Includes indexes

The main focus of this book is on the causation of starvation in general and of famines in particular. The traditional analysis of famines focusing on food supply, is shown to be fundamentally defective-theoretically unsound, empirically inept, and dangerously misleading for policy. The author develops an alternative method of analysis--the 'the entitlement approach'- concentrating on ownership and exchange. Aside from developing the underlying theory, the approach is used in a number of case studies of recent famines, including the great Bengal Famine of i943, the Ethiopian famines of 1973 and 1974, the Bangladesh famine of 1974 and the famines inn the Sahel countries in Africa in the seventies.