A good discussion on the Great Bengal Famine!!!
The End of Hunger?
David Rieff
The New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/article/world/the-end-hunger?page=0,0
Famine: A Short History
By Cormac Ó Gráda
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David Rieff is the author of eight books including A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis.
The earliest recorded famines, according to Cormac Ó Gráda in his brief but masterful book, are mentioned on Egyptian stelae from the third millennium B.C.E. In that time--and to an extent, even today, above the
Leave Gilgamesh out of it. We now know enough about the history of famine for Ó Gráda to state confidently that the common denominator in most of the worst famines on record has been rain--too much of it or too little of it; while in some instances the cause seems to have been volcanic eruptions. The great famine that afflicted most of northern
A century earlier, in 1229, the Kangi famine in
Ó Gráda has a deeper quarrel with Malthus, which is to challenge the father of modern demography's fundamental claim that famine "seems to be the last, most dreadful resource of nature," and that "the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to provide subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race." This may seem to make intuitive sense, and doubtless the survival of the Malthusian paradigm owes much to this impression. The problem is that Malthus was wrong. As Ó Gráda notes with characteristic understatement, "elementary demographic arithmetic argues against famines being as severe a demographic corrective as Malthus and others have suggested." If famines had really been as frequent as Malthus and his inheritors argued, it would have been impossible to sustain populations, let alone for them to grow. He is suitably cautious about how far the historical record before the seventeenth century can be trusted, but still Ó Gráda is willing to put his money on famines having been "less common in the past than claimed by Malthus or Braudel."
This is not to say that Ó Gráda is trying to prettify the long picture, and to underestimate how central, and how convulsive, famine has been to the human experience. Based on his account, it is hard not to conclude that, in terms of proportion of population killed, famine has taken the lives of many more people throughout most of recorded history than war. The two are catastrophically interrelated, of course--as closely linked to humanity's detriment as, in Amartya Sen's seminal insight, democracy is linked to the avoidance of famine, even in periods of failed harvests. But wrong as Malthus may have been--at least so far--about whether population growth must inevitably outstrip the availability of the food needed for human survival, he had sound reasons, in 1798, to treat famine as principally a natural phenomenon linked to weather, rather than as a calamity fundamentally caused by war and ideology--a political calamity. Ó Gráda, with his typical fair-mindedness, goes to some lengths to demonstrate that Malthus may have under-emphasized the latter connection, but he certainly did not deny it.
O Gráda begins to emphasize the centrality of famine's political dimension once his discussion moves away from pre-nineteenthcentury famines to what might be called modern famines. The former, he insists, were mainly linked either to "extraordinary 'natural events'" or to "ecological shocks." In the latter, by contrast, the natural dimension more often than not played a subaltern role. As a result, while it seems doubtful that it was Ó Gráda's intention to defend Malthus, his account of "pre-modern" famines nonetheless seems to offer at least tacit support for some of Malthus's assumptions--as when, in a chapter called "Markets and Famines," Ó Gráda points out that Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (which was published in 1776, twenty-two years before Malthus's Essay on Population) got it wrong when, writing of the terrible famine in Bengal and Bihar in 1770, he attributed the cause principally to mistakes made by the East India Company. In reality the root cause was drought.
Famine is by no means Ó Gráda's only interest. Much of his writing has been on Irish economic history, including, in great depth, its twentieth-century history, not least as the author of the Oxford New Economic History of Ireland. His great book on the so-called potato famine--Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory--is a model of care and skepticism about sentimentalizing the past or indulging in nationalist cant, even as it is a harrowing account of an event that, as Ó Gráda puts it, "was much more murderous, relatively speaking, than most historical and most modern famines." In his conclusion to that book, Ó Gráda refers dismissively to "a continued desire in Ireland 'to remember things we never knew' and an eagerness in some quarters further afield, particularly in the United States, to invoke the famine as a means of stoking up old resentments." That said, the memory of the famine--Ó Gráda is absolutely right to emphasize that element in Black '47--played an important role in the shaping of Irish nationalism, just as the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 did in defining, if only dialectically, Indian nationalism. (The historian Jill Bender has even argued that there is a link between the earlier Indian famine of 1873–1874 and the development of nineteenth-century Irish parliamentary nationalism.)
Given the stance he took in this earlier book, it is hardly surprising that when Ó Gráda turns to the ideological and political dimensions of the cause of the famines, he is unwilling to endorse a reductive account that assigns the complete responsibility for nineteenthcentury famines to imperial policy. This view has its defenders, and has been expressed in subtle scholarly work by the geographer Michael Watts in his study of northern
This is progressive tripe, and woefully consistent with
The reality is that if there was a malign side to British imperial famine policy--and, though you wouldn't know it from Niall Ferguson and Adam Roberts and others, God knows there was!--it was a Malthusian malignity: the view that, as Malthus himself wrote, "gigantic inevitable famine ... with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world." Malthusianism provided a pseudo-scientific pretext--the great famine specialist Alex de Waal has called it "one of the most monstrous intellectual aberrations of all time"--for the British authorities to fail to aid the poor. But it was most emphatically not a charter to foment famine, as
What is true is that Malthusianism exerted a tremendous and pernicious influence on Victorian thinking in terms of its moral complacency about the suffering of the poor and of its mistaken analysis of why famines actually occur. In 1805, the East India Company appointed Malthus professor of political economy at the college that it maintained in Haileybury. His views, based less on his actual writings and more on what de Waal calls the "oral tradition" of Malthusianism, persisted until at least the early 1880s. Yet there was no conspiracy and no master plan, and by the 1870s British imperial policy was swinging strongly toward what de Waal, who is hardly known for his admiration for imperialism, calls in Famine Crimes--an essential book--"a commitment to employing the destitute and hungry." This changed analysis of the nature of famine and the responsibilities of government led first to the appointment of a Famine Commission and then to the Famine Codes of imperial
De Waal actually goes further, arguing that "ceding an anti-famine political contract was the price paid by
O Gráda hardly holds European domination blameless. His general view seems to be that, to the extent we are in a position to know, pre-nineteenth-century famines were principally the result of natural phenomena, but that subsequently, even though natural factors were almost always part of the explanation, the most important causes have been policy failures, wars, or what he calls "the violence of governments." Ó Gráda looks at the three major famines that took place, and one that was averted, in Bengal since the mid-eighteenth century, and concludes (tentatively, because of the deficits in the data) that 1769–1770, which allegedly killed one third of the affected population, was the result of drought, and that 1873–1874 was prevented because of sound public policy, and that 1896–1897 took place despite it, and that the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 was due mainly to World War II, and partly to policy failure, and only slightly to a food shortfall.
The account in Ó Gráda's book of the link between colonialism and famine is admirably nuanced. "On balance," he writes, "the initial impact of colonial conquest and 'pacification' was almost certainly to increase famine mortality." Some of the examples he cites are
That is the case for the anti-imperialist prosecution. In mitigation, Ó Gráda insists that colonialism's subsequent impact was less clear. "In the longer run," he writes, "although colonial rule may have eliminated or weakened traditional coping mechanisms, it meant better communications, integrated markets, and more effective public action, which together probably reduced famine mortality." And Ó Gráda points out that while "colonial exactions during World War I produced famine in several parts of
Alex de Waal has significantly observed that, contrary to our present view, which firmly associates famine with sub-Saharan
As Ó Gráda generously insists, this was due almost single-handedly to the work of Amartya Sen, who, as he puts it, "refocused" famine studies, reorienting it "from a Malthusian toward a distributionist perspective." Sen emphasized that a famine caused by a failure, or even just a serious shortfall, in the harvest would rapidly engender a devaluation of all non-food possessions--what famine specialists call "entitlements," so that the poorest people basically lose the purchasing power they need to ensure their own survival. Looking at the data without Malthusian prejudice, Sen demonstrated that it was simply not the case that food shortfalls were necessarily greater in periods of famine than they were in times when there was no threat of famine--and that, conversely, there were many periods, not only in Bengal but globally, in which the availability of food had actually declined and no famine had ensued.
To state it simply, if a bit reductively: Sen's work put an end, once and for all, to the false belief, derived from Malthus, that famines are primarily the result of food shortages and overpopulation. This may seem counter-intuitive, since overpopulation can be a factor and food shortfalls are a common proximate cause of famines. But whatever modifications Sen has made to his analysis in the three decades since he published his magisterial work Poverty and Famines, his fundamental idea that the principle cause of famine is not food availability within a given area but access to food--that is, whether people have the means of getting enough to eat, is now beyond question. Sen's other fundamental notion, developed in these pages, that democracy, or civil and political rights and press freedom, offer practical protection from famine, is somewhat more intuitive, and, in contrast to his theory of entitlements--a person's "ability to command enough food," as Sen put it--seems in need of complication. This is not because it is wrong, but because, as de Waal has pointed out, other preconditions such as administrative capacity have to exist for even democratic governments in poor countries to combat famine. As the example of
It is now absolutely clear that while many factors contributed to the Great Bengal Famine, an overall absence of food grains was not one of them. For Sen, the famine was principally the result of bureaucratic bungling by the British authorities and the consequent market failure. Ó Gráda demurs slightly, arguing that it was "largely due to the failure of the British authorities, for war-strategic reasons, to make good a genuine food deficit." Mars, he says, played a greater role than Malthus. Ó Gráda is unsparing, and his understatement is far more damning than the reckless speculations of Mike Davis, who is piously convinced that the British intentionally caused the deaths by starvation of millions of Bengalis. ("Wartime priorities," Ó Gráda writes, "deprived the Bengali poor of the food they so badly needed, disrupted food markets [to some extent], inhibited free speech, and delayed the public proclamation of famine conditions. The conclusion seems inescapable: the two million and more who perished in
But if, in reality, the Great Bengal Famine was the last major unintended famine in Asia, all too many twentieth-century famines have been, as Ó Gráda writes, "deliberately engineered to kill." Had Davis really been looking for 'holocausts', he need have looked no further than the famine created by Lenin's government in 1920, by Stalin's in 1932, and by Mao's in 1959. Those catastrophes--ideologically inconvenient to the radical anti-imperialist left--really do fit his template of deliberately engineered acts of mass murder. It is these events, and their successors (above all in two other soi-disant Marxist regimes,
Ó Gráda does not mince his words, and they are worth quoting at length. "It is a great irony," he writes,
that the most deadly famines of the last century--including the worst ever in terms of sheer numbers--occurred under regimes committed, at least on paper, to the eradication of poverty. The history of the
While the degree to which the famine of 1920–1922 was actually orchestrated by Lenin's government may be impossible to establish, what Ó Gráda calls military "requisitions" for the revolutionary war effort--a policy that does not seem to have been very different from what the British did in
About the famine of 1959 in
Ó Gráda is equally cautious in offering a view as to whether the famines in
In the words of the late François Jean, a leading figure in Doctors Without Borders and a man who knew the Ethiopian situation intimately, famine came to be used by the government in
Still, Ó Gráda is absolutely correct in saying that, globally speaking, "the scope ... to produce cataclysmic famine even in peacetime" is much reduced compared with what it has been in the past. In this, he explicitly endorses de Waal's argument that famine is now conquerable, and Sen's view that if the political will exists, then famines are not hard to prevent. De Waal actually puts the claim even more strongly in Famine Crimes, arguing that "for more than a century there has been no excuse for famine." And while he is unwilling (or perhaps temperamentally averse) to write so categorically, Ó Gráda's analysis does seem to concur. As he notes, even in the case of
This African exception is not difficult to explain. "Only in sub-Saharan
This does not mean that the situation is hopeless, even in the world's most illfavored countries, such as
The final chapter of Ó Gráda's book is called "An End to Famine?" It is a question, not an assertion. He is right to put it that way. What is far less certain is whether his claim that "as much as anything else, the slow, onward march of accountable government will rid the world's last vulnerable regions of the scourge of famine," and, more broadly, that "the prospect of a famine-free world hinges on improved governance and peace," is not overly sanguine. Ó Gráda knows that while famine may now be preventable, there is no good reason to believe the same of war--and war between and within nations is for him what may usher in a new age of famine.
But war is not the only threat. Climate change, which by most projections will disproportionately damage rural
No one looking for sensible rather than sentimental or ideological reasons to believe in the possibility of human progress need look any further than the fact that, for the first time in human history, it is possible to imagine the end of famine. When Ó Gráda writes that "at present, only the poorest regions of Africa remain at risk, and prolonged famine anywhere is conceivable only in contexts of endemic warfare or blockade," he is saying something that could never have been said before. To be sure, there are also many other things to say, other questions to ask--most notably why, if we are now so competent at dealing with famine, we are so incompetent at dealing with chronic malnutrition, which is getting no better, and in some cases is actually getting worse, even in democratic countries such as India that seem to have banished famine. The other three horsemen of the apocalypse will likely always be with us. But the possibility that we have seen the fourth horseman off for good is a reason for the most profound thankfulness.
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