AMARTYA Sen, known for his work on famine, argues that famines do not occur in democracies that enjoy independence and practise elections. He cites the example of India. But now that famines are clearly staging a comeback in today’s India, after five decades of independence and parliamentary democracy, Sen has cautioned us that it would be a misconception to believe that democracy solves the problem of hunger. Then, democracy for what? And for whom?

Millions of people go to bed hungry every night. In the starvation death regions of Orissa, there are reports of children and wives being sold for a pittance to overcome hunger. No PDS functions for the starved in the region. What does democracy mean for the starving?

Sen himself admits that production has not declined abnormally while prices have soared and real wages have sagged making it impossible for people to buy required food. In his book “Hunger and Public Action” (1989), Mr. Sen (along with his co-author, Jean Dreze) noted that nearly four million people die prematurely in India every year from malnutrition and related problems. This exceeds the number perished during the entire Bengal famine.

Vandana Shiva argues, “Amartya Sen is the world’s leading expert on the causes of famine. But he is wrong in his analysis of contemporary famine. His analysis ignores trade liberalization and globalization as a cause for why people are hungry today. In offering free trade solutions to hunger, he is offering the disease as a cure.

“Amartya Sen does not refer anywhere to issues of land reform as central to the issue of hunger and poverty, or to the high costs of seeds and chemicals which are pushing Indian peasants to suicide. Without people’s rights to resources, there is no lasting solution to hunger.

“... Yet nowhere in his article does Amartya Sen identify the destruction of livelihoods and income of the small rural producers as the reason for increased endemic hunger, and indeed famine, in India.”

There cannot be any democracy without economic, social and political equality. Talking of democracy divorced of its economic content is nothing but hair splitting academic exercise that cannot fill the empty stomachs. There is no point trying to make a distinction between a famine where lakhs of people die without food and a starvation scenario where thousands of people die without access to food and without income. Democracy should be measured not in terms of foodgrains rotting in godowns but in terms of access to food and the purchasing power of the people.