More Than Enough to Go Around: Part 1
A new, multi-part series on tax revenues to reduce inequality in the United States
In October of 1942, a great cyclone struck the Bengal province of India.
It came at a most unfortunate time. The annual rice crop, the basis of their livelihood, was due to be harvested in December. The rice farmers had invested ten months of labor into their fields. If the crop failed, they would have to start all over again, and the province would spend the next year without its primary food source.
In normal times, the Bengalese could simply make up the difference with imports from Burma, but these were not normal times. The continent was embroiled in World War II, and the Japanese occupation of Burma seven months earlier had squashed its rice trade.
Bengal was on its own.
The cyclone smashed into the coast with not one, not two, but three tidal waves from the Bay of Bengal. Fierce wind and rain pummelled the land, drowning the rice fields in deep floods. When the waters receded, they left behind a fungus that snuffed out the few crops that had survived the onslaught.
The Indian government pleaded with their colonial overlords, but the British Empire refused to send aid or allow other provinces to share their excess with Bengal. The people would simply have to starve.
The famine started taking its toll in May of 1943, when the death rate first ticked up. Hospitals overflowed with malnourished patients. Many were so weak that they could not make it to the emergency room. They had to be picked up off the streets. Government officials referred to the victims as “living skeletons.” Their bodies were infected with “uncontrollable diarrhea.” Their minds were so disoriented that they did not realize they had soiled their beds. Despite the best efforts of hospital workers, the death rate accelerated throughout the summer.
The pervasiveness of starvation began to subside with the December harvest, but the death rate remained elevated long into 1944. In their weakened state, the starving masses had contracted deadly diseases and passed them along to otherwise healthy neighbours. Malaria, cholera, and smallpox spread throughout the province.
By the time the epidemic receded, three million people had died in the Bengal famine of 1943. Percentagewise, the number would be five times higher if a comparable tragedy struck a population the size of today’s United States.
Almost immediately, the Indian government established a Famine Inquiry Commission to investigate the cause of the “great calamity.” Its final report, issued in 1945, pinpointed a culprit as simple as it was unsurprising: food shortage.
As obvious as it may have been, this conclusion never rang true to Amartya Sen.
The Bengal-born economist was only nine years old at the time of the famine, but his memory of it was quite clear. (It is not something that a nine-year-old easily forgets.) “I knew of no one in my school or among my friends and relations whose family had experienced the slightest problem during the entire famine,” he recalled half a century later; “it was not a famine that afflicted even the lower middle classes — only people much further down the economic ladder, such as landless rural laborers.”
It struck Sen as odd that a provincial food shortage should take on such a “thoroughly class-dependent character.” Where did the upper classes get this food that was supposedly in short supply? He decided to unearth the Commission’s report and see for himself.
What he found overturned everything we thought we knew about famines.
The first surprise was the amount of rice that had survived the cyclone. While rice production did decline from 1942 to 1943, it did not disappear. On the contrary, there was more food available in 1943 than there had been in 1941, both in total quantity and per person.
Another clue was geography. Consistent with Sen’s memory, the statistics revealed that “the famine victims came almost exclusively from the rural population.” This seems hard to square with the food shortage story. Wouldn’t the farmers consume whatever they produced and let the urban population starve?
The final piece of the puzzle was money. The combination of the cyclone and the war economy drove up the price of rice, but not everyone’s wages followed. Sen found, for example, that the occupations that suffered the most — fishermen, barbers, and bamboo craftsmen — all had one thing in common: Their incomes declined sharply from 1942 to 1943. Cities like Calcutta did not have this problem because the government subsidised their food purchases to keep them healthy enough to run the factories that were supplying the war effort. The most disturbing occupational divide, however, was between the farm owners, who suffered the least, and the day laborers they hired, who did not earn enough money to buy the rice that their labour had made possible.
This discovery was so shocking that Sen wondered whether Bengal was an isolated example. He applied the same analysis to other famines. Ethiopia in 1973. Bangladesh in 1974. The African Sahel in the 1970s. He could not find a single instance of food shortage.
There was always more than enough to go around. Some people simply could not afford it, and instead of helping them, everyone else let them die.
This is the first in a series of Substack posts that will show how the United States can raise trillions of dollars in revenues to reduce inequality. Come back next week for Part 2…
It’s always eye opening to read of the sadness of starvation. Deep sensitivity surfaces to realize that famine will completely thwart upward mobility. Inadequate food intake will undoubtedly lead to health problems, disease, then death. It’s a downward spiral of no money, no food, no wellness. Those economies with more means who did not distribute foods, but rather harbored it, practiced unconscionable acts of no soul.