What is food entitlement?
More than 40 years ago, Amartya Sen tried to use a concept called “food entitlement”. In his book Poverty and Famine published in 1981 he explains the causation behind or the preceding phases which are at the basis of hunger and famine.
Jul 31, 2015
More than 40 years ago, Amartya Sen tried to use a concept called “food entitlement”. In his book Poverty and Famine published in 1981 he explains the causation behind or the preceding phases which are at the basis of hunger and famine.
The basic idea of food entitlement is extremely simple and elementary. Since food and other commodities are not distributed freely to people, their consumption in general — and the ability to consume food in particular — must depend on the basket of goods and services that people can respectively buy or have entitlement to.
In a market economy, the crucial variable is the amount of food that a person can buy in the market, or directly own by having produced in one’s own plot of land.
What we can buy on the market would depend on the level of the income, or the goods produced and sold, or from the services that can be offered or the labour power that can be sold through wage and employment, it depends from our status and from our labour situation.
Hunger and starvation result from some people not having enough food to eat – it is not a characteristic of there not being enough food to eat in the country or the region.
The crucial variable to understand is the relevance of the entitlement set, the ability to command food and alternative basket of goods within the entitlement’s borders.
In a market economy, entitlements depends on what resources we have, what the endowments are, and on initial or basic asset that can be used directly for production or for sell in the market, on real opportunity the markets offer for our labour and from prices and availability of food and other commodities that can be bought on the market.
Hunger and food deprivation arise primarily from entitlement failure plus underdevelopment of public health facilities with all the consequences in terms of critical health problems, education levels, for the role the education has to enable people to get a job in the market and earn an income. The above mentioned underdevelopment of public health facilities and educations systems contribute and determine various problems and the widespread of undernourishment is one of these. -- Vatican Insider
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