The Entitlement Approach to Famine: A n Assessment S. R. Osmani March 1993 UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU/WIDER) Helsinki, FinlandTable of Contents 1. Introduction 2. The Conceptual Apparatus of the Entitlement Approach 2 The Basic Concepts 3 Transition in the Conceptual Framework 6 3. The Entitlement Approach to Famine: What Does it Say? 10 Three Interpretations of the Entitlement Approach 10 Legacy of the Initial Formulation 13 FAD versus FEE: Hypothesis or Approach? 16 What the Entitlement Analysis is All About: in Five Capsules 21 4. Criticisms of the Entitlement Approach 22 The Entitlement Approach has Limited Applicability 23 The Entitlement Approach is not Sufficiently Backward-Looking 29 The Entitlement Approach is not Sufficiently Forward-Looking 34 The Entitlement Approach Says Nothing New: Conceptually 38 The Entitlement Approach Says Nothing New: Historically 40 5. Summary and Conclusions 47 References 521 The Entitlement Approach to Famine: A n A s s e s s m e n t S. R. O s m a n i 1. Introduction: Nothing excites intellectual curiosity more than the overturning of a time-honoured belief. This is specially so when that overturning is accomplished b y scholarly analysis, as distinct from Messianic rhetoric. So w h e n as highly acclaimed a scholar as Amartya Sen challenged the popular belief that famine means shortage of food, it inevitably caused a stir. The famine that had killed two to three million people and brought starvation to millions more in Bengal in 1943 was not, he maintained, a result of shortage of food (Sen 1976, 1977). What's more, he went on to argue, the Bengal famine was by no means unique in this regard. He showed that m a n y contemporary famines in Asia and Africa shared this property of not being caused by reduced availability of food (Sen 1981b). Famine, he concluded, is a case of people not having enough food to eat, b u t not necessarily of there not being enough food to go around. From this emerged what has come to be known as the 'entitlement approach' to hunger and famine -- an approach that focuses attention on people having or not having enough command over food as distinct from there being or not being enough food to be eaten. Over the years, Sen and others following his lead have extended the reach of the entitlement approach from its initial concern with the genesis of famine. In a recent treatise, for example, Dreze and Sen (1989) have skilfully utilized the insights of this approach to shed radically new light on the policy issues relating to famine relief and the more widespread problem of combating endemic hunger. To many, these insights have forever changed the w a y they perceive the problems of hunger and famine. I have benefited from helpful comments of Dersch Endale and Amartya Sen on an earlier draft, but I am alone responsible for the views and interpretations contained in the paper. As Robert Solow remarks in his review of the Dreze-Sen book, "It has changed the wav 1 will think about famine relief from now on." (Solow 1991, p.23.)2 But, for all the adulation it has received, the entitlement approach has not gone unchallenged. Although it is perhaps fair to say that those w h o have delved into Sen's copious writings on this matter have generally come out impressed with his arguments, a significant strand of critical reaction has persisted to this day. A major objective of this paper is to assess the merit of this critical literature with a view to forming a judgement as to where exactly the entitlement approach now stands. However, I am not going to attempt a comprehensive assessment of the whole of the critical literature. It is convenient to divide u p this literature into two parts: one that questions the analytical merit of the entitlement approach as a tool for understanding famines in general, and one that takes issue with Sen's empirical analysis of particular famines. The t w o parts are not necessarily independent, but they are nevertheless distinct. I shall concentrate on the first part, delving into the empirical literature only insofar as issues relating to particular famines are relevant for understanding disputes at the analytical level. I begin by sketching out (in Section 2) the conceptual apparatus of the entitlement approach. In doing so, I d r a w attention to a certain transition that seems to have occurred between Sen's earliest formulation and the later ones. I attach some importance to this transition, because I believe that the failure to notice it may be responsible at least in part for some of the confusions surrounding the entitlement approach. An attempt is then made in Section 3 to reach a clear understanding of what the entitlement approach really claims, and what it does not. Next, in Section 4, I take u p the major criticisms of the entitlement approach, and evaluate their merit in the light of the preceding account of what I believe the entitlement approach to be really about. Section 5 provides a brief summary and some concluding remarks. 2. The Conceptual Apparatus of the Entitlement Approach: The basic unit of analysis is an individual person. For practical purposes, however, the analysis can also be conducted at collective levels such as household, group, or class by using the standard device of assuming a 'representative individual'.3 The Basic Concepts The analysis is built upon three basic conceptual categories, viz. the endowment set, the entitlement-mapping (or E-mapping, for short), and the entitlement set. The endowment set is defined as the combination of all resources legally owned by a person. In this definition, 'resources' include both tangible assets such as land, equipment, animals, etc., and intangibles such as knowledge and skill, labour power, membership of a particular community, etc. Furthermore, the word legally' has to be interpreted broadly to mean conforming to established social norms and practices, and not merely to what is sanctioned formally by the state. The entitlement set is defined as the set of all possible combinations of goods and services that a person can legally obtain by using the resources of his endowment set. This cryptic definition calls for a little elaboration, however. First, the definition recognizes that from any given set of resources one may be able to obtain many different combinations of final goods and services, although at any point in time a person will be seen to be enjoying only one of those possible combinations, depending on her tastes and preferences. The entitlement set refers to all the possible combinations, not just the one actually being enjoyed. Second, resources may be used in many different ways to obtain the final goods and services. For example, a farmer may use his land, labour, and other resources to produce the food he wants; a labourer may exchange his labour power to secure his food; a fisherman may first use his labour, equipment and fishing boat to produce a catch of fish and then exchange it to get the rice he wants; an unemployed person may use his resource of 'citizenship of a welfare state' to claim a transfer of state funds in the form of unemployment benefit. These acts of production, exchange, and transfer are all different ways of using one's resources. Third, the manner in which a person uses his resources must have the sanction of the law of the The need for adopting such a broad interpretation arises from the fact that while legal ownership in the modern sense is often non-existent in traditional societies, especially in relation to landed property, some notion of ownership nonetheless exists based on conventions.4 land, again interpreted in the broadest sense of the term; thus, the commodities he can obtain through looting (by using his muscle p o w e r in an illegal fashion) are not counted as part of the entitlement set. The entitlement mapping, or E-mapping, is simply the relationship between the endowment set on the one hand and the entitlement set on the other. Roughly speaking, it shows the rates at which the resources of :he e n d o w m e n t set can be converted into goods and services included in the entitlement set. For example, an E-mapping includes, for the farmer, the input-output ratios in farm production; for the labourer, the ratio betwc en money wage and the price of food i.e., the real wage rate; for the fisherman, both the input-output ratio in fishing and the relative price of fish and rice; and for the unemployed person, the rate of unemployment benefit. Thus, an E-mapping would in general have three broad components: a production component containing various input-output ratios (or, more generally, production functions), an exchange component made u p of rates of exchange involved in trading ' , and a transfer component. The following diagram shows the relationship among the three basic concepts: E-mapping Endowment _ . Entitlement Note that wage employment i.e., the trading of labour-power, is a part of the exchange mapping. Ghose (1982) seems to have overlooked this point when he suggested that S e i s framework of 'exchange entitlement' needs to be broadened to include analysis based on 'employment entitlement'. 4 Strictly speaking, the exchange mapping includes, in addition to rates of exchange, also any restriction that may exist on trading, such as quantity rationing, involuntary unemployment, etc. It is worth noting that the transfer component includes only those transfers to which a person is legally entitled -- for example, social security provisions of the state. This leaver out not only illegal transfers (such as, stealing and looting), but also non-entitlement transfers, such as charity. Although there is nothing illegal about receiving charity, it is rot counted as part of entitlement mapping for the simple reason that one is not legally entitled to charity, whatever may be one's view about the poor's moral entitlement to it. The general point is that entitlement analysis is concerned with legal as distinct from moral entitlement.5 Next follows the concept of entitlement failure, which is derived from the three basic concepts and plays a crucial role in the analysis of famines. A person is said to suffer from the failure of food entitlement when her entitlement set does not contain enough food to enable her to avoid starvation in the absence of non-entitlement transfers, such as charity. It means that no matter how a person may reallocate resources to obtain the food she wants, she cannot get the minimum amount needed to escape starvation. A famine occurs when a large number of people within a community suffer from such entitlement failures at the same time. It is useful to note at this stage one important aspect of the causal structure that binds these concepts together. A moment's reflection will show that while all three basic categories can in principle affect each other, there nevertheless exists an important asymmetry between entitlement on the one hand and endowment and E-mapping on the other. In the case of both endowment and E-mapping, the definitions allow for the effect of exogenous factors i.e., it is granted that either of them may change without any prior change in any of the other two categories , but the same is not true of entitlement. Since the entitlement set is derived by applying E-mapping on the endowment set, it is only through changes in either endowment or E- mapping that any change in entitlement can occur. Note that this is not a theory or a hypothesis, but simply a logical implication of the definitions. It then follows that 'entitlement failure', and thus famine, can only occur through some adverse change in either endowment or E-mapping or both. This leads to the useful organising principle that all possible causes of famines can be classified into two broad groups: one that affects the endowment set and the other that affects the entitlement mappings. In a sense, this organising principle can be regarded as the core of the entitlement approach; we shall come to appreciate its significance as we proceed further. For some purposes, a slightly different way of classifying the causal factors may be useful. Noting that E-mapping consists of three different kinds of relations, viz. production, exchange, and transfer, one can identify four distinct sources of entitlement failure. These are: endowment loss, For example, endowment may change exogenously when a farmer happens to inherit the land of his father, or E-mapping can change exogenously when, for instance, adverse whether reduces the crop output, or the government raises the price of rationed food, etc.6 production failure, exchange failure, and transfer failure. For people who do not rely primarily on exchange to obtain their staple food, entitlement failure would occur through the first two of the four channels. This case is described by Sen as direct entitlement failure. When exchange is involved, then any one of