Hunger: Theory, Perspectives and Reality

Assessment Through Participatory Methods

Amitava Mukherjee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138355996
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351156189
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Hunger is an issue which has been subject to much rigorous intellectual examination by economists, philosophers, sociologists, NGOs and governments. This volume provides a critical overview of current academic and political perspectives and then compares these views from thenon-hungry people with those of thehungry particularly from a broad range of poor communities in India. Their views are gathered using participatory rural appraisal techniques and the scale of the material presented is unprecedented. Not surprisingly, the comparisons show that the perceptions of the hungry are fundamentally different from those of the non-hungry. It makes compelling suggestions about how best policy makers can attempt to eliminate hunger based on what the hungry themselves suggest. The book also draws attention to the critical role of Common Property Resources and women in the fight against under-nutrition, which have so far been largely ignored.

1 Institutional Sanctions, Choice and Secondary Food System as Elements in the Explanation of Hunger

I. Introduction

The prevalent literature on the subject of food security, drawing from the "Entitlement and Deprivation (ED) Thesis" (Sen, 1981 and Dreze and Sen, 1989), defines an individual to be food secure when there is enough food in the system that he/she can buy (food availability), when he/she has the capacity to buy that food (ability to buy food), and when the food that the individual buys provides her/him with the requisite nutritional value (The World Bank, 1986). Where any of these conditions is not satisfied, the person's food security is endangered and consequently the person becomes food insecure.

We are of the view that individuals can be food insecure even when these conditions are satisfied and to that extent there are gaps in the ED thesis. There are three more conditions, namely, the existence of institutional sanction to access available food, the exercise of choice to access the food that is available and the presence of a secondary food system which must be satisfied before individuals could be guaranteed to be food secure. The principal concern of this chapter is to establish the conditions that must be met before individuals could be treated as food secure. These additional arguments have been comparatively neglected in the food security debate.

This chapter is divided into four sections. Following the introduction in section two, we will examine the different concepts of entitlement and deprivation, and how they relate to food (in) security, based on Sen's thesis. In section three we will examine the gaps in the ED thesis, and establish the conditions that need to be additionally satisfied together with certain evidences to establish the criticality of the same. Finally, in section four brief conclusions will be drawn.

II. Conceptual Specifications

According to Food Availability Decline (FAD) arguments, an individual is food insecure because there is not enough to eat. The protagonists of the Green Revolution believed in this theory and they therefore argued that all that matters is producing more food for people to be relieved of hunger. The miracle seeds of the "Green Revolution" increases grain yields and therefore are key to ending hunger. Now bio-technology—actually manipulating the genes of plants—we are told, offers an even more dramatic production revolution just down the road (Financial Express, November 1999). The second Green Revolution based on these advances in bio-technology will have a greater impact on our food security situation than the first Green Revolution. More food means less hunger. The then Chairman of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIR), overseeing Green Revolution research, S. Sahid Husain, went so far as to suggest that the poor are the beneficiaries of the new seeds output and proceeded to claim that "added emphasis on poverty alleviation is not necessary" because increasing production itself has a major impact on the poor (Quoted in The Bank's World, 1985, p. 1). Whether one agrees with CGIR Chief or not, the subsequent turn of events clearly establishes that advances made in production of food were for real. For instance, food production in excess of 204 million tons in India currently estimated is laudable.

There were skeptics, however, who held that focussing on increasing food production cannot alleviate hunger because it fails to alter the tightly concentrated distribution of economic power, especially access to land and purchasing power. If individuals do not have land on which to grow food or the money to buy food, they would go hungry, no matter how dramatically food production and hence food availability is pushed up. It was even argued that a narrow focus on production ultimately defeated itself as it destroyed the very resource base on which agriculture depended (Lappe and Collins, 1988).

The World Bank itself found the curious paradox that with increasing food production, the world was possessed of even more hungry people. The number of hungry people increased throughout the world during the 1970s, reaching 730 million by the end of the decade (World Bank, 1986, p. 49). And where were these hungry people? It was in South Asia, precisely where Green Revolution seeds had contributed to the greatest production success (Lewis, 1985), that lived roughly two thirds of the undernourished in the entire world. And in India, an estimated 300-400 million people are today hungry, despite the massive strides in food production.

It was in this scenario and in the high noon of the "Green Revolution", Sen came with the Entitlement and Deprivation Thesis (E&D Thesis) challenging the received theory that people are hungry because there is scarcity of food. We would now turn to examine the thesis, as it is the principal strand of thinking in currency as the explanation of hunger in contemporary world.

Box 1.1
Paradox of Hunger

It is paradoxical but hardly surprising that the right to food has been endorsed more often and with greater unanimity and urgency than most other human rights, while at the same time being violated more comprehensively and systematically than probably any other.

Richard Cohen, in Causes of Hunger, 1994

According to the E&D Thesis (Sen, 1981) food insecurity has to be seen as the characteristic of the person not having enough to eat. This is not tantamount to saying that "there isn't enough to eat". The latter could be the cause of the former, but it is not the only cause. It is argued that whether and how food insecurity is related to food availability deals with things about food considered on its own, whereas food insecurity statements are about the relationship of the person to food. Except in cases where an individual deliberately starves, so argues the E&D thesis, to understand food insecurity, one has to go into the structure of ownership of food.

Ownership relations, according to Sen, are one kind of entitlement relationship, which as accepted in a private ownership market economy, typically include the following amongst others:

• a) Trade-based Entitlement, where an individual is entitled to own goods and services, which the individual obtains by trading something, owned by her/him with a willing party or parties.
• b) Production-based Entitlement, where an individual is entitled to own goods and services, he/she obtains by arranging production using resources owned by her/him, or by hiring resources from willing parties meeting the agreed conditions of trade. Production-based entitlement may also be construed as exchange with nature when considered in the context of food security.
• c) Own Labour Entitlement, where an individual is entitled to one's own labour power and thus to the trade-based and production-based entitlements related to the individual's labour power.
• d) Inheritance and Transfer Entitlement, where an individual is entitled to own commodities that are willingly given to the individual by another who legitimately owns them, which could be either during the life time of the latter if commodities are transferred in the nature of a gift, or after the latter's death, in case they are transferred by way of a Will, inheritance or bequest.

What an individual owns is called the endowment entitlement or direct entitlement, but in a market economy individuals can also exchange the commodities they own for another, or another collection of commodities, either through trading (trade-based entitlement) or through production (production-based entitlement) or through some combination of the two. The set of all alternative bundles of commodities that an individual can acquire through such means, has been collectively called exchange entitlement of what the individual owns. We shall discuss this in greater detail in the next section.

Apart from non-entitlement transfers like inheritance, there could be, according to Sen, other kinds of entitlements as well, such that an individual may be entitled to enjoy the fruits of some property without being able to trade it for anything else. For instance individuals can use the river water for personal use, but cannot sell or buy a river. The case with the tribal's entitlement (in India) to minor forest produce is very similar. One could also inherit the property of a deceased person who leaves behind no deed of conveyance such as a "Will" for anyone to inherit, through some kind of kinship-based inheritance, accepted in the statutes as by law established. It is not hard to imagine that individuals may also have some entitlements related to unclaimed objects on the basis of "discovery".

Exchange Entitlements

The exchange entitlement mapping is the relation that specifies the set of exchange entitlements for each ownership, which defines the possibilities that would be open to individuals corresponding to each ownership situation. An individual, accordingly, would be food insecure if the exchange entitlement set does not contain any feasible bundle, which includes enough food. It is, thus, possible to identify those ownership bundles that must lead to food insecurity in the absence of non-entitlement transfers (such as charity). Sen identified five factors, which determine an individual's exchange entitlement, namely, the following:

• a) The individual's ability to find employment, its tenure and the wage rate at which the individual will be able to secure the employment.
• b) The individual's ability to earn by selling the relative individual's non-labour assets, and the costs to be incurred by the individual to buy whatever he/she can buy and manage.
• c) The commodities that the individual can produce with his or her own labour power and resources he/she can buy and manage.
• d) The cost, to the individual, of purchasing resources or resource services and the value of the produce which he/she can sell.
• e) The social security benefits to which the respective individual is entitled to and the taxes, levies, fees and charges, to which he/she may be subjected, as enjoined by law.

Food insecurity of individuals and their ability to avoid it depend upon both individuals' ownership of commodities and on the exchange entitlement mapping. A general decline in food supply may indeed cause an individual to be exposed to food insecurity through a rise in prices with an unfavorable impact upon the individual's exchange entitlement. Even where food insecurity of the person is thus caused by food shortage, the immediate reason for the individual's food insecurity will be decline in that individual's exchange entitlement.

Significantly enough, according to Sen, an individual's exchange entitlement may worsen for reasons other than a general decline in food supply. For example, imagine that there are two Groups, A and B. An individual belonging to Group-A would be adversely affected, if the income of Group-B increases and starts buying more food (induced by higher income), causing food prices to rise, without any adverse variation in systemic availability of food. The reason is that this would lead to worsening the exchange entitlement of the individual belonging to Group-A. It is also possible that some economic changes, which as an IMF-World Bank enjoined structural adjustment programme may adversely affect the employment opportunities of the individual whose exchange entitlement may worsen because her or his wages lag behind price increases as it happened in India during 1991-92, when prices rose by upto 17 per cent on a month to month basis but wages remained nearly stagnant, during the same period, on a month to month basis, particularly so in the rural areas (Government of India, 1992). Thus, according to the ED Thesis, differential incomes of various sections of people, policy changes leading to changes in employment opportunities, wages and prices of commodities for production and consumption may lead to a worsening of the individual's exchange entitlement. These diverse influences on exchange entitlements, according to the ED Thesis, are as relevant as the overall volume of food supply vis-a-vis population of one's country.

Food Supply and Food Insecurity

The discussion, therefore, on food insecurity emanating from food supply falling behind population growth according to the E&D Thesis, is only part of the picture. According to the thesis, it is not merely falling food availability but food entitlement failure, which is responsible for causing food insecurity.

Ensunng food insecurity then would revolve around influencing different factors, which determine distribution of food between different sections of the community. The Senian entitlement approach directs one to questions dealing with ownership patterns and, less obviously, to the various influences that affect entitlement mapping. The influence of food supply itself on the prevalence of food insecurity, works through the entitlement relations. If one person in eight is food insecure regularly in the world (according to the Secretary General of the Food and Agricultural Organisation, Rome and Commitments and Plan of Action worked out at the World Food Summit, held in Rome in November, 1996, there are 800 million people who go to bed hungry every night in the world today) (Diouf, 1996) this is seen more as the inability of those who are food insecure to establish entitlement to enough food, where the question of the actual availability of food is not directly involved.

Endowment and Exchange

Clearly enough, entitlement approach to food insecurity of an individual concentrates on the ability of the individual to command food through the legal means available to the individual, including the use of production possibilities, trade opportunities, entitlements vis-a-vis the state, and other methods of acquiring food. Individuals are food insecure either because the individuals do not have the ability to command enough food, or because the ability to avoid food insecurity is not used. The entitlement approach concentrates on the former, to the exclusion of the other possibility, and it concentrates on those means of commanding food that are legitimate under the legal system for the time being in force. As Sen puts it:

"While it is an approach of some generality, it does not make any attempt at including all possible influences that can cause food insecurity, for example illegal transfers (e.g. looting) and choice failure (e.g. owing to inflexible food habits)."

The entitlement approach focuses on the entitlement of each individual to commodity bundles which include food. It views food insecurity as resulting from a failure of the individual to be entitled to be bundle of commodities with enough food in it.

Normally, there is a menu before an individual to choose from. It is argued by Sen that, suppose E-l is the entitlement set of an individual in a given society, in a given situation, where E-1 consists of a set of alternative commodity bundles, any one of which the individual can decide to have. In an open economy, with private ownership typical of capitalist system, E-l can be characterized as depending on two parameters, viz., the endowment of the person (the ownership bundle) and the exchange entitlement mapping (the function that specifies the set of alternative commodity bundles that the person can command respectively for each endowment bundle).

Take the case of a farmer, having a piece of land, labour power and a few other resources such as a pair of bullocks and a plough, which taken one with the others make up the farmers' endowment. With that endowment the farmer can produce a basket of goods, say rice and pulses, which will be farmer's own, or she could sell her labour and buy some basket of commodities which may include food. The farmer can alternatively produce on her piece of land some cash crops, say sugarcane, that she can sell to buy food and other goods and services that she may wish to buy. There are farmers who produce rice, consume rice to meet their own food consumption requirement. But to meet some of their other needs, say of clothing, they may sell a part of the rice grown by them. They would sell rice at as favourable an exchange rate as possible, to buy clothes.

A person can face food insecurity if some economic change takes place in the system, which makes it impossible for her to acquire any commodity bundle, which has enough food to survive. Such entitlement failure can be caused either by a fall in the person's endowment (like alienation of land for the landowner, or loss of labour power of a mason due to accidental loss of limb caused by a fall while at work), or by an unfavourable shift in exchange entitlement (like loss of employment, fall in wages, rise in food prices, drop in the prices of goods or services the individual sells, decline in self-employment, in production and so on).

It is added, however, by the E&D Thesis, that an individual who is en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Boxes and Figures
• List of Tables
• Glossary of Indian Terms
• Months of the Year in the Indian Calendar
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Institutional Sanctions, Choice and Secondary Food System as Elements in the Explanation of Hunger
• 2 The Theory of Hunger: The Economists' Perspectives
• 3 The Theory of Hunger: The Social and Political Perspectives
• 4 Community Perspective on Hunger from a Backward State, Village Chandpur, Varanasi
• 5 A Second Perspective on Hunger in a Backward State, from Villagers of Tikri, Varanasi
• 6 Community Perspective on Hunger from Vegetable Producing Farmers: Village Uncha Gaon, Faridabad
• 7 Perspectives of Rural Women on Food Security from a Tribal Village (in West Bengal) - 1993 to 1998
• 8 A Note on Force Field Analysis of Hunger in the Four Villages of Varanasi and Faridabad
• 9 A Note on Food Security in Villages of a Perpetually Hunger Stricken District, Bolangir
• 10 Summary and Conclusions: The Reality Check
• References and Select Bibliography