Poverty and famines : An essay on entitlement and deprivation

The main focus of this book is on the causation of starvation in general and of famines in particular. The traditional analysis of famines focusing on food supply, is shown to be fundamentally defective - theoretically unsound, empirically inept, and dangerously misleading for policy. The author develops and alternative method of analysis - the 'entitlement approach'- concentrating on ownership and exchange. Aside from developing the underlying theory, the approach is used in a number of case studies of recent famines, including the Great Bangladesh famine of 1974 and the famines in the Sahel countries in Africa in the seventies. The book also provides a general analysis of the characterization and measurement of poverty. Various approaches used in economics, sociology and political theory are critically examined. The predominance of distributional issues, including distribution between occupation groups, links up the problem of conceptualizing poverty with that of analyzing starvation. While technical economic analysis is to some extent unavoidable for a work technicalities and mathematical reasoning are confined to the Appendices. The text is accessible to the non-technical reader, who can easily follow the main lines of reasoning and their applications to the case studies.