ABSTRACT
In his influential book Poverty and Famines (1981), Amartya Sen radically changed ideas on the causation of starvation and famines. Conventional wisdom until then had suggested that famines were variously caused when food availability declined on account of dramatic shifts in climatic conditions, mismanagement of natural resources and overpopulation. Placing such approaches under the category of ‘Food Availability Decline’ (FAD), Sen launched a forceful refutation of the FAD thesis, observing that starvation and famines occur even when there is an abundance of food available in a country or a region. Based on a study of famines in Africa and South Asia, he argued that the main causation of famine was not food supply failure, but rather demand failure or ‘entitlement collapse’. In terms of the Kalahandi case, it is particularly important to examine whether starvation deaths are the result of insufficient food production or lack of individual freedoms; hence this chapter starts with a brief overview of Sen’s entitlement and capability approaches which provide the foundation for a focus on the role of democracy and public action in combating starvation and famine.
