Framing and Famine

Why “we need to grow more food” is an incomplete answer

1) Famines are in regions with food surpluses sit in storage

2) World agriculture produces enough calories to feed ∼10 billion people

State Food Availability Decline theory and Entitlement Theory

FAD theory: 

• Is economic and historical theory 

• that famines and acute food shortages are caused by a total drop in mass food production or supply.

Entitlement theory:

• set of bundles of goods you can legally command, given what you own and the terms on which you can exchange it.

Bengal 1943: What happened to food availability?

Food availability per head was higher than in several non-famine years.

Bengal 1943: What happened to Prices and Wages?

• Rice prices roughly quadrupled.

• Wages for rural labor did not.

Bengal 1943: Why is this case decisive?

• Wartime inflation

• urban and military procurement bidding up the price of rice

• panic buying, hoarding

• provincial government that suppressed news and blocked relief. 

Name 4 routes by which an entitlement can collapse

• 1) You lose your job 

• 2) Your wage buys less 

• 3) Your asset loses value 

• 4) Your own crop fails.

How many are about a shortage of food?

4) Your own crop fails

How can a pastoralist starve in drought without owning less than before.

• Exchange Rate:

• between what they own & what they eat has moved

What did Ireland and China have in common?

• Had famines 

• Be fault of political and economic decision policy failures

• continued food & resource extraction/mismanagement 

• massive loss of life

Meng, Qian & Yared find famine mortality highest where food production per head had been highest.

Why is that devastating for FAD?

FAD cannot generate that prediction; it gets the sign backwards.

State Sen’s claim about democracy and famine.

“No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”

Give mechanism to Sen’s claim: Democracy and Famine

• driven by political accountability, free press, and institutional incentives

• than how much food country produces 

Give Objection to Sen’s claim: Democracy and Famine

Irish potato famine.

How can government respond to famine just beginning. 

• Early warning. FEWS NET and IPC watch prices, wages, and terms of trade

• (entitlement variables), not just harvests

• Keeping markets and roads open. Most famine deaths now trace to access being blocked, not to food not existing.