DEVELOPMENT: Famine Shaped Work of Nobel Economics Laureate

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 14 1998 (IPS) - Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics, is haunted by the memories of the famine which hit India’s Bengal region in 1943 where he lived as a child.

“As a nine-and-a-half-year-old boy, you suddenly find emaciated people arising from nowhere and dying in thousands,” Sen reminisced Wednesday learning of his selection by the Nobel Committee in Sweden. “It’s a very shaking experience … It made me think about the politics of human society.”

Over the years the Dhaka-born Sen, now Master of Trinity College at Britain’s Cambridge University, studied the 1943 crisis and other major famines and how limited – and how easy to prevent – are even the worst famines.

In his pioneering research on famine and welfare economics, Sen ascertained that most of the major world famines affect only 4 to 5 percent of any given society – and that none has occurred in a democratic society with a free press.

“Famines are easy to prevent, but often governments don’t have an incentive to prevent them,” Sen told reporters here Wednesday. “Their lives are going on extremely unaffected, while people are dying.”

That picture, he added, changes in societies with elections, effective opposition and a free press, because “a democratic government immediately has incentive not to create a famine” in its fear of losing power.

With the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Economics – which carries with it an approximately 930,000-dollar award – Sen broke a trend among recent awardees by focusing on human development and issues of poverty.

Sen’s achievement was strongly praised at the United Nations, where the economist has contributed to several editions of the annual U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) publication, ‘The Human Development Report’, which ranks nations on their achievements in health, education and living standards as well as on economic growth.

“The concept of human development is deeply rooted in Professor Sen’s work,” said UNDP Administrator James Gustave Speth in congratulating the new Nobel winner. “It goes beyond looking at economic growth as the sole indicator of a nation’s progress and looks also at the expansion of peoples’ choices and their capacity to live long, healthy, knowledgeable and satisfying lives.”

The prize, Sen argued, demonstrated that “economics also is concerned with the poor and the downtrodden of society”.

Much of Sen’s work has focused on the poorest groups, in an attempt to find out why some sectors of a population suffer from famine and poverty even as others thrive.

The Bengali famine of 1943, for example, came at a time of economic growth for Bengal at a whole but the growth also spurred inflation, making it difficult for some sectors of the society to afford food. That process in turn led many to stop purchasing “luxury” food items like fish, causing a drop in the price of fish which led many fisherfolk to fall into poverty and famine as well, he said.

From such studies, Sen concluded that many types of government – including dictatorships and colonial rule – may allow famines to progress because they do not feel the effects.

In some cases – such as China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ from 1958 to 1962, the lack of information caused by fear of dissent and the absence of a free press worsen problems by presenting leaders with overly optimistic data about food production – a factor which helped lead to some 30 million deaths from famine in China.

Sen is the ninth Nobel prizewinner in economics to be associated with the United Nations, but the first to hail from South Asia and one of only a handful associated with development economics.

“At a time when many economists focused on purely macro- economic solutions, Professor Sen concentrated international attention on the strong relationship between the welfare of the poor and the fortunes of the world economy,” Speth said.