Food Entitlement

Yet another concept entered the general debate on the quest for food security from Amartya Sen’s clinical examination of famines, first in India in 1976 and 1977 (Sen, 1976, 1977), and then in a seminal publication in 1981 (Sen, 1981).45 Sen’s thesis was that in major famines in the past, the problem was not so much lack of food but of poor people’s access to it. The cause, in his view, was a breakdown in what he called their ‘entitlement’. This related to his concept of economic development as a process of expanding people’s ‘capabilities’, or what they are able to do (Sen, 1982). Sen’s view is that the goal not only of economics but of society as a whole should be the enlargement of what he calls ‘positive human freedom’ and the capability to enjoy it (Sen, 1999). He believes that the issue of ‘social choice’ should be of concern not only to economists but also to the public (Dreze and Sen, 1989). His insistence on making larger moral and cultural concerns preconditions for answering economic questions echoes Socrates’ challenge, ‘man, know thyself’, and Plato’s comparison of the human soul to a chariot pulled by the two horses of ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’.