REPORTS AND COMMENTS

Famine Prevention*

JEAN DREZE

I should like to begin by sharing with you a few reflections based on my experience in the drought-prone areas of India in the last few years. If I start with India, it is not because I believe that India has all the answers to the problem of famine preven- tion. Indeed, one thing we have empha- sised in Hunger and Public Action is the fact that experiences of successful famine pre- vention can be found in Africa no less than in India. I start with India mainly because I happen to be more familiar with that country, and because my competence on Africa does not even meet the well-known criterion according to which an economist is entitled to talk about a particular country only if he or she has flown over it at least once by daylight.

Someone who flew over Western India by daylight in, say, 1987 would have recog- nised many of the drought-induced symp- toms that are commonly associated with famine in Africa: large-scale environmental degradation (including desertification on an alarming scale), dessicated rivers and ponds, withered crops, minimal agricultural activity, and so on. The drought was par-

* This is a transcript of a presentation made at a con- ference on Hunger and Public Action held at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (Helsinki), July 1990. The theme of famine prevention is further explored in Hunger a d Public Action, by Jean DrPze and Amartya Sen (Oxford University Press, 1989), on which this presentation was largely based.

ticularly severe in the state of Gujarat, where it lasted for three consecutive years (from 1985-86 to 1987-88) and where the production of food in the third year of the drought was well below 10 per cent of the normal level.’

In spite of this staggering production collapse, and of the major disruption of normal economic activities caused by the drought, there were no signs of famine. Mortality rates did not rise. Nutritional levels did not deteriorate. There were no reports of starvation deaths, few sales of land and very little distress migration. There was, of course, a great deal of hunger, as there always is in that part of India (particu- larly in the rural areas), but the surprising thing is that there seemed to be no deterioration of living conditions compared with a normal year. In fact, some studies have come to the striking conclusion that the nutritional status of the population of Gujarat was better during the drought years than in normal years.’

This remarkable success in preventing a drought of catastrophic magnitude from developing into a famine has a lot to do with public intervention during that period and, in particular, with the large-scale provision of employment through rural public works programmes. I will come back to this, but first I would like to mention a few things that struck me in the course of my field work in drought-affected areas.

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Perhaps what struck me most was the fact that, for many poor people, life went on more or less as usual during the drought period. This applies particularly to wage labourers. Not only were they protected from starvation, they were also able to earn their living in a dignified way, to take their wages home and cook their own food (rather than suffering the humiliation and hardship of joining a famine relief camp), to look after their cattle, and even - in some cases - to go to the cinema from time to time. Of course, in many places the drought brought new hardships in its trail (e.g., shortages of drinking water), but on the whole the magnitude of these hardships seemed relatively small in comparison with the intensity of the drought. Moreover, rural households were able to preserve their productive capital. In other words, famine prevention measures not only averted an increase in mortality but also prevented the economic and social disruption that so often accompanies droughts and other natural calamities in agricultural economies. It is important, generally, to see the objectives of famine prevention in these broad terms.

My second observation relates to the distributional implications of the drought. It might be argued that the indications I have referred to so far are of an aggregate nature, and that these aggregate indications could hide intense sufferings on the part of the more vulnerable groups (e .g . agricultural labourers, children or women). There are, however, no indications that the drought intensified overall social and economic inequalities.

As far as agricultural labourers are con- cerned, their relative position in the econ- omic scale almost certainly improved during the drought. This is because their wage earnings during the drought were close to normal, while cultivators, whose participa- tion in public works programmes was much lower, experienced sharp declines in income due to the failure of their crops. I would even go one step further, and argue that at

least in some areas the absolute position of agricultural labourers was better than usual during the drought. Indeed, in some of the villages I revisited one year after the end of the drought, I found agricultural labourers lamenting that they could not find work and looking with nostalgia to the days of the drought when several members of each of their households were assured of employ- ment on public works. This is quite a striking phenomenon, especially in view of the historical fact that agricultural labourers are traditionally the first victims of Indian famines.

Similarly, there are no indications that intra-family distribution has severely wor- sened during the drought. Informal surveys suggest that children were probably pro- tected, rather than neglected, in families experiencing unusual hardship. Women undoubtedly had to bear many new bur- dens as a result of the drought (e.g., that of queuing for long hours or walking long distances to fetch water), but their very active participation in public works pro- grammes almost certainly increased their autonomy and bargaining power within the family. The only serious problem of en- hanced intra-family inequalities I encoun- tered related to the neglect of the elderly. In particular, in some villages I found that elderly widows who had previously been supported by their married sons were often left to fend for themselves when the sons found it hard to make both ends meet.

Finally, I would like to say something about the politics of drought relief in Gujarat. The part that adversarial politics play in India in forcing the government to act in the event of a crisis has been dis- cussed earlier in this conference. In this process, there is no doubt that institutions such as political parties and the Press play a major role. But it is, I think, equally impor- tant to see the contribution made by public pressure arising from the demands of affected people themselves. These demands for more employment, higher wages, more

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food in the ration shops, better water supply, etc. tend to be backed by various forms of protest such as marches, rallies, pickets and even - believe it or not - hunger strikes. To cite only one notable example of successful protest, during the drought of 1972-73 in Maharashtra (which shared many common features with that of 1985-88 in Gujarat), a strike by 1.5 million labourers working on relief sites forced the government to grant them an increase in wages.

It is worth noting in passing that politi- cal activism during droughts in India often goes well beyond demands for better relief. The experience of collective action around common interests can also have lasting effects on the militancy of the poor and on their perception of the scope for social change. For instance, the mobilisation of rural women during the drought of 1972-73 in Maharashtra (to which I have just referred) had a profound long-term impact on the women’s movement in that part of the ~ o u n t r y . ~

The effectiveness of political activism during droughts, and especially the ability of the public to force the government to take extensive measures to prevent famine, have a lot to do with the nature of India’s political institutions. It is hard to see a hunger strike by famine victims, or a street demonstration by relief labourers, having much effect on the policies of an authoritarian ruler like Haile Selassie or Numeiri. In India, events of this kind are big news, and the subject of intense debate and comments in the press and in Parliament. The ultimate accountability of the government to the people, and its desire to win the rural vote, force it to act early and decisively to prevent the political stink that famines invariably represent.

Before you all jump to the conclusion that droughts are times of accelerated econ- omic and social progress in India, and that we should look forward to global warming, 1 should supplement this account of a recent

drought in Gujarat with two qualifying remarks. First, it is not the case that every threat of famine in Inda is handled with the determination and efficiency that were witnessed in this particular event. Public intervention in India since independence has been characterised by important tem- poral and regional diversities, and some experiences of famine prevention have been less than completely successful. On one oc- casion at least (namely the Bihar famine of 1967) there was even some failure to prevent a significant increase in mortality.

Second, while droughts in contem- porary India no longer cause crises of survival, they increasingly precipitate crises of other kinds that require close attention. Water shortages are a good illustration. In some areas of Rajasthan, people are now said to bathe only twice a year (once for the Holi festival, and once for the Diwali festival). The lowering of underground water tables, and the pollution of surface water, are partly long-term trends, but these trends and their consequences for the well- being of the population become greatly intensified during droughts.

The same applies to many other aspects of the current environmental crisis. Droughts in India are times of accelerated environmental destruction (in the form of receding water tables, impoverished top soil, shrinking vegetation, etc.), and the pace of this process is more alarming than ever before. The system of public inter- vention needs to face these - and other - relatively new challenges, in addition to dealing with the threat of famine.

Let me now move from this personal account of a recent drought in Gujarat to some more general remarks about famine prevention issues. In Hunger and Public Action, we have argued that a reliable system of famine prevention essentially has to consist of two ingredients. The first ingredient is a political compulsion to respond in the event of a crisis. In the case of India, as I have already discussed and

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illustrated, this compulsion arises from the fact that the government is ultimately accountable to the public and therefore responsive to its more forceful demands, in particular demands for relief when famine threatens.

One might think that political ideology, when it takes the form of a commitment to the well-being of the population, can also be the impulse behind public intervention in the event of a threat of famine. In some countries of Africa, such as Cape Verde and to some extent Zimbabwe, this factor seems to have been important. For instance, the political system of Cape Verde is not very pluralist (indeed it is a one-party system), but the revolutionary enthusiasm of the independence struggle seems to have found a new expression after independence in 1975 in a number of important social re- forms, including the provision of extensive public support during droughts. However, political ideology is not a very dependable basis for ensuring early response, as the history of famines in socialist countries (including Russia, China, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Cambodia) has shown again and again.

It seems clear, therefore, that the pres- sures of a vigorous political opposition, backed by a free press, provide particularly useful incentives for a government to respond to the threat of famine. A move towards greater political pluralism in Africa would certainly make an important contri- bution to the elimination of famines in that continent. In Hunger and Public Action , we wrote a couple of brave paragraphs about the fact that there was nothing immutable about the current state of African politics, and that popular movements in Africa might succeed in achieving drastic political changes in the not-too-distant future. At the time when we wrote this (acouple of years ago), there was much scepticism about the prospects for change in the direction of greater democracy in Africa. I think that there is now much less pessimism in this

respect, and I do hope that this issue will come up again during the discussion this afternoon.

In Africa, another crucial aspect to the politics of famine prevention is war. The connections between famine and war have emerged again and again in different Afri- can countries (including Ethiopia, Sudan, Chad, Somalia, Nigeria, Mozambique and Angola), and indeed it is difficult to think of a recent large-scale famine in Africa that has not been associated with some armed conflict or other. Many of these armed con- flicts have been linked, however indirectly, with superpower rivalry and the cold war, and here too one can hope (given recent transformations in world politics) for some positive change in the near future.

The second necessary ingredient of a reliable famine prevention system is a well- defined strategy of public intervention for protecting the entitlements of vulnerable groups. In India, the main plank of public intervention in the event of a threatening famine is the unconditional provision of employment to the rural population for a subsistence wage paid in cash. We have discussed the general merits of this approach in Hunger and Public Action, and we have also contrasted it with the more popular but in our view less dependable strategy of direct food distribution. I will conclude my presentation by briefly re- calling the main points of that argument.

Food distribution in famine situations can take two different forms. One is that of direct feeding, where every victim is indivi- dually rehabilitated through the provision of cooked food. This strategy, which at one time had great popularity, has, I think, now been widely discredited. Experience has shown that it is extremely hard to improve the nutritional status of a particular indi- vidual unless food intake is adequate for his or her household (mainly because those who benefit from direct feeding usually get a correspondingly smaller share of family consumption). Conversely, experience has

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also shown that if food intake is adequate at the household level, there is no great risk that children or other vulnerable individuals will be neglected (as I have already dis- cussed in the case of Gujarat). It is therefore wise to seek the support of the family in helping the undernourished, rather than to divide the family by feeding some of its members but not others. The priority should be to protect entitlements at the household level, rather than to spoon-feed particular individuals.

I would add that the achievements of direct feeding cannot go beyond that of pre- venting starvation deaths, and that, as I discussed earlier with reference to Gujarat, the aim of famine prevention should be not only to prevent mortality increases but also to enable people to preserve their produc- tive potential and to lead a normal social life. Direct feeding is, at best, a measure of last resort, to be adopted when famine victims are too enfeebled to be helped in any other way.

The second way in which food can be distributed is in the form of “take-home rations”, either provided to all households in the affected region or ”targeted” to par- ticular groups. There are two major diffi- culties with this approach. First, its success depends on the ability of the relief system to transport food to the right places at the right time and to distribute it efficiently. In this respect, the performance of govern- ments as well as of international agencies has repeatedly proved inadequate, not only in different parts of Africa but also in India, where the public distribution system is comparatively well developed. More often than not, the timely delivery of food stumbles on bureaucratic formalities, trans- port bottlenecks or just the sheer delays involved in acquiring food from distant places and hauling it to famine-affected regions.

The second difficulty with direct dis- tribution of take-home rations is that it can be extremely difficult to give preferential

treatment to the more vulnerable groups. In order to prevent a famine, it is sometimes very important to protect or even increase the share that vulnerable groups have in available resources. In my case study of famine prevention in 1972-73 in Mahar- ashtra, for instance, I noted how the aggre- gate consumption of food in that state was much lower than usual during the drought year, but also how income generation through public employment programmes protected the share of labourers in total consumption. Earlier in this presentation, I have also referred to the positive impact of famine prevention policies in Gujarat on the relative economic position of agricul- tural labourers. When food is distributed through administrative channels, however, it is typically very hard to ”target” food to particular groups. The scope for actually doing so depends a great deal on the nature of rural politics and institutions, and a few countries in Africa (notably, I believe, Zimbabwe) have achieved some success in needs-oriented food distribution. But the general experience with food distribution in most countries (whether in Africa or in South Asia) is far from encouraging. Usual- ly, food distribution is at best indiscriminate - at worst, it discriminates in favour of the rich.

Turning finally to the strategy of em- ployment provision, we have particularly stressed two advantages of this approach. First, employment-based relief strategies involve a ”self-selection” mechanism which ensures an automatic targeting of resources to the most vulnerable. No need to find out through administrative means who is at risk and who isn’t: those who are hungry will join the relief works by themselves. The power of this self-selection mechanism has emerged in many experiences of famine pre- vention, both in South Asia and in several countries of Africa (notably Botswana).

The second major advantage of employ- ment-based income generation is that it makes it possible to provide relief in the

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form of cash rather than in the form of food. This means that the efforts that the govern- ment or relief agencies may directly make to transport food to affected areas, or to ration food within affected areas, will be importantly supplemented by the market mechanism. This will, inter alia, take the form of food being transported by private traders into areas where purchasing power is being generated, and also of the more privileged sections of the population reduc- ing their food intake in response to price increases. Cash relief can be a very impor- tant option to use in order to avoid the difficulties of food delivery which I referred to earlier.

Before concluding, I should make two final remarks to clarify the nature of these recommendations. First, cash relief is not a substitute for food supply management. Often, in addition to a strong case for cash relief, there is also a good argument for public involvement in efforts to increase the availability of food in the affected regions. Our thesis is not that cash relief should replace efforts to improve food availability, but rather that in many circumstances there is no need to wait for these efforts to succeed before taking extensive measures to protect the entitlements of vulnerable groups.

Second, the success of cash relief may depend quite importantly on the integration of this strategy with other related aspects of public policy. In particular, the case for imposing bureaucratic restrictions on food movements (as is often done in famine situations) seems much weaker when the incomes of the poor are protected through public policy. In fact, an adequate market response to the demands newly generated by a strategy of cash relief will often call for a relaxation of such controls. In the context of famine prevention, it is important to see the market mechanism as a potential tool of

public intervention, and not only as a threat of intensified hunger.

Notes

1. According to the Government of Gujarat’s ”Memorandum to the Government of India on Scarcity, 1987-88” (Revenue Department, Gandhinagar), “normal production” and “expected production in 1987-88” were, respectively, 27.6 and 2.3 lakh tonnes for kharif cereals, 4.0 and 0.6 for kharif pulses and 16.3 and 1.3 for kharif oilseeds (p. 35).

2. See particularly “Diet and Nutrition during Drought”, Nutrition News , 9(4), National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, 1988. See also ”Report of the Joint GIAPlUNICEF Seminar to Review the Nutritional Status of Children in Drought-Affected Areas of Gujarat”, Gujarat Institute of Area Planning, Ahmedabad, 1988, (mimeo); L. Visaria and J. Anandjiwala (1988); and P.N. Rao (1989).

3. On this question see, for example, Gail Omvedt (1980).

References

Omvedt, G. (1980) We Will Smash This Prison! Indian Women in Struggle. Zed Press, London.

Rao, P.N. (1989) Diet and Nutrition during Drought: an Indian Experience. Economic Journal 13:l.

Visaria, L. and Anandjiwala, J. (1988) Growth of Children in a Drought Affected Area of Gujarat. Working Paper No. 17, GIAP, Ahmedabad.

Jean Dreze Suntory-Toyota Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines London School of Economics Houghton Street London, WC2A 2AE UK

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