Swift proceeds to advance the merits of his proposal by pointing out, in the darkest of humours, that selling their children will relieve their parents of deprivation both through the proceeds of the sale and the cessation of the need to provide for them; and thus serve to reduce the incidence of both destitution and beggary, so distasteful in the eyes of the rich. Additionally, this would be a good way, Swift suggests, of checking the excess fertility of Catholics. 

A different, and more passionately direct, indictment of a callous government is contained in the tract titled Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, by that great Indian nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917): Professor of Mathematics in Elphinstone College, Bombay; Professor of Gujarati in University College, London; Founder-Member-President of the Indian National Congress; and the first British Indian Member of Parliament. The book, published in 1901, carries, among other things, a first (and brilliant) attempt at defining a poverty line for India, and seeks an explanation of the poverty of the country in the continuous and oppressive draining of its wealth, achieved by ‘plunder, not trade’, that is, through punitive taxation unredeemed by British exports into India. It is worth noting that Naoroji had anticipated Sen’s ‘entitlement theory’ of famines, as borne out by this record of a speech addressed by him in Kennington, London, in 1900:

“It might be asked were not the famines due to droughts? His answer was in the negative. India was able to grow any quantity of food. Her resources in that respect were inexhaustible, and when famines had occurred in the past before she was subjected to the continual drain of her wealth the population were able to withstand them because they had stores of grain upon which they could fall back. But nowadays they were unable to accumulate such stores. Immediately the grain was grown it had to be sold in order to provide the taxation of the country, and the people were therefore not in a position to cope with famine…  [T]he difficulty of India was that the Natives had no money with which to buy food should their crops fail, and hence it was that these disastrous famines arose.”

The remedy for this state of affairs was couched in equally uncompromising terms, in an address to the Plumstead Radical Club in London, in 1900:

“Considering that Britain has appropriated thousands of millions of India’s wealth for building up and maintaining her British Indian Empire, and for directly drawing vast wealth to herself; that she is continuing to drain about 30,000,000 of India's wealth every year unceasingly in a variety of way; and that she has thereby reduced the bulk of the Indian population to extreme poverty, destitution, and degradation; it is therefore her bounden duty in common justice and humanity to pay from her own exchequer the costs of all famines and diseases caused by such impoverishment.

Against the passion and rigour and intelligence of Swift and Naoroji must be set the standards to which we have sunk today, as captured in an Indian state minister’s obsession with selfies in a time of drought. The kindest explanation for such behaviour — even if it means risking sedition — is in terms of irredeemable idiocy.

The writer  is a retired Professor of Economics

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