Working Paper
Food, Economics and Entitlements

This paper deals with questions of starvation and hunger from the perspective of food economics. It points to the need for focusing on the ‘acquirement’ of food by the respective households and individuals, and the fact that the overall production or availability of food may be a bad predictor of what the vulnerable groups in the population can actually acquire. 

The ‘entitlement approach’ concentrates instead on the forces that determine the bundles of commodities over which a family or an individual can establish command. A person can be reduced to starvation if some economic change makes it no longer possible for him or her to acquire any commodity bundle with enough food. This can happen either because of a fall in endowment (e.g. alienation of land, or loss of labour power due to ill health), or because of an unfavourable shift in the conditions of exchange (e.g. loss of employment, fall in wages, rise in food prices, drop in the price of goods or services sold by the person, reduction of social security provisions). 

The paper then proceeds to use the entitlement perspective to analyse a number of specific policy issues: famine anticipation and warning; famine relief (particularly the use of employment and payment of cash wages to regenerate lost entitlements); the use of food imports; the role of public distribution (of food and other necessities including health care); and the need for diversification in the production structure (particularly in the context of encountering African famines and hunger). 

This is the first WIDER working paper ever to be released. It was prepared at UNU-WIDER and presented as the fourth Elmhirst Lecture at the triennial meeting of the International Association of Agricultural Economists, in Malaga (Spain), on 26 August 1985.  A shortened version was released as Chapter 2 of The Political Economy of Hunger: Volume 1: Entitlement and Well-being (eds J. Drèze and A. Sen). The fourth Elmhirst Lecture version was published in the proceedings of the conference (Maunder and Renborg 1986) and a shorter version in the Lloyds Bank Review, 160 (Apr. 1986).