Random Quotation for the Day

Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat. -- Amartya Sen.

Starvation is a problem, then, not of inevitable scarcities, or earthly infertility, but of defective social and political arrangements.

Sen was born in Bengal (northeastern India and the country now known as Bengla-desh was all once "Bengal") in November 1933.

Of course this means that he was born a subject of King Edward VIII, about a month before that King would abdicate in order to be free to marry Wallis Simpson. It also means that Sen was old enough to have a general sense of what was going on when the Japanese troops were at his country's door, knocking, in 1942-44.

So if we understand anything about the horrific Bengali famine of 1943, we know that he knows of what he speaks when he writes of starvation.

The Bengali famine came about because Bengal had been importing most of its food from Burma for years. That itself was a consequences of Imperial planners.

When the Japanese got as far as Burma, that became a key battlefront, and it ceased to be a food exporter. The result: death in Bengal on a massive scale.

And another result? Sen's comprehension of the fact that starvation is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.

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