Sen on famines and democracy

Dsquared,
I don’t have much of a substantial argument against your post, but am curious about one point- why focus on “Development as Freedom”? Because Cohen did? (I didn’t read his article.) I ask becuase of course Sen has been talking about this at least since the 70’s, and so it looked funny to me when you call the line from DasF the “original quote”. Do you mean the one Cohen quoted? And do you think that the earlier (and more technical, I believe) work Sen did on this has the same problems?

When Sen does pop versions of his analysis (such as in the factoid), it can seem that there are two case studies driving the slogan: post-independence India compared with pre, and Ireland in 1847. But as DD says, the underlying proposition is surely that if you really want to prevent famines, you can, whereas in the Irish case, some combination of ignorance and ideology drove the lack of famine relief. One can imagine an 1847 Ireland with the same political structure within the UK (and thus “undemocratic” by Sen’s definition) but with a different set of policymakers in London, where the famine might have been better mitigated.

While Daniel’s qualifications seem reasonable enough, let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture here. It is the India-China comparison, post-1947/1949, that is perhaps most telling for Sen’s analysis, which provides a good first explanation for the greatest famine of the twentieth century, the Great Leap Forward. Millions and millions of Chinese farmers died because the undemocratic state refused to listen to them, or even to the Minister of Defense who spoke the truth to Mao, when they said they were starving, and the political system – even though it was premised on a peasant revolution come to power – did not respond. The failures in North Korea in recent years, where people have been dying in large numbers from starvation, would also be fairly well explained by Sen’s analysis. These are famines. And Sen does a good job in helping us understand them.

Sam is dead on here. If I remember back to the days when I took a class with Sen, the main point is that democratic governments have institutional mechanisms that tend to prevent famines. That does not mean that authoritarian states *will* have famines, only that they lack an important structural check on the development of famines.

Zimbabwe is a sham democracy and people are starving to prop up the dictator. The point is that dictators are not answerable to the people on what they do with their money or how they run the agriculture sector. However, Zambia is a democracy and does have a food problem (drought is no respecter of political piety).

There are no democracies, they don’t exist. There are different mechanisms allowing the governed to express their dissatisfaction, mechanisms ranging from periodic opinion surveys (‘elections’) to popular uprisings. What does this have to do with famines? Not much, IMO.

DaF is a _very_ poorly edited and repetitive book. I leafed through without checking your page ref and, when the formula is repeated on p. 170 it concerns a functioning _multiparty_ democracy. Zimbabwe is again cited as an example, however ….

Sam: It is the India-China comparison, post-1947/1949, that is perhaps most telling for Sen’s analysis…

Wasn’t one of Sen’s points that Maoist China’s record, bad as it is, is actually better than India’s, because over the years poverty in India resulted in more deaths from starvation and malnutrition than the Chinese famines?

Motoko makes the same point I made in an earlier thread–I never went back to see if anyone responded to it. It might be true that democracies don’t suffer famines (the Irish and the Indians under British rule didn’t have political rights, which is presumably why they aren’t a counterexample) but there is less to that statement than meets the eye, because most people who die from lack of food don’t do it in spectacular famines. As DD says, famines are singled out because lots of people die in a short time–if even larger numbers of people die in a more spread-out manner, the press and most pundits and even most of Sen’s alleged readers ignore it. Sen doesn’t ignore this—he points out that Maoist China actually has a better overall record in terms of increased life expectancy and fewer deaths from malnutrition than democratic India during the same period. But virtually all of the commentary on Sen ignores what he says about this and instead focuses on the nice warm fuzzy claim that democracies never suffer from famine. People either haven’t really read much of Sen (neither have I, frankly) or they are using his work in a propagandistic way. They might be afraid of sounding like apologists for Mao, but that’s silly, because you can say this about Maoist China while also acknowledging that Mao was one of the worst tyrants in history. As Sen also points out, the Indian state of Kerala achieved the same or better results compared to China and because they are a democracy, they did it without massive state violence, concentration camps, and spectacular famines.

Both Democratic India and Maoist China received outside assistance for food aid / food production during the time in question. This needs to be taken into account when comparing the two.

“Sebastian has a point – although not necessarily the one he thinks he’s making. :^)”

No, I agree that Sen may very well be using too expansive terms in the argument (actually too limited in that case). But I am absolutely sure that derek is.

Expand “famine” into “poverty” and the USA looks less and less like a functioning democracy.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to argue that high income/wealth inequality is an odd, unexpected characteristic of what one could reasonably identify as ‘functioning democracy’.

Och, Donald a mhic, don’t trouble yourself. If the Irish themselves had a better (or worse) grasp of Irish history, the world might be a better place for it.

Anyway, on the big picture I tend to agree with you. As I began reading Daniel’s post I was prepared to be all indignant. After reading the whole thing, I have the impression that what he is saying is that people who want to bandy Sen On Famines And Democracy about ought first to go read Sen On Famines And Democracy. And I can hardly quarrel with that.

I’ve never been a big fan of Sen’s dictum that “democracies don’t have famines” – I’ve always regarded it as being a slogan on a par with “no two countries which have a McDonalds have ever gone to war with each other”.

I think this is somewhat of a later development; Sen’s original and really pioneering work was to show not that democracies somehow never have famines but to debunk the old FAD thesis on what causes famines – in his seminal 1981 book which takes an in-depth look at several famines and provides a formal theory of what causes them this is explored and explained at length. What is really remarkable is that by going over the micro-level statistics, Sen shows how regions and states that were meant to be suffering from famines did not see any collapse in per capita food availability and were actually net food exporters during famine periods. The association with democracy tends to be a later one and is specific to outbreaks of real droughts that lead to famines (as opposed to political causes or shifts in relative prices of commodities) and here he is correct to point out that a democratic state that is relatively stable and has a free media will not be able to survive non-action unlike a totalitarian state. India and China are the two examples that are usually cited in this regard, of course, however as pointed out; the real discontinuity holds better wrt to other factors such as fertility ratios and female literacy and that two for only specific regions within the respective countries. Perhaps a better way to phrase his dictum, which it must be said he never really puts in stark terms, is that no government in a functioning democracy could survive if it didn’t effectively try and combat a famine that occurred. More importantly, no government in such a state could ever get away with actually engineering a man-made famine (why any such government would want to do so is difficult to understand, on a national level at least).

It is this “plannability” of famine mitigation which is at the heart of Sen’s argument about famines and democracy. The actual reason why “democracies don’t have famines”, according to Sen, is as simple as pie. Think about it this way; it would be a very bad famine indeed that killed even as much as 10% of the population. The 10% of your population who are vulnerable to a famine are usually the poorest 10%, so their consumption is often as little as 3% of your GDP. And the famine comes about when their consumption drops below subsistence level, not when it disappears entirely. So basically, it is reasonable to suppose that the famine-vulnerable population could be brought back to their original level of consumption by diverting as little as 1.5% of GDP, and a government which can’t divert one and a half per cent of a country’s output is not a government worthy of the name.

Actually, no this is not correct. Even better than Griffith’s book, to understand how aid and redistribution can go wrong in LDC contexts is P. Sainath’s book “Everybody Loves a Good Drought” which looks at how in certain very well known cases of extreme poverty or hunger, most notriously Kalahandi, this supposed democratic link between state effectiveness and famine relief breaks down. Kalahandi district in Orissa is a prime example of a micro-level failure of Sen’s theory in that recurrent famine conditions have happened leading to debasing incidents such as debt-bondage and sale of children, which were picked up by the national media and then caused an uproar, leading to massive political attention including several prime ministers flying out to the area but which had little if any positive net impact. It was Rajiv Gandhi, I think who said that only about 10%-15% of the money the state distributes towards the rural poor reaches them and this was in the mid-80s when things were better; so to be able to distribute 1.5% of GDP and have it reach the intended beneficiaries will require a much larger infusion of money or a revolution of governance. Most govts like India can divert 1.5% of GDP, the problem is that they can’t make sure it reaches the intended destination; this might make them unworthy of the name but then this is perhaps not what they were configured to do. The Indian state these days likes to see itself as a nascent global power and aspirant to a permanent UNSC seat; it still can’t however prevent several thousand children from starving to death in one of its richest states.

Conrad, thanks for the reference, and I’ll certainly try to read it. But to pick up on one point:

‘It was Rajiv Gandhi, I think who said that only about 10%-15% of the money the state distributes towards the rural poor reaches them.’
I really don’t trust this. Firstly I’m no expert on Indian politics, but Rajiv Gandhi always sounded like a shyster of the first order.

Secondly, this level of failure may well apply to development aid, but with famine relief we’re not talking about development aid. You need to supply a few skilled personnel plus bulk quantities of basic foodstuffs, potable water, medicines and public health (ie clean toilets in refugee camps), and, perhaps, a few seeds or items of livestock to persuade rural refugees back to their lands. There is much less opportunity for graft or waste in bulk-buying those items than there is in running many ‘development’ projects.

But thirdly, what you’ve said is a very valid criticism, or perhaps enlargement, of Sen’s work: the Indian sociologist Amrita Rangasami made the same points in 1981 in Delhi’s ‘Economic and Political Weekly’. Hunger among the rural poor, as Sen notes, only rarely reaches the point of ‘famine’- ie mass mortality. Sen wrote about ‘coping mechanisms’ and Rangasami pointed out that these include not just such things as reducing levels of food consumption, begging food from religious organisations or richer neighbours etc but also moving off land, becoming indentured labourers etc.

I agree that the real merit of Sen’s work is in his conclusive demolition of the Food Aggregate Deficiency thesis (ie the ‘common sense’ position that ‘people starve because there isn’t enough food nearby’). He’d accomplished this by 1981, and thereafter he started looking for a more positive account of what does cause famine, rather than what doesn’t. One of the reasons that it’s so hard to pin down his thinking on this is that he kept writing new books and articles (often with Jean Dreze)- and, to his credit, changing his mind when challenged. In the mid-80s, he did seem to say ‘democracies don’t suffer famines’; then it was ‘a free press will always prevent famines’; and Dsquared’s post is the best exposition I’ve read of the position he’s finally arrived at.

Umpteenth time I’ve recommended this, but Alex De Waal’s ‘Famine Crimes’ contains an excellent discussion, and history, of at least some of the problems associated with food aid to the starving. As De Waal notes, Sen’s demolition of the FAD was at least implicit in the Famine Codes of the British Raj in India, and was certainly anticipated by some of the pre-Raj Hindu writers of books on governance.

Btw, another interesting point:on the definition of famine as ‘an episode of mass deaths due to starvation rather than malnutrition’: De Waal’s ‘Famine that Kills’, a demographic study of the causes of death in a Sudanese famine in the early ’80s, reached the conclusion that the cause of mortality in the overwhelming majority of cases in the famine he studied was not malnutrition but diarrhoea due to lack of potable water and/or epidemics due to the lack of sanitation among refugees on the move. What killed people, in other words, was not the lack of food but the fact that the lack of food caused them to become refugees and thus exposed them to other hazards. No doubt this is untrue of famine afflicting, say, the poor in an urban context (eg Jews locked up in the Kiev ghetto in the Second World War, refugees in an African city today) but De Waal concluded that it was poor water and epidemics that killed in most famines, not simple lack of calories.

Dan,

I really don’t trust this. Firstly I’m no expert on Indian politics, but Rajiv Gandhi always sounded like a shyster of the first order.

Well, I don’t want to get sidetracked into a discussion about the integrity of Indian PMs, but Rajiv Gandhi wasn’t all that bad, wasn’t all that great either. He needs to be seen in a context where pretty much every single PM that has led a govt which has lasted at the centre since the mid-60s have been unscrupolous manipulators of the first order. I think my point wasn’t to comment on Rajiv Gandhi record as a PM but just to point out how ‘leaky’ and difficult to manage state efforts in this area was and indeed is.

Secondly, this level of failure may well apply to development aid, but with famine relief we’re not talking about development aid. You need to supply a few skilled personnel plus bulk quantities of basic foodstuffs, potable water, medicines and public health (ie clean toilets in refugee camps), and, perhaps, a few seeds or items of livestock to persuade rural refugees back to their lands. There is much less opportunity for graft or waste in bulk-buying those items than there is in running many ‘development’ projects.

I am afraid not; one would this should be the case but it isn’t. I know this personally and professionally; the lead IAS officer who was in charge of relief efforts for the Latur earthquake victims was actually tranferred out in what was a well known case at the time because he was refusing to allow local legislators and party fixers to dip their hand in the funds. A more recent example is the general mis-handling of rehabilitation efforts for the Orissa cyclone that occurred a couple of years ago; the only effective work was carried out by volunteers from Andhra Pradesh sent by the Naidu govt which led to many Oriya beneficiaries adopting pro-TDP armbands and slogans as a mark of acknowledgement and gratitude. I woulde reverse your reasoning and say that there is even more scope graft and waste since emergency releif often means that the aid has to reach the targets in time with the minimum of delay or obstruction – which simply put can be very costly in human terms. In a situation analogous to wartime, this can allow very large exploitative rents to be extracted by those in a position to do so.

In the mid-80s, he did seem to say ‘democracies don’t suffer famines’; then it was ‘a free press will always prevent famines

He sort of moved around it a bit; there is the volume Hunger and Public Action that he wrote with Jean Dreze that looks at the specific success of the Maharastra state govt in dealing with famine and the edited collection of papers in ‘The Political Economy of Hunger’ has a few chapters on the role of media and other institutions. Bob Currie has an excellent book on Kalandi, ‘Poverty and Hunger’ that actually shows some of the weaknesses in Sen’s logic. Localised famines led to a war of words being conducted in the media whereby the state govt actually took out multi-page adverts insisting that no famine was taking place, and in many districts clear provisions for action in the case of malnutrition deaths were simply ignored by attributing death to other causes such as eating of mahua fruits and other inedible materials – circumventing the declaration of mass hunger conditions. Of course, the reason why people were eating tree bark and other such stuff was the fact that they simply had run out of edible food to eat. All this evades the real paradox of persistent hunger in democracies and this is how such a large proportion of the population can go unfed while food is literally rotting in grain godowns or being exported at subsidised prices; which was the case for the last 5-7 years in India.

Umpteenth time I’ve recommended this, but Alex De Waal’s ‘Famine Crimes’ contains an excellent discussion, and history, of at least some of the problems associated with food aid to the starving. As De Waal notes, Sen’s demolition of the FAD was at least implicit in the Famine Codes of the British Raj in India, and was certainly anticipated by some of the pre-Raj Hindu writers of books on governance.

Yeah, De Waal is a good guy; I would also recommend his most recent paper on ‘New Variant Famine’ in the Lancet which looks at the link between AIDs and malnutrition. Two pre-colonial thinkers that preceded Sen in this regard would be MG Ranade and Dadabhai Naroji; both influential in what could be termed as the Bombay School of political economy.

No doubt this is untrue of famine afflicting, say, the poor in an urban context (eg Jews locked up in the Kiev ghetto in the Second World War, refugees in an African city today) but De Waal concluded that it was poor water and epidemics that killed in most famines, not simple lack of calories.

Sure, I think this would be true of many famines. Actually dying of hunger is a very long and drawn out process, most people would be finished off by disease or epidemics long before this. As I mentioned earlier many try to eat things that are either inedible or poisonous and die of food poisoning – conveniently allowing the govt to pass the buck on there actually being an outbreak of malnutrition deaths.

Dsquared,

I think Dan has to be right and Rajiv Gandhi wrong on the subject of disaster aid. This is why the army are always so prominent in disaster relief efforts; as organisations, armies are fantastic at delivering things to people (after all, their main function in life is the delivery of small bits of metal to people who don’t want them).

Yes and no. The army isn’t always called out in such instances and even when it is, they are not given authority over the procurement and strategic allocation of aid; I remember that the first active mission I underwent was in assisstance to village communities flooded in Punjab; but we were always under civilian control as far as actual distribution of aid went – ultimately we could only do a good job if the civil authorites didn’t mess around with the disbursement of supplies. The army does play a stronger role in preventing any breakdown of law and order and of course, in actually physically saving people or transporting them from hazardous areas to safe ones. As is so often the case, the military is mainly a tool and they can be used efficiently and effectively or poorly and inappropriately; this is primarily a political question not a tactical or operational one. Even when we have to ‘deliver small bits of metal to people who don’t want them’ we don’t always get to choose the who, why or where; which is often very important.

Conrad- this is fascinating. Let me know if you ever start a blog. You’re arguing from experience and I’m arguing from my reading, so I think you win.

Would you quibble with the conclusion (reached by both Sen and De Waal) that post-Independence Indian governments have effectively abolished famine? You’ve come up with a number of counter-examples which make me suspect you don’t quite agree with this.

This also makes me think of China’s government today. Their emphasis on growth in quantities (they foster competition in price) is driven by a fear that, if the economy slows down, social discontent will endanger the government’s stability. It isn’t really that the government cares very much about the welfare of the people, I think, but rather that they know that if hunger is widespread, they are in trouble.

But Zimbabwe was a one-party state between 1988 (merger of ZANU and ZAPU) and 1999 (formation of MDC). That’s the period during which Sen was doing a lot of the work that ended up in DaF.