Volume 29, Number 12 · July 15, 1982
Why People Go Hungry
By Kenneth J. Arrow
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
by Amartya Sen
Oxford University Press, 257 pp., $17.95
The title of Amartya Sen's book is more provocative than it may at first seem. Hunger is associated with poverty in that people who are not poor are not hungry; and famine is simply the extreme of hunger. Yet most people are convinced that the basic cause of a famine is not poverty but a failure of food supply relative to the population. A localized famine is commonly thought of as resulting from a local failure of crops that is not mitigated by importing food, as happened in the Sahel region of Africa in the late 1960s. Countries where hunger is widespread are frequently blamed, moreover, for allowing excessive population growth. The simple Malthusian ratio of food supply to population is further simplified so that the cause of misery is often seen as a matter of overpopulation alone; and we even hear advocates of 'lifeboat ethics,' by which countries should be abandoned to their fates.[1]
Review, 2956 words
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