Development as Freedom (30 page)

In this context, it is important to bear in mind the fact that by the 1840s, when the Irish famine occurred, an extensive system of poverty relief was fairly well established in Britain, as far as Britain itself was concerned. England too had its share of the poor, and even the life of the employed English worker was far from prosperous (indeed, the year 1845, when the sequence of Irish famines began, was also the year in which Friedrich Engels’s classic indictment of the poverty and economic misery of English workers,
The Conditions of the Working Class in England
, was published). But there was still some political commitment to prevent open starvation within England. A similar commitment did not apply to the empire—not even to Ireland. Even the Poor Laws gave the English destitute substantially more rights than the Irish destitute got from the more anemic Poor Laws that were instituted for Ireland.

Indeed, as Joel Mokyr has noted, “Ireland was considered by Britain as an alien and even hostile nation.”
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This estrangement
affected many aspects of Irish-British relations. For one thing, as Mokyr notes, it discouraged British capital investment in Ireland. But most relevantly in the present context, there was a relative indifference to famines and suffering in Ireland and less determination in London to prevent Irish destitution and starvation. Richard Ned Lebow has argued that while poverty in Britain was typically attributed to economic change and fluctuations, poverty in Ireland was viewed as being caused by laziness, indifference and ineptitude, so that “Britain’s mission” was seen not as one “to alleviate Irish distress but to civilize her people and to lead them to feel and act like human beings.”
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This may be a somewhat exaggerated view, but it is hard to think that famines like those in Ireland in the 1840s would have been at all allowed to occur in Britain.

In looking behind the social and cultural influences that shape public policy and that in this case allowed the famines to occur, it is important to appreciate the sense of dissociation and superiority that characterized the British attitude toward the Irish. The cultural roots of the Irish famines extend as far back as Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene
(published in 1590), and perhaps even earlier. The tendency to blame the victims, plentiful in
The Faerie Queene
itself, survived through the famines of the 1840s, and the Irish taste for potatoes was added to the list of the calamities that the natives had, in the English view, brought on themselves.

The conviction of cultural superiority merges well with the asymmetry of political power.
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Winston Churchill’s famous remark that the Bengal famine of 1943, which was the last famine in British India (and also the last famine in India altogether), was caused by the tendency of the natives to breed “like rabbits” belongs to this general tradition of blaming the colonial subject; it nicely supplemented Churchill’s other belief that Indians were “the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans.”
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One cannot but sympathize with Winston Churchill’s double jeopardy confronted by beastly Germans wanting to topple his government and beastly Indians requesting good governance.

Charles Edward Trevelyan, the head of the Treasury during the Irish famines, who saw not much wrong with British economic policy in Ireland (of which he was in charge), pointed to Irish habits as part of the explanation of the famines. Chief among the habitual failures
was the tendency of the Irish poor to eat only potatoes, which made them dependent on one crop. Indeed, Trevelyan’s view of the causation of the Irish famines permitted him to link them with his analysis of Irish cooking: “There is scarcely a woman of the peasant class in the West of Ireland whose culinary art exceeds the boiling of a potato.”
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The remark is of interest not just because it is rather rare for an Englishman to find a suitable occasion for making international criticism of culinary art. Rather, the pointing of an accusing finger at the meagerness of the diet of the Irish poor well illustrates the tendency to blame the victim. The victims, in this view, had helped themselves to a disaster, despite the best efforts of the administration in London to prevent it.

Cultural alienation has to be added to the lack of political incentives (discussed in
chapter 6
) in explaining British nonaction during the Irish famines. Famines are, in fact, so easy to prevent that it is amazing that they are allowed to occur at all.
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The sense of distance between the ruler and the ruled—between “us” and “them”—is a crucial feature of famines. That distance is as severe in the contemporary famines in Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan as it was in Ireland and India under foreign domination in the last century.

I return now to the economics of famine prevention. In preventing famines, it helps to have a more opulent and growing economy. Economic expansion typically reduces the need for entitlement protection, and also enhances the resources available for providing that protection. This is a lesson of obvious importance for sub-Saharan Africa, where the lack of overall economic growth has been a major underlying source of deprivation. The proneness to famines is much greater when the population is generally impoverished and when public funds are hard to secure.

Attention has to be paid to the need for incentives to generate the growth of outputs and incomes—including, inter alia, the expansion of food output. This calls for devising sensible price incentives, but also for measures to encourage and enhance technical change, skill formation and productivity—both in agriculture and in other fields.
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While growth of food output is important, the main issue concerns
overall economic growth, since food is purchasable in the world market. A country can purchase food from abroad if it has the means to do this (based, say, on industrial production). If, for example, we compare food production per head in 1993–1995 with that in 1979–1981 in different countries in Asia and Africa, we find a
decline
of 1.7 percent in South Korea, 12.4 percent in Japan, 33.5 percent in Botswana and 58.0 percent in Singapore. We do not, however, observe any growing hunger in these economies, since they also experienced fast expansion of real income per head through other means (such as industries or mining), and they happen to be richer anyway. The sharing of the increased income made the citizens of these countries more able to secure food than before, despite the falling food output. In contrast, even though there was little or no decline in food production per head in economies such as Sudan (7.7 percent
increase)
, or Burkina Faso (29.4 percent
increase)
, those economies experienced considerable unfolding of hunger because of their general poverty and the vulnerable economic entitlements of many substantial groups. It is essential to focus on the actual processes through which a person or a family establishes command over food.

It is often pointed out—rightly—that food output per head has been falling in sub-Saharan Africa until recently. This is indeed so and is obviously a matter of concern, and it has implications for many aspects of public policy, varying from agricultural research to population control. But, as was noted earlier, the same fact of falling food output per head applies to many countries in other regions of the world as well.
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These countries did not experience famines both (1) because they achieved relatively high growth rates in other areas of production, and (2) because the dependence on food output as a source of income is much less in these countries than in the typical sub-Saharan African economy.

The tendency to think of growing more food as the only way of solving a food problem is strong and tempting, and often it does have some rationale. But the picture is more complex than that, related to alternative economic opportunities and the possibilities of international trade. As far as lack of growth is concerned, the major feature of sub-Saharan Africa’s problems is not the particular lack of growth in food output as such, but the
general
lack of economic growth altogether
(of which the problem of food output is only one part). The need for a more diversified production structure is very strong in sub-Saharan Africa, given the climatic uncertainties, on the one hand, and the possibility of expanding in other fields of productive activity, on the other. The often-advocated strategy of concentrating exclusively on the expansion of agriculture—and specifically food crops—is like putting all the eggs in the same basket, and the perils of such a policy can be great indeed.

It is, of course, unlikely that the dependence of sub-Saharan Africa on food production as a source of income can be dramatically reduced in the short run. But some diversification can be attempted straightaway, and even the reduction of overdependence on a few crops can enhance security of incomes. In the long run, for sub-Saharan Africa to join in the process of economic expansion that has taken place in much of the rest of the world, sources of income and growth outside food production and even outside agriculture would have to be more vigorosly sought and used.

Even when the opportunities of international trade are absent, how the total food supply is shared between different groups within the country can be crucially important. Famines can be prevented by re-creating lost incomes of the potential victims (for example, through the temporary creation of wage employment in specially devised public projects), giving them the ability to compete for food in the market, making the available supply more equally shared. In most situations in which famines have occurred, a more equal sharing of food would have prevented starvation (though expanding the food supply would obviously have made things easier). Famine prevention through employment creation, with or without expanding the total food availability, has been well used in many countries, including India, Botswana and Zimbabwe.
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The employment route also happens to encourage the processes of trade and commerce, and does not disrupt economic, social and family lives. The people helped can mostly stay on in their own homes, close to their economic activities (like farming), so that these economic operations are not disrupted. The family life too can
continue in a normal way, rather than people being herded into emergency camps. There is also more social continuity, and, furthermore, less danger of the spread of infectious diseases, which tend to break out in the overcrowded camps. In general, the approach of relief through employment also allows the potential famine victims to be treated as active agents, rather than as passive recipients of governmental handouts.
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Another point to note here (in line with the overall approach of this book) is the combined uses of different social institutions in this process of famine prevention. Public policy here takes the form of drawing on very different institutional arrangements:

The integration of the respective roles of different social institutions—involving the market as well as nonmarket organizations—is very important for an adequately broad approach to the prevention of famines, as it is, in fact, for economic development in general.

Earlier on in this book I referred to the role of democracy in preventing famines. The argument related particularly to the political incentives generated by elections, multiparty politics and investigative journalism. It is certainly true that there has never been a famine in a functioning multiparty democracy.

Is this observed historical association a causal one, or simply an accidental occurrence? The possibility that the connection between democratic political rights and the absence of famines is a “bogus correlation” may seem plausible enough when one considers the fact that the democratic countries are typically also rather rich and thus, perhaps, immune from famines for other reasons. But the absence of famines holds even for those democratic countries that happen to be very poor, such as India, Botswana or Zimbabwe.

Indeed, the democratic poor countries sometimes have had much larger declines in the production and supply of food, and also sharper
collapse of the purchasing power of substantial sections of the population, than some nondemocratic countries. But while the dictatorial countries had major famines, the democratic ones managed to avert famines altogether despite the worse food situation. For example, Botswana had a fall in food production of 17 percent and Zimbabwe one of 38 percent between 1979–1981 and 1983–1984, in the same period in which the food production decline amounted to a relatively modest 11 or 12 percent in Sudan and Ethiopia. But while Sudan and Ethiopia, with comparatively smaller declines in food output, had massive famines, Botswana and Zimbabwe had none, and this was largely due to timely and extensive famine prevention policies by these latter countries.
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Had the governments in Botswana and Zimbabwe failed to undertake timely action, they would have been under severe criticism and pressure from the opposition and would have gotten plenty of flak from newspapers. In contrast, the Ethiopian and Sudanese governments did not have to reckon with those prospects, and the political incentives provided by democratic institutions were thoroughly absent in those countries. Famines in Sudan and Ethiopia—and in many other countries in sub-Saharan Africa—were fed by the political immunity enjoyed by governmental leaders in authoritarian countries. This would seem to apply to the present situation in North Korea as well.

Indeed, famines are very easy to prevent through regenerating the lost purchasing power of hard-hit groups, and this can be done through various programs, including—as was just discussed—the creation of emergency employment in short-term public projects. Postindependence India has had, on different occasions, very large declines in food production and availability, and also quite gigantic destruction of the economic solvency of large groups of people, and still famines have been prevented through giving the potential famine victims “entitlement” to food, through wage income in employment-oriented projects and other means. It is obvious that getting more food into the famine-stricken region helps to alleviate the famine if the potential famine victims have the economic power to buy the food, for which too creating income for those without any (or with very little) is quite crucial. But even in the absence of any food import into the region, the creation of income for the destitute people itself
helps to alleviate hunger through a better sharing of the available food.
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