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The politics and economics of food and famine in Bangladesh in the early 1970s – with special reference to Amartya Sen's interpretation of the 1974 famine
Author(s) -
Dowlah Caf
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
international journal of social welfare
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.664
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1468-2397
pISSN - 1369-6866
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-2397.2006.00448.x
Subject(s) - famine , entitlement (fair division) , population , development economics , politics , government (linguistics) , economics , political economy , hoarding (animal behavior) , political science , economic growth , sociology , law , philosophy , ecology , demography , mathematical economics , foraging , biology , linguistics
Bangladesh confronted two formidable food crises in 1972 and 1974. While the government succeeded in averting a widely predicted famine in the first case, it failed to prevent an actual famine in the later case when such a cataclysmic disaster was least anticipated. Evidence suggests that the 1974 famine was caused by successive onslaughts of natural disasters such as floods and droughts, and man‐made disasters such as the government's inability to import foods, the directing of subsidised food to the politically vocal urban population, an abrupt fall in food aid and political and administrative corruption that encouraged massive hoarding and the smuggling of food grain. This article argues that Noble Laureate economist Amartya Sen's seminal analysis of the 1974 Bangladesh famine on the basis of his ‘entitlement approach’ fails to capture most of these circumventing factors. The article also argues that by undermining the politico‐administrative dynamics of the famine, and by applying his entitlement approach only half‐heartedly in examining it, Sen somewhat trivialises the sufferings of a famine‐affected population under a corrupt and inefficient political regime.