Hunger and Public Action, by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen and The Political Economy of Hunger, Vols. I, II and III, edited by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen
Dube, Siddharth
HUNGER AND PUBLIC ACTION, by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen. Oxford University Press, 373 pp., 1990. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF HUNGER, edited by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen. Oxford University Press....
...Part of the answer lies in the labour intensive nature of many of these measures of public delivery...
...This series forms the most definitive recent analysis of the problems of hunger and deprivation in the three continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America...
...forthcoming...
...Bringing all this together is Amartya Sen, Lamont University Professor at Harvard, who has an unparalleled reputation for his work on famine, equity, and development economics...
...The 1990s may be remembered as the decade in which the rest of the Third World went the Brazil way...
...In contrast, the authors of these volumes argue that hunger in the modern world is rooted primarily in global inequity and the dominance of national policies that focus on WINTER • 1992 • 109 economic growth to the neglect of basic needs and redistributive public programs...
...The dominant Western paradigm on the Third World locates hunger—quite erroneously —as a derivative of the Third World's poverty, economic mismanagement, overpopulation, political repressiveness, ethnic conflict, allegiance to traditional ties, and utopian ideological politics...
...But] it is not necessary to prune the poverty alleviation projects in order to have growth...
...The central concern of this monumental series is to explain the extraordinary paradox that millions continue to die of hunger in this brave new world of plenty, of food surpluses, and of diseases of overeating...
...But in fact, the growth-equity dilemma central to the mainstream economic development model simply may not be relevant to most developing countries...
...The die has already been cast: virtually every Third World country, including such iconoclasts as India and China, has the huge foreign debt burdens that will give the multilateral banks leverage to force cutbacks on social welfare programs— where they exist— and to open their doors to free trade and free markets...
...Yet, apart from concern about recurrent famines, this incredible carnage is given little attention in the industrialized countries...
...The crucial factor in ensuring improvements in levels of hunger, life expectancy, and other prime social welfare indicators has been the expansion of public support systems such as unemployment benefits, subsidized food distribution, and accessible health care, rather than higher per capita income per se...
...And Sen and Dreze note that poor countries that have been successful in dramatically improving health and nutritional levels did not require disproportionately heavy expenditures on basic needs provisioning: It may be asked how poor countries can afford to have extensive public support systems...
...Also crucial is Sen's work on how changes in acquisition—entitlements—can have a major impact on the extent of hunger even without a change in aggregate food availability...
...VOLUME II: FAMINE PREVENTION, 400 pp., 1991...
...The more crucial, and unpleasant, explanation lies in the fact that Western thinkers and activists—and their counterparts in the poorer countries—mindlessly accept an agenda on Third World problems set by the industrialized countries that has not moved beyond its colonial, imperial roots...
...Common perceptions of the historical experience of Western countries in enhancing life expectancy often involve this misleading belief in the power of simple opulence per se," write Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, who edit this series...
...The neglect is only partly explained by the First World's physical distance from the front lines where third-world people are dying of starvation...
...The papers here speak the hard, economistic language dear to policymakers...
...This makes good sense from the perspective of the richer industrial countries trying to pull away from the depths of the current recession: it is the poor in the poor countries who bear the brunt of "structural adjustment...
...VOLUME III: ENDEMIC HUNGER, 292 pp...
...VOLUME I: ENTITLEMENT AND WELL-BEING, 492 pp., 1991...
...He writes: Any attempt to operate through national and world food markets fails for the simple reason that, lacking purchasing power, the hungry are only marginal participants in the market...
...Equally, this series is welcome for its criticism of economic growth policies that have dominated discussion of "development...
...Attempts to reach them through the markets leads to adjustments elsewhere and in the new equilibrium the poor usually remain as badly off as before...
...In a meticulously argued essay, Kaushik Basu notes that most low-income countries function at an inefficient frontier at which "there is sufficient slack for them to have more of both equity and growth...
...Such a view is unlikely to be accepted easily, but the only explanation for this opposition lies in a political economy in which the rich countries rule the poor countries, and the rich in the poor countries rule their poor...
...the authors are highly respected and the series draws on an extraordinary data base and comparison between countries...
...In one essay, Kirit Parikh, the well-known Indian 110 • DISSENT economist, argues that interventions designed to improve global food supplies do not increase significantly the food consumed by the poor...
...WINTER • 1992 • 111...
...Such findings call for a review of the dominant theories about "developing the Third World...
...Acute starvation continues to be newsworthy—and politically sensitive—in a way that chronic hunger is not...
...Basu writes: To ensure the sustenance of poverty alleviation programmes, we need some concommitant policies, . . . we need to bolster growth so that the government has adequate resources for its programmes...
...Equally, growth and equity are affected by quite distinct policy instruments...
...Modernization and growth-centric theorists have maintained that poor countries must sacrifice improvements in social conditions on the altar of economic growth...
...These studies point to the policy pitfalls of focusing on economic growth and food production to the exclusion of equity and distribution...
...Such criticisms are unwelcome both in the United States and in my native India, which continues, despite mounting food surpluses, to be the world's largest contributor to the tally of hunger-related deaths...
...The first volume delineates the geopolitics and the range of public policies that can reduce chronic hunger and famine...
...This attention to detail sets these studies far above other contemporary writing on hunger and deprivation...
...Hunger is, however, intolerable in the modern world in a way it could not have been in the past...
...The enormous expansion of productive power that has taken place over the last few centuries has made it, perhaps for the first time, possible to guarantee adequate food for all, and it is in this context that the persistence of chronic hunger and the recurrence of virulent famines must be seen as being morally outrageous and politically unacceptable...
...Hunger kills millions more people each year than wars or political repression...
...The idea that the rich countries have achieved high levels of basic capabilities simply because they are rich is, to say the least, an oversimplification...
...Growth can be bolstered through a different set of policy instruments while continuing with the same basic needs policies...
...Brazil, in contrast, faithfully followed the industrialized countries' economic recipe through its emphasis on fast growth, industry, and urbanization, yet has an extraordinarily high incidence of hunger and •ll-health...
...Hunger is not a modern malady," write Dreze and Sen in the Hunger and Public Action volume...
...This is so despite the wealth of research in the past two decades that shows that low-income countries from Sri Lanka to China to Jamaica have made substantial improvements in reducing hunger and ill-health through national policies that focus on basic needs, despite having little economic growth in the periods in which such improvements were made...
...Brazil represents the most extreme case of a very rapid and sustained economic growth— about 7 percent per year over the forty years 1940-80—and a spectacular modernization, going hand in hand with persistent poverty, endemic malnutrition, and occasional hunger," writes Ignacy Sachs, the eminent French social scientist...
...By a rough estimate, the current toll of hunger-related deaths equals several hundred jumbo jets crashing each day with no survivors...
...The third volume focuses on chronic hunger, and delineates the strategies used by low-income countries that have successfully reduced hunger...
...But such oversimplification—economic growth as the panacea for the Third World's problems— continues to dominate the policies set by First World governments and multilateral financial institutions...
...Moreover, this is a poor time to question the popular discrediting of socialism, the welfare state, and social security programs...
...The range of issues and countries covered is nothing short of extraordinary...
...Sen shows that hunger can increase despite peak food availability and that redistributive social programs have significantly reduced hunger in situations where there has been no increase in per capita food availability...
...Famine and famine prevention are the subjects of the second volume...
...It is little wonder, then, that modern economic theories have been successful in misrepresenting to the poorer countries how the rich countries achieved higher social welfare standards...
...Parikh's sustained questioning of the distributive qualities of the market is particularly noteworthy given mainstream economic theory's reverence for the market...
...They stress that the market and growth dominated view of development is flawed: what is needed to set right hunger in the Third World is not untrammeled growth but purposive investments in basic needs programs...
...This volume will probably be widely read, and is likely to prove to be a particularly useful source...
...But some of the explanation also relates to the scope for reorienting the focus of delivery away from proving an enormous lot—of expensive and advanced services—to a few to securing the minimal basic services for all...
Vol. 39 • January 1992 • No. 1
