Analysing Famines for the International Labour Organization: Linking the Removal of Injustice to Democracy as Public Agency
Sen's (1981) seminal work on famines was prepared for the ILO within the framework of the World Employment Programme (WEP). The WEP was launched in 1969, as the ILO's main contribution to the International Development Strategy for the Second United Nations Development Decade.
It was committed to help national decision-makers to reshape their policies and plans with the aim of eradicating mass poverty and unemployment. Sen actually began his work on the causation of famines in 1973,[154] at a period when Ethiopia and the Sahelian countries were experiencing important famines, and Bangladesh was nearly to suffer this way as well - chapter 7 to 9 of Sen's (1981) book are devoted to these respective famines. However, Sen wanted to give a larger scope to his study of famine, by formulating a new approach to poverty and destitution - which may be seen as an embryo of his capability approach (Gilardone 2010: 15). Above all, it seems that his idea was to change the focus from strict food availability to that of direct entitlement to food since ‘something more than availability is involved' (Sen 1981: 165). In this regard, we may pay some attention to Sen's dedication of the book ‘to Amiya Dasgupta who introduced me to economics and taught me what it is about', as well as to his later confession of being deeply shaken in his childhood by the agony and outrage caused by the Great Bengal famine of 1943 - to which chapter 6 is devoted.Firstly, in a later interview with Richard Swedberg (1990: 251), Sen outlined the influence of Amiya Dasgupta, a friend of his father, in his choice to study economic theory while he was quite sceptical of its impact. At a time when he was much more concerned with things that looked immediately applicable and perspicuous in their relevance to the real world,[155] Dasgupta[156] made him aware that ‘one could make a terrible mistake, even in terms of any relevance for practical concerns, by going too directly at it’.
Sen was very concerned with politics, but he learnt from Dasgupta the crucial role that theorizing inevitably has in setting the problem right and in confronting practical problems. More precisely, there are two reasons for his gratitude to appear precisely in that book (Swedberg 1990: 251-2). The first reason is that the book concentrates on the kind of problem that really affects people in Asia or Africa, and that is neglected by standard economic theory. The second reason is that Sen presents and uses there a theoretical approach that is different from the prevalent approach of hunger and famine and, according to him, more relevant. The setting of a new theory certainly explains why it eventually took him almost ten years to publish Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation,11 but it was critically important since he certainly already had the conviction that ‘a misconceived theory can kill’ (Sen 1999c: 209).Secondly, although there is no reference in his book to his own experience when he discusses, among others, the Bengal famine he had witnessed, one can guess that his motivation for that research came from his childhood trauma - to which he first confessed in 1990 (Sen 1990a) and then recurrently presented as a decisive experience in his choice of subject study as well as on the methodological setting (e.g. Sen 1999a; Barsamian 2001). Born on a university campus,12 the son and grandson of academics, Sen’s childhood was quite protected and privileged. But this condition didn’t prevent him from being deeply shaken by the Great Bengal famine of 1943. Although he was a witness, and not a victim, of this event, it left
reason for being interested in economics was what he called “the presence of economically remediable misery in the world”, the reasoning it demanded had to be strict and exacting’ (Sen 1994: 1147).
11 In the preface, Sen (1981: vii) thanks the ILO’s members ‘for, among other things, their extraordinary patience; the work took a good deal longer than they - and for that matter I - imagined it would’.
12 Sen was born in Santiniketan - which means ‘the home of peace’ - on the campus founded by the poet and social thinker Rabindranath Tagore in the forest, while his parents lived in Dhaka. Indeed, in the Indian tradition, the birth of the first child has to take place in the mother’s parental home, in that case where his maternal grandfather worked and lived. Not only had Tagore christened Sen as ‘Amartya’, which means ‘immortal’ in Sanskrit, but he is one of the strongest influences on Sen’s world view, at least for two reasons: (1) the bounds that linked the poet with Sen’s family and (2) Sen’s education at the school Tagore founded (see Gilardone 2008). Especially in Sen (2001) appears the proximity between the engagements of the poet and the economist. The main themes are the importance of science and education in people’s lives, the reasoning in freedom, the critique of patriotism, nationalism and cultural separation.
a deep impression on him. When the Bengal famine occurred, Sen was a nine-year-old boy. He remembers he was allowed by his grandfather to give a cigarette tin of rice to anyone that came for help. But the main memory he has and on which he prefers to focus is, on the contrary, his feeling of helplessness and ‘bewilderment’ (Barsamian 2001: 5). He then realized that no one in his family, nor any of his friends’ families, were affected by the famine. This quite transparent and brutal class-division profoundly sensitized him to the issue of inequality.[157] Moreover, he knew from his parents that ‘the crop hadn’t been bad in any sense so it was surprising that there would be a famine’ (Barsamian 2001: 6), which maybe oriented him to postulate that the problem was not just about the availability of food. Those thoughts of his childhood returned in the work on famines he started some thirty years after the Bengal famine and without doubt influenced the opening lines of his study:
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. (Sen 1981: 1)For example, the general understanding that the famine he witnessed was taking place at a time when food supply was not insufficient - which was confirmed by empirical research on other famines as well - certainly helped him work out another hypothesis. Indeed, he found that overall food output during the Bengal famine of 1943, in which about 3 million people died according to his evaluation, was no lower than in 1941. Thus he questioned the view that famines are caused by food availability decline and showed that it ‘gives little clue to the causal mechanism of starvation, since it does not go into the relationship of people to food’ (Sen 1981: 151). Finally, he tackled the problem keeping in mind what he had wondered as a child:
If some people had to starve, then clearly, they didn’t have enough food, but the question is: why didn’t they have food? What allows one group rather than another to get hold of the food that is there? These questions lead to the entitlement approach, which has been explored in this monograph, going from economic phenomena into social, political, and legal issues. (Sen 1981: 151)
According to Sen, the entitlement approach[158] provides a general framework for analysing famines rather than one particular hypothesis about
their causation. However, that view allows explanation as to why the market mechanism takes food away from the famine-stricken areas to elsewhere: ‘Market demands are not reflections of biological needs or psychological desires, but choices based on exchange entitlement relations’ (Sen 1981: 161). Just as Keynes had shown that a market economy could be in equilibrium with many people unemployed, so Sen showed that a functioning market economy could leave millions dead (Desai 2001:220).
From the middle of the 1980s, Sen carried on his work on famines and chronic hunger under the auspices of WIDER in Helsinki.15 In collaboration with Jean Dreze, he tried to focus on the appropriate public actions in facing hunger, rather than on its measurement.
Their book Hunger and Public Action (1989) represents one of the first fruits of a programme of ‘research for action’,16 and the primary focus of which is indeed on action. While they highlight the major role the state might play in eradicating famines and in eliminating persistent deprivation, they also insist from the very beginning on the decisive part of ‘agency’ in such action - although the term agency is not always used:the reach of public action goes well beyond the doings of the state, and involves what is done by the public - not merely for the public. We also argue that the nature and the effectiveness of the activities of the state can deteriorate very easily in the absence of public vigilance and activism. (Dreze and Sen 1989: vii)
On the one hand, Sen argued that theoreticians have a role to play in proposing a better approach to famines17 that would help to anticipate and
ownerships to another through certain rules of legitimacy’ (Sen 1981: 1). And in a market economy, ‘[a] person will be exposed to starvation if, for the ownership that he actually has, the exchange entitlement set does not contain any feasible bundle including enough food’ (Sen 1981: 2).
15 The World Institute of Development Economics Research (WIDER) was established by the United Nations University as its first research and training centre in 1984 and started work in 1985. The principal purpose of the Institute was to help identify and meet the need for policy-oriented socio-economic research on pressing global and development problems, as well as common domestic problems and their interrelationships (see Sen 1987: 1).
16 Lal Jayawardena - the director of WIDER and an old friend of Sen who had also studied at Cambridge in the 1950s - explains in the preface that Dreze and Sen’s book is one of the first results of WIDER’s programme of ‘research for action’. He also insists on the fact that, since its creation in 1985, ‘WIDER has consistently searched to promote research on contemporary development problems with a practical orientation’ (Dreze and Sen 1989: v).
17 To him, it means ‘making better use of economic analysis that focuses on entitlement failures of particular occupation groups rather than on output fluctuations in the economy as a whole’ (Sen 1987: 14). prevent them. On the other hand, alerts given by media, non-governmental organizations, pressure groups or opposition parties are also of crucial importance - which takes us to the notion of ‘agency’, as Sen (1987: 14) notes. ‘[A]ctive journalism can fruitfully supplement the work of economic analysis, by reporting early signs of distress’, and ‘how soon, how urgently and how actively the government will act will also depend on the nature of the politics of the country and the forces that operate on the government to act without delay’ (Sen 1987: 14). Agency here is related to two crucial elements: (1) ‘public knowledge’, in which economists as well as journalists have a role to play and (2) ‘involvement in social issues’, or political commitment of the population (Sen 1987: 15). It is now well known that one of Sen’s points in his analysis of famines was that democracy - implying adversarial politics and social criticism, in addition to elections - can influence state action in the direction of greater sensitivity to extreme poverty, and indeed plays a major role in the eradication of hunger and deprivation (see Sen 1999b). For example, he and Dreze came to the conclusion that the Bengal famine of 1943 would not have occurred if India had not been under the British domination (e.g. Dreze and Sen 1989: 126). More generally, in democratic countries, even very poor ones, the survival of the ruling government would be threatened by famine, since it is not easy to withstand the criticism of opposition parties and media.[159]
It appears that Sen’s contribution to the study of famines has been an important step in theorizing agency and integrating practical ideas of democracy in tackling the removal of injustice. As Alkire (2010: 212) has noted, Sen’s writings on famines politicized the problem in a new way: while there is ‘no law against dying of hunger’ (Sen 1981), Sen’s analysis, later pursued with Jean Dreze, made it clear that people’s actions and protests of injustice can effectively prevent famines. His insistent focus on ‘social actions taken by members of the public - both “collaborative” (through civil cooperation) and “adversarial” (through social criticism and political opposition)’ (Dreze and Sen 1989: vii) not only had ‘the effect of shifting the borders of development out from a narrowly economic space’ (Alkire 2010: 214), but offered some insights on the way actions towards more justice can be implemented. There is no doubt it influenced his formulation of a new approach to justice, alternative both to the social contract approach and the welfarist perspective.
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