Food Entitlement

D. John Shaw

Chapter 19 in World Food Security, 2007, pp 230-234 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Yet another concept entered the general debate on the quest for food security from Amartya Sen’s clinical examination of famines, first in India in 1976 and 1977 (Sen, 1976, 1977), and then in a seminal publication in 1981 (Sen, 1981).45 Sen’s thesis was that in major famines in the past, the problem was not so much lack of food but of poor people’s access to it. The cause, in his view, was a breakdown in what he called their ‘entitlement’. This related to his concept of economic development as a process of expanding people’s ‘capabilities’, or what they are able to do (Sen, 1982). Sen’s view is that the goal not only of economics but of society as a whole should be the enlargement of what he calls ‘positive human freedom’ and the capability to enjoy it (Sen, 1999). He believes that the issue of ‘social choice’ should be of concern not only to economists but also to the public (Dreze and Sen, 1989). His insistence on making larger moral and cultural concerns preconditions for answering economic questions echoes Socrates’ challenge, ‘man, know thyself’, and Plato’s comparison of the human soul to a chariot pulled by the two horses of ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’.

Keywords: Food Insecurity; Chronic Food Insecurity; Aggregate Food; World Food Crisis; Entitlement Relation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-58978-0_19

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230589780

DOI: 10.1057/9780230589780_19

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().