Amartya Sen Quotes About Famine

Quotes about: Famine

• No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.

  Amartya Sen

  Taken, Democracy, World

  Amartya Sen (2011). “The Idea of Justice”, p.343, Harvard University Press

• Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence... they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and... a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have.

  Amartya Sen

  Country, Party, Independent

  "The 'Silently' Creeping Famine" by Alemayehu G. Mariam, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 18, 2010.

• [N]o democracy with a free press has ever experienced a major famine.

  Amartya Sen

  Democracy, Famine, Free Press

• No substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic country - no matter how poor.

  Amartya Sen

  Country, Independent, Democratic

  "Development as Freedom". Book by Amartya Sen, 1999.

• I attempted to see famines as broad "economic" problems (concentrating on how people can buy food, or otherwise get entitled to it), rather than in terms of the grossly undifferentiated picture of aggregate food supply for the economy as a whole.

  Amartya Sen

  People, Poverty, Problem

• Hardly any famine affects more than 5 percent, almost never more than 10 percent, of the population. The largest proportion of a population affected was the Irish famine of the 1840s, which came close to 10 percent over a number of years.

  Amartya Sen

  Years, Numbers, Population

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 29, 2011.

• From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.

  Amartya Sen

  Prevention, Causation, Famine

• You can’t prevent undernourishment so easily, but famines you can stop with half an effort. Then the question was why don’t the governments stop them?

  Amartya Sen

  Government, Effort, Half

• If the government is vulnerable to public opinion, then famines are a dreadfully bad thing to have. You can’t win many elections after a famine, and you don’t like being criticized by newspapers, opposition parties in parliament, and so on. Democracy gives the government an immediate political incentive to act.

  Amartya Sen

  Party, Winning, Government

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 29, 2011.

• Famines occur under a colonial administration, like the British Raj in India or for that matter in Ireland, or under military dictators in one country after another, like Somalia and Ethiopia, or in one-party states like the Soviet Union and China.

  Amartya Sen

  Country, Military, Party

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 29, 2011.

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