Poverty and Famines Social World I



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Poverty and Famines

  • Social World I


Some Web Sites

  • USDA: Food and Nutrition Service; www.usda.gov/fcs/

  • HungerWeb: www.brown.edu/Departments/World_Hunger_Program

  • Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research: www.cgiar.org/



Who’s Amartya Sen?

  • Economist, Philosopher, Scholar

  • Origin; career

  • Nobel Prize, Economics



Why Read This Book?

  • Still useful?

  • Research as process: new findings, conclusions, techniques modified

  • Recent events, and confirmation of analysis



Further: Poverty, Famine as

  • A concrete way to begin to talk about the social world

  • Illustrates



Specifically: Approach Involves

  • Definition

  • Description

  • Measurement

  • Analysis

  • Public policy [prescription]



Some Data

  • Numbers

  • Location: Hunger belt?

  • Who are the hungry?



Hunger in the U. S.

  • Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 1995

  • About 4% of households experienced reduced food intake and hunger as result of financial constraints

  • About 0.8% of households experienced severe hunger



Famine vs. Hunger

  • Distinction

    • Hunger: sustained nutritional deprivation
    • Famine: acute deprivation, sharp increase in mortality
  • Famine:

    • As a social problem
    • Some history


  • Famine deaths: hunger? Or disease?

  • Famine and children

  • “Missing women” issue



Famine and the Food Supply: Malthus vs. Sen

  • Population vs. food supply: how helpful is this comparison?

    • Malthus, and Essay on Population: the “race”
    • Sen, and famine, starvation as involving the relationship of people to food: the “entitlement approach”


Thinking About Famine

  • Malthus: difficulties?

    • Food increasing faster than population: no famine?
    • Population increasing faster than food: famine?


Sen, and the Entitlement Approach

  • Famine as a collapse of claims to food

  • Key: how do we get claims to food?

    • Production
    • Trade
    • One’s own labor
    • Inheritance or transfer


Exchange Entitlement

  • Definition: The set of all bundles of commodities we can acquire for what we own (see p. 3)

  • What affects exchange entitlement: that is, what affects our ability to exert command over food?

    • Can we find employment?


    • Can we sell assets?
    • What can we produce, sell?
    • What are our claims to social security?
    • What are our tax liabilities?
    • How does the price of what we have to sell compare with the price of what we buy (the price of food)?


Examples (from Sen)

  • Peasant vs. landless laborer: Who owns the product? What happens when typhoon destroys half the crop?

  • “boom famine”

  • Increasing price of food

  • China; and decreased starvation, though not large food production increases



Conclude: Useful to Focus On:

  • Distribution issues? Clarify:

    • Physical distribution? Possibly
    • Income distribution? Yes: this distributes claims to food
  • How food supply works through entitlement relationships

  • How claims to food are established



  • Paraphrasing from page 8: not focus so much on what is as on who can command what . . .



Is Food Supply Irrelevant?

  • More helpful to trace effects of changes in food supply through changes in entitlements

  • Why? May influence

    • understanding of why we see famine
    • policy response
  • Example: typhoon destroys half of rice crop: effects?



  • Point: impact of natural disaster depends on how society is organized, especially to care for its economically vulnerable groups



Poverty

  • How does Sen proceed?

    • Definition
    • Description
    • Measurement, (aggregation)
    • Analysis (underlying analytical concepts)
    • Public policy


Definition

  • What’s poverty, exactly?

  • Why does it matter? Suggests ways to look for

    • Causes
    • Approaches to relief of the poor


Approaches to Definition

  • Absolute deprivation: minimum subsistence definition

    • A biological approach
      • Survival
      • Ability to work effectively
    • Problems: translating nutritional requirements into food requirements; actually drawing the nutritional line


  • Relative deprivation: inequality definition

    • Rich vs. poor
    • Problems
      • Poverty never goes away
      • Income transferred from top to middle: inequality reduced, but not poverty
      • Decrease in overall income: no change in inequality, poverty increases


Aggregation

  • We want an indicator of poverty

  • Problem: how to do this, exactly?



Identifying the Poor

  • Direct method (a consumption-based definition)

    • Poor if consumption bundle leaves some basic needs unfulfilled
    • Problem: What’s the minimum acceptable bundle, in terms of specific goods?


  • Income method

    • Calculate minimum income necessary to meet basic needs; then identify those below that line
    • Catches ability to meet minimum needs
    • Permits us to measure the shortfall from the poverty line


Unit of Analysis

  • Individual?

  • Family? This is most typical



Common Measures

  • Head Count measure

    • Definition: proportion of the population defined as poor
    • U. S., and Mollie Orshansky
    • Problem: Not consider income shortfall


  • Income Gap Ratio

    • Definition: the percentage shortfall of average income of the poor from the poverty line
    • Problem: not catch income distribution below poverty line
    • Example: income increases for some poor, decreases for others just enough to keep IGR constant; H constant, IGR constant, poverty up


Overall Difficulty?

  • There are multiple dimensions to poverty

  • Hard to catch them all in a single measure

  • Sen’s work: illustrates an important part of thinking about the social world



From the General (Poverty) to the Specific (Famine)

  • Issues requiring distinction regarding food consumption:

    • Low level
    • Decreasing trend
    • sudden collapse


  • Importance of distinguishing trends, movements around trends: examples

    • Water levels, storm vs. calm
    • Gross Domestic Product
  • Regarding food: may see

    • Rising trend, production
    • Increasing size of fluctuations around trend


  • Seeming paradox: periodic famine accompanying decreasing starvation

  • Point: Does famine affect all groups in society equally?



How to Command Food

  • Legal means

    • Own production
    • Trade opportunities
    • Social security mechanisms


  • Command over goods depends on society’s characteristics:

    • Legal
    • Political
    • Economic
    • Social
  • And on one’s place in society



Summary

  • How useful is it to compare total food to total population in analyzing famine?

  • How useful is the term “the poor” as a category of analysis?



  • Do market forces have a place in famine relief?

    • Role of increasing food prices
    • Where does purchasing power come from?


Hunger Policy

  • Grounding: protecting entitlements to food

  • Goal: secure

    • Lives
    • Livelihoods


  • Aid vs. development: a false choice?

    • Aid: getting food to the starving
      • Direct food aid
      • Employment subsidies; cash transfers
    • Development
      • Education; capital accumulation; growth
      • Social security system; and examples


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