PUBLIC ACTION TO REMEDY HUNGER

By Amartya Sen

Summary

Public Action to Remedy Hunger reprints Amartya Sen’s 1990 Arturo Tanco Memorial Lecture, reissued by the Forum of Free Enterprise in November 1998 to mark his Nobel Prize. In the rendered pages, Sen distinguishes two faces of hunger — transient but violent famines and the more persistent, less spectacular phenomenon of endemic undernourishment — and argues that both yield to systematic public action, including legislation, an open press, democratic accountability, and the active engagement of markets, civil society, and the state working in concert. He rejects the fatalism that has long dampened preventive effort, illustrating it through James Mill’s gloomy 1816 letter to David Ricardo, and insists that the ‘inflamed minds of the lower orders’ have historically been closer to the truth than the resigned philosophers.

On endemic deprivation, Sen develops a now-familiar comparative argument: countries and regions that have invested in basic health care, female education, and public provisioning — Kerala, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica, and pre-1979 China — outperform much richer ‘unaimed opulence’ economies such as Brazil and Oman in life expectancy and child mortality. Because health and education are labour-intensive, they are also relatively cheap in poor countries, so the pessimism about affordability is overstated. He then turns to famines as entitlement failures rather than mere food-availability collapses, drawing on the Bengal famine of 1943, the Wollo famine in Ethiopia (1973), and the Bangladesh famine of 1974 to show how famines ‘survive by divide and rule’, and how modest income-creating public works — re-establishing entitlements for affected occupation groups — can avert mass starvation at very small fiscal cost. The rendered chunk closes with a discussion of food production, diversification, and the special predicament of sub-Saharan Africa, where the underlying problem is general economic stagnation, not food output alone.

Key points

• Hunger has two distinct faces — episodic famines and chronic endemic undernourishment — that demand different strategic responses but are both tractable through public action.

• Pessimism about hunger is empirically unfounded; Sen traces it to a long intellectual lineage (Mill and Ricardo in 1816) and treats it as the chief obstacle to remedial effort.

• Public action is broader than state action: it includes a free press, democratic rights, popular vigilance, and the cooperation of markets and civil society rather than the state as ‘lone ranger’.

• Kerala, Sri Lanka, China before 1979, Costa Rica, Chile, and Jamaica show that poor economies can achieve rich-country mortality and life-expectancy outcomes through public provisioning of health and basic education, especially female literacy.

• Labour-intensive social services are cheaper in poor countries because wages are low, so the affordability objection against publicly funded health and education is weaker than commonly assumed.

• Famines are entitlement failures, not necessarily failures of food availability — Bengal 1943, Wollo 1973, and Bangladesh 1974 all featured adequate or near-peak food supplies but collapsed purchasing power among specific occupation groups.

• Famine prevention is fiscally cheap: even where potential victims constitute 10 per cent of the population, restoring their income may require only about 3 per cent of GNP, so timely public employment schemes can avert starvation at modest cost.

• For sub-Saharan Africa the diagnosis is overall economic stagnation rather than food-output decline alone; diversification and broader sources of income, not just expansion of food crops, are essential.

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