Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics mainly for his work on famine. In his book Poverty and Famines, and in many other books and papers he claimed that most famines are not caused by sudden declines in food availability due to droughts, floods etc. He claimed that, on the contrary, they happen when there is plenty of food available, but one part of the population suddenly eats a lot more than normal, because of a wartime boom or inflation for instance. As a result there is less food available for the rest of the population, so the poor starve. If this is the cause of a famine, it is formally possible to control the famine by reversing the change in distribution. This can be done by seizing traders' stocks, imposing rationing and giving free food to the poor. If Sen is right and this redistribution is the normal cause of famine, organizations like Oxfam are largely redundant.

His theory is not new: this demand-based approach was put forward by Adam Smith and the English Classical School two hundred years ago, and their remedies for famine were the same as his. The approach proved totally disastrous in practice, notably in the Irish Famine, but also in a string of Indian famines in the last two centuries, where it was found that if there was insufficient food available, rationing, handouts and providing the poor with purchasing power just worsened the situation. It just pushed up prices.

This theory was replaced by an approach which addressed both supply and demand: it said that the first priority was to ensure that there was sufficient food available, and the second to ensure that the poor could get hold of the food, with rationing, handouts, food for work etc. Nobody ever had a "supply only" theory - that it was enough to ensure that sufficient food was available and one could ignore the fact that some people did not have the money buy it, though Sen says it was the standard theory, what he calls the Food Availability Decline doctrine.

Sen revived the discredited Classical approach by attacking the non-existent people who had said that it was enough to see that there was sufficient food available. He also presented a mass of evidence to show that the Bengal Famine of 1943 in particular occurred when there was adequate food available, but a switch in purchasing power meant that some parts of the population were no longer able to buy the food.

Sen's dramatic statement is "In a poor community take the poorest section, say, the bottom 20% of the population and double the income of half that group, keeping the money income of the rest unchanged. In the short run prices of food will now rise sharply, since the lucky half of the poorest group will now fill their part-filled bellies. While this might affect the food consumption of other groups as well, the group that will be pushed towards starvation will be the remaining half of the poorest community which will face higher prices with unchanged money income. Something of this nature happened in the economy of Bengal in 1943." This has been a hugely influential statement.

A little work with a calculator shows that even if it was true, the lucky half would have eaten very little more, only 1.2% to 1.8% of total more.[1]

General average rate for Bengal	17
Sectional average rates:
Rural population	17
Middle classes	13
Industrial working classes	16

Families whose monthly expenditure is Rs 10 or less 14 This would have had no noticeable effect, if, as Sen says, there was plenty of food available.

But it cannot possibly be true. It implies that 10% of the 61 million population moved to the war industries of the cities and doubled their income. This did not happen - wartime rationing means that we have accurate figures on population, in the very documents that Sen cites. It appears to have increased in size by 300,000 to 500,000 from 1939 to 1943. Sen's figures are more than twelve times the true figures.

Nor was there any way in which the extra 1.2% to 1.8% could be taken away from the poorest part of the population. The effect would have been spread over the market as a whole. In Bengal we know that 66% of the population went hungry, not just the poorest 10% as Sen states. Nor is it at all likely that war workers were recruited exclusively from the very poor. Many of them were farmers and manual workers who normally consumed more calories than the industrial workers, according to contemporary consumption surveys, so consumption should have fallen, not risen.

Elsewhere Sen argued that there was no sudden decline in food availability in 1943, and that the war boom caused the famine. There were 100,000 new war workers, who were well paid, and he argues that they and their families ate so much extra food that there was not enough left to go round, and there was a famine. These people were quarter to one half per cent of Bengal's 61 million population. Their extra consumption is supposed to have caused a famine in which 40 million people went hungry, 10 to 15 million people suffered very seriously indeed, and two to four million people died. A few minutes' work with a calculator shows that to achieve this, each of the workers, and their family members, would have had to eat 60 to 100 times as much food as in a normal year, two to three months food every day!

Elsewhere again, Sen extends this argument, saying that the wartime boom meant that the people of Calcutta ate so much rice in 1943 (but not in 1942 or 1944) that rice was moved from the countryside to feed them. As a result there was a major famine in the country areas. Again, a few minutes work with a calculator is enough to show that they would have had to eat more than three times the normal amount of food to create this shortage.

Needless to say, the facts show that they did not eat this much. There are very accurate statistics on consumption because of wartime controls, and these show that the people of Calcutta ate less than usual during the famine year.

Nor is Sen correct in saying that food moved from the country areas into Calcutta. As in previous years, Calcutta got all its grain from outside Bengal. True, there were small imports from the country immediately after harvest, but this never amounted to more than two and a half days' supply for the districts. By the time the famine was in full flow, this and more had been shipped back to the districts. The quantities moved were tiny: the Government had impounded all the boats, the only means of transport to and from country areas, and there were wartime controls on road vehicles. If Sen was right about the cause of the famine, this extra supply shipped to country areas would have stopped the famine there: it did not.

At this stage, a few more minutes' work with a calculator shows that a major boom famine is impossible in this type of economy. (See Bowbrick, 2000)

Sen's statement that 1943 food availability was "at least 11% higher than in 1941 when there was nothing remotely like a famine" was essential for his argument. Several economists have used exactly the same data to show that, on the contrary, food availability was the lowest in at least 15 years, and probably 11% lower than in 1941. The latest analysis, by Dr Goswami (1990) of the Indian Statistical Institute, dissects Sen's analysis in great detail and confirms that Sen was wrong.

Even if his calculations had been correct, they would have been meaningless, because the data he used, crop forecasts, were bad. These had been damned as totally unreliable, being based on wild guesses adjusted by officials for bureaucratic convenience, by contemporary analysts, including Professor Mahalanobis, one of the founding fathers of agricultural statistics. They must be some of the worst statistics ever produced. Giving strong weight to such bad statistics, and little weight to more reliable evidence totally invalidates his results. Even if the figures were correct, however, they would contradict his statements.

The statement that some occupational groups were particularly hard hit is merely stating what everybody has always known, that certain occupational groups are hit particularly seriously in a famine: it had been a commonplace in Bengal since 1873 at least (See for example, Hunter, 1873, Frere, 1884) It is an effect of famine: in no sense can it be construed as an explanation of the famine.

The main thrust of Sen's work is that if the government had had his diagnosis of the cause of the famine, they would have controlled it or prevented it entirely. He says that the main reason that the famine was not recognized and not dealt with properly was "the result largely of erroneous theories of famine causation [held by the Bengal Government], rather than mistakes about facts dealing with food availability" He says that they were obsessed with the view that the famine was caused by major shortages, not by a war boom.

The facts are quite different. The Bengal Government had exactly the same diagnosis of the cause of famine as Sen. They carried out a programme of seizing traders' stocks, rationing to reduce consumption in Calcutta, distribution to the affected areas, and free food for those people who could not buy it. They imported more than enough to feed Calcutta. If the government - and Sen - had been correct, the famine would have stopped.

In fact, their actions had virtually no effect other than to push up prices: the famine raged unabated. The famine was caused by severe shortages, and could only have been tackled by very large imports. The amount they imported for the 55 million country people was only six days' supply - enough for propaganda pictures but not much else.

These many serious discrepancies suggest that either Sen's facts are incorrect, or Sen's theory is incorrect or both. Several economists have compared Sen's facts and figures with those that are in the sources he cites, and have found that in nearly all instances he has misstated the facts.[2] Neither Sen nor anyone else has challenged this conclusion. Sen (1986, 1987) stated that he had made one less misstatement than had been pointed out, accepting the others by default, but Bowbrick (1987) and Goswami (1990) confirmed his error. Bowbrick has shown that it is impossible to have a boom famine or a famine caused by speculation in any such economy. (Bowbrick, 2000a, 2000b).

The effects of applying the wrong theory and the wrong measures to a famine are truly horrific. Any analysis should be based on hard, uncontestable facts and hard theory: Sen's is not.

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