ABSTRACT
This is a text of the first Annual Lecture of the Development Studies Association. It investigates a variety of issues that arise in famine analysis, covering identification, causation and prevention. The rejection of the food availability approach is combined with exploration of the ‘entitlement approach’ presented by the author in an earlier contribution in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 1 (1977). Four recent famines as well as some famous historical ones are examined in the light of the entitlement approach. Aside from throwing light on the causes and cures of famines, the entitlement approach also permits us to distinguish between various types of famines all of which share the feature of a common predicament of a mass of people but which do not share the same causal mechanism, nor invite the same response. Famine analysis, it is shown, requires more structure than the traditional approaches are able to provide.
