Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 1 (2011), p. 146

In this learned and humane book, Cormac Ó Gráda offers a wide-ranging account of famine in human society. The first three chapters review famine and the frequency of famine, describe what actually happens in famines, and explain how famines were prevented and coped with when they occurred. The fourth chapter discusses famine demography (including the shortfall in births). Chapters then follow on ‘markets and famine’ and ‘entitlements’ (perhaps the most important in the book). Chapter seven discusses ‘private and public action’, eight treats ‘the violence of government’ and famine as a form of war, and chapter nine asks whether we have seen the end of famine.

In a sense, the book falls into three chronological parts. The first reviews famine over a very long period, showing how reactions to food shortages have remained very similar over extended periods of time. Ó Gráda has gathered material from the classical societies of the Mediterranean, pre-colonial India and pre-modern China. Deployed side-by-side with examples drawn from the experience of medieval and early modern Europe and, of course, Ireland in the nineteenth century, Ó Gráda weaves his examples into a scintillating if depressing tapestry. His account of the place of middlemen runs from Cicero to the execution of corn traders in Ethiopia in 1974. The instinct to deny shortage and to turn on the vendors of corn turns out to be a very old one, as is the government instinct to meddle in markets in years of high prices and distress. Most pre-industrial societies seem to have been sufficiently resilient to come through a single year of harvest failure without major mortality: but two successive years crippled them and produced famine deaths in the second year. Incidentally, he dismisses famine as having much of a role as Malthus’s preventive check. Second, we have a discussion of twentieth-century famine, showing how famine was so often caused by government and war, and might be a political tool. This is perhaps the real heart of the book. Ó Gráda is particularly interesting on the way in which some modern societies undergoing massive food depravation managed to sustain elementary rules of cleanliness and sanitation and so avoid the worst of famine-sponsored disease. Third, Ó Gráda asks whether we have entered an age which has seen an ‘end to famine’. Food is easier to move, governments and NGOs are now alert to the early warning signs of distress and cheap medical treatments are available, which can sustain the life of the malnourished.

Whilst the book offers a superb overview, the section which will attract most attention is Ó Gráda’s re-examination of the Bengal famine of 1943–4. This has a particular place in famine studies as it provides the basis for Sen’s entitlement thesis, which placed an emphasis on the failure of markets to deliver foodstuffs equitably in famine conditions. Thus Sen explained the paradox that there could be a famine when there was no shortage of foodstuffs. As I have argued myself, this has become too pervasive an explanation, and it ignores the agricultural roots of famine. Ó Gráda’s views will be familiar to readers of his Tawney lecture to the Economic History Society, now printed in the Economic History Review supplement Feeding the Masses (2008). He finds that there was an absolute shortage of foodstuffs in Bengal. Persistent attempts by the authorities to find hoarded foodstuffs failed to discover any. Other supply lines were disrupted by wartime conditions. The Bengal government was delusional about the supplies at its disposal until too late. Entitlements may well explain how food is distributed within a society under stress, but Ó Gráda is in no doubt that at the root of the Bengal Crisis was an episode of Food Availability Decline (FAD).

On one point I find myself stimulated by Ó Gráda into wondering whether he is right. Whilst Ó Gráda finds no evidence of hoarding in Bengal, he also invokes the ‘carryover’ from year to year a little too much for my taste (see pp. 148–9, 151 and other references). I doubt whether there is such a thing in pre-industrial societies. Holding back foodstuffs until late in the year to maximise profit could always be hazardous. It might well be unpopular, leading to the seizure of stocks by public action or government initiative, but moreover, the expectation of high end-of-year prices might not be realised if either demand collapsed for want of purchasing power (Sen’s entitlements) or supplies came in from abroad. As for keeping grain from year to year, do we really know if anyone did this, except of course the few state-sponsored granaries (in Sweden, for example)? It was, after all, a sure way to lose value, the stored grain shrinking in volume as pests ate it: the resulting grain was probably not highly marketable given that in most years it would be sold in the new season to make room for more. In any case, how much would need to be carried forwards as a buffer stock to make much of an impact on the following year’s price? If we know relatively little about the agricultural origins of famines, then we also know less than we should about the activities of the middlemen and the international trade in grain.

Having said that, Ó Gráda’s book is both learned and humane, it is also elegant in both its writing and production. Occasionally I thought that Ó Gráda was a little laconic – a further sentence of recapitulation to drive home a point would sometimes have been welcome. It is a wise book about an unpalatable subject.