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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Entitlements or Empowerment? Famine and Starvation in Africa
Author:Watts, Michael
Year:1991
Periodical:Review of African Political Economy
Volume:18
Issue:51
Period:July
Pages:9-26
Language:English
Geographic term:Africa
Subjects:power
human rights
famine
Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment
Development and Technology
Economics and Trade
External link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03056249108703903
Abstract:This article reviews recent research on the genesis, dynamics and consequences of famine in Africa. Special attention is paid to the entitlement approach of Amartya Sen ('Poverty and famines', 1981). Sen's economics begins with entitlements, the rules governing the acquisition, use, and transfer of property rights. An entitlement system is related to an individual's command over food. Famines develop when entitlements collapse for large segments of society, which implies that starvation can occur without there being a shortage of food. Entitlement approaches have the merit of focusing on the specific social, political and institutional relations between people and food. The influence of Sen's analysis has shifted the terms of the debate from shortage of food supply to the intervening variables between food production and consumption. The market has, as a consequence, become a centre-piece of contemporary famine analysis. In conclusion, the author argues that the problem of democracy and peace strikes to the heart of Africa's famine problem. The heart of the matter is the political exclusion of peasants and the urban poor, and the fact that 'control of political power is a subject of armed conflicts in which food is a weapon of war'. The need for social entitlements is embedded in the politics of democratization. In the long term, famine prevention in Africa will be rooted in the doubtless long and contradictory struggle for democracy. Note, ref., sum.
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