Sen's Explanation of the Great Bengal Famine - Book Report/Review Example

Running head: Critically Evaluate Sen's Explanation of the Great Bengal Famine Critically Evaluate Sen's Explanation of the Great BengalFamine [The name of the writer appears here] [The name of institution appears here] Critically Evaluate Sen's Explanation of the Great Bengal Famine Although a celebrity in his native India since winning the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, Amartya Sen is otherwise little known outside academic circles in Britain and the United States. Yet his ideas have had a global impact. By the reckoning of a fellow economist, Sudhir Anand of Oxford University, Sen "has made fundamental contributions to at least four fields: social choice theory, welfare economics, economic measurement, and development economics." (Pundarik Mukhopadhaya, Srikanta Chatterjee, 2000) Born just north of Calcutta in 1933, on the campus of a university founded by poet Rabindranath Tagore, Sen went to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1953, returning a little more than a decade later to teach at the Delhi School of Economics. His serious scholarly attention in those days was given to social choice, the abstruse, mathematically oriented field opened up by RAND Corporation economist Kenneth Arrow in a 1951 essay showing how hard it could be for democratic mechanisms to reflect a majority's true preferences. Grappling with Arrow's paradox, Sen "returned to first principles on the nature of choice," explains Desai, who teaches economics at the London School of Economics. A person choosing to buy fish rather than meat may not be asserting a simple preference for fish, Sen pointed out. He may be acting on a whim, or perhaps participating in a meat boycott in support of a meatpackers' strike. "Sen showed that we must take into account notions of sympathy or commitment in order to understand voting behavior, paying for public goods...and so on." In short, he brought economics closer to the real world. Sen's 1970 book, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, marked the end of a decade's work on social choice and "a definitive advance on Arrow's work," Desai says. The next year, Sen left Delhi and joined the London School of Economics. (Alex de Waal, 1989). In Poverty and Famines (1981), Sen studied the 1943 Bengal famine (and several others). By detailing the weekly arrivals of food grains in Calcutta, he showed that it was not a scarcity of food but the lack of money to buy it that caused the mass starvation. In short, says Desai, "Sen showed that a functioning market economy could leave millions dead." Events in his youth in Bengal, before he went to Oxford, Harvard and eventually Cambridge to study and teach, affected Sen deeply. In Development as Freedom he describes his awful experience as a 10-year- old child, when a Muslim laborer named Kader Mia staggered into the Sen Family garden and died after Hindu extremists knifed him. Sen has never let his long sojourn in the West or his immersion in his beloved economic equations erases his memory of Kader Mia. Nothing excites intellectual curiosity more than the overturning of a time-honored belief. This is specially so when that overturning is accomplished by scholarly analysis, as distinct from Messianic rhetoric. So when as highly acclaimed a scholar as Amartya Sen challenged the popular belief that famine means shortage of food, it inevitably caused a stir. The famine that had killed two to three million people and brought starvation to millions more in Bengal in 1943 was not, he maintained, a result of shortage of food. What's more, he went on to argue, the Bengal famine was by no means unique in this regard. He showed that many contemporary famines in Asia and Africa shared this property of not being caused by reduced availability of food. Famine, he concluded, is a case of people not having enough food to eat, but not necessarily of there not being enough food to go around. From this emerged what has come to be known as the 'entitlement approach' to hunger and famine an approach that focuses attention on people having or not having enough command over food, as distinct from there being or not being enough food to be eaten. Over the years, Sen and others following his lead have extended the reach of the entitlement approach from its initial concern with the genesis of famine. In a more recent treatise, for example, Drze and Sen (1989) have skillfully utilized the insights of this approach to shed radically new light on the policy issues relating to famine relief and the more widespread problem of combating endemic hunger. To many, these insights have for ever changed the way they perceive the problems of hunger and famine. But, for all the adulation it has received, the entitlement approach has not gone unchallenged. Although it is perhaps fair to say that those who have delved into Sen's copious writings on this matter have generally come out impressed with his arguments, a significant strand of critical reaction has persisted to this day. A major objective of this report is to assess the merit of this critical literature with a view to forming a judgment as to where exactly the entitlement approach now stands. (S.R. Osmani, 1995) The term 'entitlement' is the key word used by Sen to define the relationship between people and the commodities which they need to acquire in order to be able to lead certain kinds of lives. The term connotes 'rights', and Sen clarifies this relationship explicitly: It is usual to characterize rights as relationships that hold between distinct agents e.g. between one person and another, or between one person and the state. In contrast, a person's entitlements are the totality of things he can have by virtue of his rights. In the social context, a person's entitlements would depend, among other things, on all the rights he has vis--vis others and others have vis--vis him. If a right is best thought of as a relationship of one agent to another, entitlements represent a relationship between an agent and things based on the set of all rights relevant to him. The 'things' which can be part of a person's entitlement are, Sen notes, quite general, comprising 'anything the person could conceivably wish to have, including non-molestation in the street, or the freedom to lecture on the immorality of the modern age to one's neighbor in the bus'. But in all of his analytical work on entitlements, Sen has focused on a particular type of 'thing' that is, commodities. (Amartya Sen, 1977). In entitlement analysis, a person's command over commodities is said to depend on firstly, the person's position in society (what their occupation or class is, what they produce, where they live, how much land they own, what skills they possess, for example), and secondly, the rules which render claims over commodities legitimate. Because a person's entitlement depends on their position in society, entitlement analysis can introduce a range of social, economic, cultural, and political factors as determinants of entitlements. But at the heart of the analysis are the rules of entitlement which specify what a person in any given position in society can legitimately command. These rules vary between societies, and are different, for example, in a private ownership market economy, in an economy in which the means of production are collectively owned, and in a private ownership market economy which contains social security provisions and employment guarantees. Whilst the nature of the 'things' which can be part of a person's entitlement is defined consistently throughout Sen's analytical work (as commodities), the nature of the rules which render the claims of persons to those things legitimate is defined in various ways. Thus the literature on the moral economy is founded on the observation that markets, basically for foodstuffs, but also for agricultural factors of production, are regulated in different ways. The literature identifies moral rules which are held in common by many people and which prescribe 'right' and 'wrong' exchange practices at times when people suffer from hunger and famine. It examines the interplay between these socially accepted moral rules on the one hand, and legal rules backed by state power on the other hand. Understanding this interplay can involve analyzing how moral rules in society can draw upon earlier legal rules. But a particular concern in the literature has been to examine how, in circumstances where the socially accepted moral rules diverge from the legal rules, people act to enforce a pattern of legitimate, but illegal, exchange practices. The socially accepted moral rules which constitute the moral economy are not necessarily shared by all members of society, and they vary between localities, between societies, and over time. They also do not necessarily conform to a particular welfarist morality, as is assumed by those, including Sen, who equate the moral economy with an informal insurance system which guarantees a minimum welfare. Within the literature different authors have identified different moral rules. (Sugata Bose, Ayesha Jalal, 2003). In E.P. Thompson's original work, the moral rules of the English crowd in the eighteenth century were rounded on a specific model of grain marketing which included such features as the correct length of the marketing chain, correct practices of dealers, correct profit margins of bakers and millers, and just prices of grain for the poor. This model was derived from earlier Tudor policies of market regulation and was, at a particular historical moment at least, shared by the poor and some of the English gentry. James Scott, examining the bases of peasant rebellion in southeast Asia in the twentieth century, identifies a moral economy of the peasant which includes two important norms the norm of reciprocity and the right to subsistence. The former was the rule that 'a gift or service received creates a reciprocal obligation to return a gift or service at some future date' [Scott, 1976: 167], and the latter meant that 'all members of the community have a presumptive right to a living as far as local resources will allow' [Scott, 1976: 176]. Paul Greenhough [1980; 1983], by contrast, focusing on the dynamics of the Bengal famine in 1943-44, argues that in that case there was a particular morality of distress which includes considerations of a person's merit as well as their welfare. In the famine the obligations of landowners to their clients and husbands to their wives and children which pertained in more 'normal' times and which were rounded on a morality of abundance or indulgence, were replaced by a morality which gave primacy to the survival of landlords, husbands, and parents. (Vivian Welsh Walsh, 1996). Clients and dependents were abandoned, but this deliberate imposition of starvation on some was designed to ensure the survival of particular others, and it was accepted as morally right. Whether the arguments of these different authors are correct or not is not at issue here. The point is that a moral economy is based on some set of moral rules regarding food exchange practices which are socially shared (to varying degrees) and which are socially enforced in situations of hunger and famine. Once this is realized, a number of analytical insights for Sen's entitlement analysis follow. The first, and most basic, is that a better view of social action in times of hunger and famine is obtained. A central weakness of Sen's analysis of famine is its assumption of the inevitability of famine once certain entitlement shifts occur. The logical structure of Sen's explanation of famine leaves people with no choice but to starve. People thus are seen, as de Waal [1990] and Arnold [1988] point out, as the passive victims of famine. Those who have identified the 'coping strategies' of the poor and the vulnerable in times of famine have redressed the balance somewhat against the false necessity inscribed in Sen's analysis. But 'coping' essentially means acting to survive within the prevailing rule-systems. What the moral economy literature shows is that the assertion of entitlements also involves negotiation of the rules, confrontation, and struggles, in which 'unruly' social practices of various kinds are brought to bear. In E.P. Thompson's original work, food riots are identified as a form of collective action by which the poor in eighteenth century England, when threatened by exchange entitlement failure in the market-place, ensured that the moral economy of food provisioning, derived from Tudor times, took precedence over legal property rights as rules of entitlement. In that case, entitlement to food depended on acts which were legitimate, but illegal. These illegal acts also had specific rules. The riots were characterized by restraint and discipline, and a key element of them was not theft, but the setting of a just price. (Darfur, Sudan, 1989). Scott [1976] similarly shows how some famines in southeast Asia were accompanied by peasant rebellion, and Arnold [1979] describes how food shortages and entitlement shifts in south India in 1918 led to looting and grain riots. However, it would obviously be wrong to assume that famine and hunger are invariably associated with food riots. Other factors may break the link between food riots and the sense of outrage associated with the way the working of legal rules in the marketplace leads to relationships and outcomes which flout the rules of the moral economy. Moreover there may be other forms of resistance to the legal rules. E.P. Thompson identifies a range of social practices which are brought to bear as social sanctions and are designed to ensure that the moral economy takes precedence over legal rules -- including 'mass petitioning the authorities, fast-days, sacrifices and prayer, per-ambulation of the houses of the rich'. Scott [1985] specifically focuses on 'unruly' practices which he calls the 'small arms fire' of the weak, the everyday forms of resistance to erosion of community norms on which their livelihood depends. And, of course, there may be no resistance at all, particularly if the repressive forces of the state are strong and effective. In Western Europe, Tilly [1971; 1983] identifies food riots as a central form of social protest at a particular historical juncture. Whether hunger and famine leads to food riots is not the issue. The point is that rules of entitlement are negotiated, and confrontations and struggles can occur over entitlements. Food riots are simply one example of the assertion of entitlements through confrontation, struggle and negotiation about the rules of entitlement. What matters is that by considering the moral economy as a set of food exchange practices accepted by (at least some) members of society as legitimate and asserted against the working of legal rules in food markets, it is possible to view entitlement relations as an active process. (Jean Dreze, Amartya Sen, 1990). A second important insight of the moral economy literature for Sen's entitlement analysis is that it provides a more complete view of the dynamics of entitlement shifts as a famine develops. Sen's entitlement analysis focuses on the way in which entitlements shift for specific groups of people within a given set of rules of entitlement which predate the famine event and also survive it. But entitlement shifts may not be simply the outcome of endowment loss and changes in exchange entitlement mapping within a set of rules of entitlement. Within a society, there may be, and usually are, as Falk Moore points out, 'numerous conflicting and competing rule-orders'. In a famine situation entitlement shifts can occur because the dominant rules of entitlement change. An example of this is the outcome of some of the food riots described by E.P. Thompson. Collective action was designed to change the rules, to make certain widely accepted moral rules take precedence over the working of legal rules in the market-place. But the socially accepted moral rules which are dominant may also changed. (Reuss, Alejandro, 1999). As Greenhough points out for Bengal in 1943-44, there can be a pattern of entitlement relations in which in the early stages of a famine, patron-client relationships provide some support to the hungry, whilst in the later stages other survival priorities become important. This is not 'the breakdown of the moral economy' (as it is described by some, including Dreze and Sen [1989]), but rather a shift in the dominant moral rules of entitlement which occurs as famine 'twists' routine moral and social arrangements. The fact that the dominant rules of entitlement change in a famine situation further illuminates the relationship between exchange entitlements and food availability decline. A primary aim of Sen's work on famine has been to make it clear that famines do not necessarily arise through a decline in aggregate food supply, and that, although there is a relationship between food availability and famine, this relationship is indirect, mediated by a person's command over food. He has also identified a number of ways in which food entitlement is related to food availability. But a further connection between food availability and entitlement arises because the rules of entitlement are related to food availability. (Amartya Sen, 1992). The dominant rules of entitlement change in conditions of shortage. In Ghana, in the early 1970s, for example, the internal food distribution system was characterized by 'regular customer relationships'. A buyer was said to be a seller's 'customer' when he or she did not buy from any other seller unless it was apparent that his or her usual supplier could not meet his or her demand. In local idiom, the seller was likewise said to be the buyer's 'customer'. These relationships were used to reduce risk. In times of plentiful food availability there were a variety of sources from which traders could obtain supplies from farmers or other traders, and consumers could obtain supplies from traders. But many buyers and sellers would seek to regularize their market conduct by always making exchanges with the same suppliers and buyers. These practices stabilized the market and gave it a regular pattern. But it was in times of scarce food supplies that the regular customer relationships assumed the most significance. For in those times it became impossible for buyers, whether they were traders or consumers, to secure supplies unless they were a 'regular customer'. (Barsamian, David, 2001). Food availability decline thus affected people's food entitlements in two ways. First, prices went up causing a shift in the exchange entitlement mapping. Secondly, even at these higher prices buyers could only secure commodities if they were a 'regular customer'. Whereas in times of plenty, purchasing power was sufficient to command commodities, in times of scarcity, command over commodities depended on purchasing power plus the social bond of regular customer relationships. Moreover the greater the shortage of supplies, the more closely tied to the supplier the 'customer' had to be to ensure that he or she could purchase produce. A third important insight of the moral economy literature is that it indicates how the rules of entitlement can change in ways that increase or decrease the vulnerability of particular groups to hunger and famine not just over the short period as different rule-systems become dominant, but also over longer periods of time as transformations in the rules of entitlement take place. In short it is possible to get a more complete understanding of hunger and famine in historical context. In considering how long-term transformations in the rules of entitlement take place, one danger, evident in the moral economy literature, is to see the moral rules which act as a mechanism for allocating resources as a characteristic of 'traditional' society which disappears totally when modernization occurs. This would seem to be another key trap which, together with the fallacy of equating the moral economy with a particular welfarist set of moral rules and the false assumption that the moral economy is necessarily moral when viewed from some external ethical position, can disable the insights of the moral economy literature. It is a trap which can be particularly disabling if the norms of 'traditional' society are seen by some external standard to have particular moral value (as in idyllic images of peasant Arcadia), or if they are, conversely, associated with ethnocentric images of 'native' customs. And it is a trap into which Sen himself seems to have fallen in his discussion of the moral economy. (Sachs, Jeffrey, 1998). In describing the moral economy, Dreze and Sen, for example, write of 'traditional systems of mutual insurance', 'traditional security systems', and the 'traditional responses to the threat of famine'. Moreover, Sen's overall entitlement approach to famine was originally designed to be applied to 'modern' (as against 'medieval') famines, and extensions and modifications are still designed to understand hunger in the 'modern' world [Dreze and Sen, 1989], although what 'modern' exactly means is not spelled out. Contrary to evolutionary and dualistic modernization theories, it is wrong to assume that there is an inevitable transition from a 'traditional' set of rules to a 'modern' set of rules, with one somehow automatically replacing the other. First, as stressed above, changes occur through the active negotiation of rules at particular historical moments. Scott [1985] and Holmes [1989] are particularly good examples of this, illustrating well how the negotiation of moral rules is bound up with power relationships and based on particular discursive strategies. Secondly, what is happening is not the substitution of state-enforced legal rules ('the law') for socially enforced moral rules ('custom'), but rather the emergence of new types of interplay which, in nation-states, reflect the coexistence of socially enforced moral rules, with bureaucratic rules, and with, in a formal sense at least, the rule of law. It is precisely the nature of the interplay between different rule-systems at particular historical moments which is the central issue in the moral economy literature. (Wallace, Laura, 2004). An important concern has been to focus upon that time when, with the establishment of a centralized state and the development of commercial transactions, individuals are legally free to buy and sell, manage and exploit their private property as they wish and legal claims over commodities are established through monetary transactions backed by the police, but when the morality of the 'free' market is not yet generally accepted. The fourth insight that the moral economy literature provides is that it is possible to understand more clearly regional and local variations in vulnerability to hunger and famine and in activity to avert it by 'unruly' social practices. Most legal rights apply uniformly to the territory of the nation-state and thus Sen's entitlement analysis can only understand regional and local variations in vulnerability in terms of differences in the endowment and the exchange entitlement mapping of people in different parts of a country. But moral rules of entitlement, which are based on moral obligations, interpretations of rights and duties, and patron-client networks are usually made and enforced locally. Including moral rules and their interplay with state-enforced legal rules in entitlement analysis allows a fuller appreciation of variations in the dynamics of hunger and famine between localities. (Tharoor, Shashi, 2005). The argument suggests that the way in which rules of entitlement are specified by Sen is inappropriate for the analysis of hunger and famine. But the weaknesses which have been identified do not totally negate the value of the entitlement approach. On the contrary, they reinforce Sen's basic insight that starvation may be explained in terms of the relationships of people to food and the other goods and services which they need to be adequately nourished. Retaining this idea, it is possible to enrich Sen's entitlement analysis by replacing the narrow view of the rules which regulate those relationships with a broad view. A broad view of the rules of entitlement would not be like the 'extended entitlement' analysis, which retains a positivist notion of state-enforced law and which downplays the working of socially accepted moral rules or compartmentalizes them to the domestic sphere. It would take note of how legal rules work in practice in determining entitlement; it would examine non-governmental sites of rule-making and rule-enforcing; and it would analyze the interplay between state-enforced legal rules and socially enforced moral rules in constraining and enabling command over commodities. With such a broad view, the insights of the moral economy literature, of the feminist theorists who question the analytical validity of separating the domestic and public spheres, and of Bernard Schaffer's work on the rules governing a person's command over administratively allocated goods and services, can each be integrated into entitlement analysis. In elaborating a broad view of the rules of entitlement it will be important to have a sociologically sophisticated conceptualization of how socially enforced moral rules work in constraining and enabling command over commodities. Reference: Alex de Waal (1989). 'Famine mortality: a case study of Darfur, Sudan 1984-5', Population Studies, 43 Amartya Sen (1977). 'Starvation and exchange entitlements: a general approach and its application to the great Bengal famine' Cambridge journal of economics, vol 1, 33-60, March Amartya Sen (1992). "war and famines: on divisions and incentives" discussion paper no 33, development economics research programme, suntory-toyota international centre for economies and related disciplines, London school of economics, October 1991. later published in wizard and c. anderson. economics of arms reduction and the peace process, elsevier science publishers Barsamian, David (2001). Amartya Sen. (economist from India) (Interview) The Progressive; August 1 Darfur, Sudan (1989). Famine that Kills: 1984-85, Clarendon Press, Oxford Jean Dreze, Amartya Sen (1990). The Political Economy of Hunger - Vol. 2; Clarendon Press North, James (1999). Sen's Sensibility. (Review) (book review). The Nation Pundarik Mukhopadhaya, Srikanta Chatterjee (2000). Unfashionable Economics Selected Contributions of Amartya K. Sen: 1998 Economics Nobel Laureate; New Zealand Economic Papers, Vol. 34, 2000 Reuss, Alejandro (1999).Nobel prize winner tweaks free marketers. (Nobel laureate Amartya Sen); Dollars & Sense; January 1 Sachs, Jeffrey (1998). The Real Causes of Famine. (Amartya Sen wins Nobel prize in economics)(Brief Article) Time; October 26 S.R. Osmani (1995). "The entitlement approach to famine: an assessment" in k. basu, p. pattanaik and k. suzumura; choice, welfare and development: a festscrift in honour of amartya k Sen, Oxford: clarendon press Sugata Bose, Ayesha Jalal (2003). Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy; Routledge Tharoor, Shashi (2005). Winning Argument; Take him on at your own risk. Amartya Sen is more than just a leading economist. Newsweek International; October 24 Vivian Welsh Walsh (1996). Rationality, Allocation, and Reproduction; Oxford University Wallace, Laura (2004). Freedom as progress: Laura Wallace interviews Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen. (People in Economics) (Interview); Finance & Development; September 1 Read More