Poverty and Famines

Social World I

Some Web Sites

• USDA: Food and Nutrition Service; www.usda.gov/fcs/

• HungerWeb: www.brown.edu/Departments/World_Hunger_Program

• Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research: www.cgiar.org/

Who’s Amartya Sen?

• Economist, Philosopher, Scholar

• Origin; career

• Nobel Prize, Economics

Why Read This Book?

• Still useful?

• Research as process: new findings, conclusions, techniques modified

• Recent events, and confirmation of analysis

Further: Poverty, Famine as

• A concrete way to begin to talk about the social world

• Illustrates– issues; vocabulary; body of knowledge– way(s) of thinking

Specifically: Approach Involves

• Definition

• Description

• Measurement

• Analysis

• Public policy [prescription]

Some Data

• Numbers

• Location: Hunger belt?

• Who are the hungry?

Hunger in the U. S.

• Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 1995

• About 4% of households experienced reduced food intake and hunger as result of financial constraints

• About 0.8% of households experienced severe hunger

Famine vs. Hunger

• Distinction– Hunger: sustained nutritional deprivation– Famine: acute deprivation, sharp increase in

mortality

• Famine:– As a social problem– Some history

• Famine deaths: hunger? Or disease?

• Famine and children

• “Missing women” issue– Where?– How many? – How do we know? Compare Female-to-Male

Ratios across countries

Famine and the Food Supply: Malthus vs. Sen

• Population vs. food supply: how helpful is this comparison?– Malthus, and Essay on Population: the “race”– Sen, and famine, starvation as involving the

relationship of people to food: the “entitlement approach”

Thinking About Famine

• Malthus: difficulties?– Food increasing faster than population: no

famine?– Population increasing faster than food: famine?

Sen, and the Entitlement Approach

• Famine as a collapse of claims to food

• Key: how do we get claims to food?– Production– Trade– One’s own labor– Inheritance or transfer

Exchange Entitlement

• Definition: The set of all bundles of commodities we can acquire for what we own (see p. 3)

• What affects exchange entitlement: that is, what affects our ability to exert command over food?– Can we find employment?

– Can we sell assets?– What can we produce, sell?– What are our claims to social security?– What are our tax liabilities?– How does the price of what we have to sell

compare with the price of what we buy (the price of food)?

Examples (from Sen)

• Peasant vs. landless laborer: Who owns the product? What happens when typhoon destroys half the crop?

• “boom famine”

• Increasing price of food

• China; and decreased starvation, though not large food production increases

Conclude: Useful to Focus On:

• Distribution issues? Clarify:– Physical distribution? Possibly– Income distribution? Yes: this distributes

claims to food

• How food supply works through entitlement relationships

• How claims to food are established

• Paraphrasing from page 8: not focus so much on what is as on who can command what . . .

Is Food Supply Irrelevant?

• More helpful to trace effects of changes in food supply through changes in entitlements

• Why? May influence – understanding of why we see famine– policy response

• Example: typhoon destroys half of rice crop: effects?

• Point: impact of natural disaster depends on how society is organized, especially to care for its economically vulnerable groups

Poverty

• How does Sen proceed?– Definition– Description– Measurement, (aggregation)– Analysis (underlying analytical concepts)– Public policy

Definition

• What’s poverty, exactly?

• Why does it matter? Suggests ways to look for– Causes– Approaches to relief of the poor

Approaches to Definition

• Absolute deprivation: minimum subsistence definition– A biological approach

• Survival

• Ability to work effectively

– Problems: translating nutritional requirements into food requirements; actually drawing the nutritional line

• Relative deprivation: inequality definition– Rich vs. poor– Problems

• Poverty never goes away

• Income transferred from top to middle: inequality reduced, but not poverty

• Decrease in overall income: no change in inequality, poverty increases

Aggregation

• We want an indicator of poverty

• Problem: how to do this, exactly?

Identifying the Poor

• Direct method (a consumption-based definition)– Poor if consumption bundle leaves some basic

needs unfulfilled– Problem: What’s the minimum acceptable

bundle, in terms of specific goods?

• Income method– Calculate minimum income necessary to meet

basic needs; then identify those below that line– Catches ability to meet minimum needs– Permits us to measure the shortfall from the

poverty line

Unit of Analysis

• Individual?

• Family? This is most typical

Common Measures

• Head Count measure– Definition: proportion of the population

defined as poor– U. S., and Mollie Orshansky– Problem: Not consider income shortfall

• Income Gap Ratio– Definition: the percentage shortfall of average

income of the poor from the poverty line– Problem: not catch income distribution below

poverty line– Example: income increases for some poor,

decreases for others just enough to keep IGR constant; H constant, IGR constant, poverty up

Overall Difficulty?

• There are multiple dimensions to poverty

• Hard to catch them all in a single measure

• Sen’s work: illustrates an important part of thinking about the social world

From the General (Poverty) to the Specific (Famine)

• Issues requiring distinction regarding food consumption:– Low level– Decreasing trend– sudden collapse

• Importance of distinguishing trends, movements around trends: examples– Water levels, storm vs. calm– Gross Domestic Product

• Regarding food: may see– Rising trend, production– Increasing size of fluctuations around trend

• Seeming paradox: periodic famine accompanying decreasing starvation

• Point: Does famine affect all groups in society equally?

How to Command Food

• Legal means– Own production– Trade opportunities– Social security mechanisms

• Command over goods depends on society’s characteristics:– Legal– Political– Economic– Social

• And on one’s place in society

Summary

• How useful is it to compare total food to total population in analyzing famine?

• How useful is the term “the poor” as a category of analysis?

• Do market forces have a place in famine relief?– Role of increasing food prices– Where does purchasing power come from?

Hunger Policy

• Grounding: protecting entitlements to food

• Goal: secure– Lives– Livelihoods

• Aid vs. development: a false choice?– Aid: getting food to the starving

• Direct food aid

• Employment subsidies; cash transfers

– Development• Education; capital accumulation; growth

• Social security system; and examples