The key indicator for this approach by corollary then is the per capita availability of food. The FAD hypothesis essentially looked at famines as a macroeconomic problem and explains them assuming a decline in overall food availability at the level of regions or countries. ‘Food Availability Decline (FAD)’ hypothesis.

Sen invokes the entitlement approach to severely attack the general paradigm then available for the analysis of famines, i.e. The key to unlocking Sen’s ideas on the causal forces of a famine is the ‘entitlement approach’. However for professional Economists and more interested readers he has supplied three detailed Mathematical appendices towards the end of the book. The book does not require any special knowledge of Mathematics and Amartya Sen has himself declares that it is targeted at a general audience. The first five chapters focus on developing an appropriate framework for the study of famines while the last five chapters focus on study of specific famines of the 20th century in Bengal, Ethiopia, the Sahel region of Africa and Bangladesh. The book under review is divided into ten chapters. The book was first published in 1981 and forms an important part of Amartya Sen’s oeuvre. The book questions all manners of conventional truth relating to famines and challenges our age old understanding of starvation and its determinants. Amartya Sen’s seminal essay on ‘Poverty and Famines’ is one such piece of work.

One rarely comes across a book that can legitimately claim to have redefined an entire area of study. In 2006, Time magazine listed him under '60 years of Asian Heroes' and in 2010 included him in their '100 most influential persons in the world'.

He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. He is the first Asian and the first Indian academic to head an Oxbridge college.Īmartya Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is also a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he previously served as Master from the years 1998 to 2004. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. Sen was best known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food. Amartya Kumar Sen is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members.

Poverty and famine by amartya sen