I didn't mean to contradict your point about India's elimination of famines. I thought the two points Sen discusses are interesting and worthy of attention:
***** Not only are there persistent recurrences of severe hunger in particular regions (the fact that they don't grow into full-fledged famines does not arrest their local brutality), but there is also a gigantic prevalence of endemic hunger across much of India. Indeed, India does much worse in this respect than even Sub-Saharan Africa. *****
and
***** We are evidently determined to maintain, at heavy cost, India's unenviable combination of having the worst of undernourishment in the world and the largest unused food stocks on the globe. *****
Why has India done better than many other developing nations in eliminating famines at the same time as having created the worst mal-nourishment problem in the world? It's not the lack of food, obviously, as Sen also notes that it has "the largest unused food stocks on the globe." It's a problem of class and gender relations, as Sen argues. I think his remarks on the dangers of "a little bit of equity" (price support for farmers, without enough income support for the poor who suffer from high food prices, plus a food politics in which interests of big farmers are covered up by the rhetoric of support for small farmers) should be paid attention to. -- Yoshie
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