68 SOCIAL SCIENTIST starvation. On these no one other than a Marie Antoinette is likely to disagree with Sen. Before Sen can conclude his arguments he must also show why exchange entitlements moved sharply during 1943. He shows that from 1941 onwards Bengal had started experiencing the inflationary impact of war financing and that the price of rice which had remained stable from 1914 to 1941 had started rising from 1942. Thus, "the 1943 famine can indeed be described as a 'boom famine' related to powerful inflationary pressures initiated by public expenditure expansion" (p 75). Burma, from where rice used to be imported to India, fell to the Japanese in 1942, which would have prompted traders to anticipate further rise in rice prices and to hoard stocks. Sen records: "Ther® was a (sic) abnormally higher withholding of rice stock by farmers and traders from the winter harvest of 1942-3; the normal realcase following the harvest did not take place. A moderate short-fall in production had by then been translated into an exceptioual short-fall in market release^ (p 76; emphases in the original). Although no figures of stock-holding are given, Table 6.4 shows that the price of rice which was Rs 0.25 per seer in February 1943, moved upto Rs 0.38 in March and Rs 0.52 in April and then shot up to Rs 0.78 in May. To add to it all, in 1942 the government of India had prevented the movement of cereals in general and of rice in particular from one province to another. With all this evidence Sen certainly has a good case. But Sen's claim goes further. He puts forward the "entitlement approach55 as an alternate explanation of famine. To be sure, Sen has a more deatailed account than what he presents as the FAD view. In particular, Sen goes into an examination of the victims of famine and their economic characteristics. Surely, FAD does not prevent such an enquiry and nothing of what Sen has to say about the victims of famine is incompatible with FAD. Indeed, Sen questions the FAD view primarily in terms of what initially kicks off a famine. It is a decline in the availability of food, says the FAD economist. Not necessarily so, says the entitlement economist. One fails to see any other logical distinction between the two approaches and notwithstanding the terminological differences that Sen introduces in the entitlement approach any empirical enquiry into famines will have to proceed in terms of the price of foodgrains, its relationship to wage rates (to determine the purchasing power of different people in the FAD view, and to see the shifts in cxcliange entitlement in the entitlement approach) etc. In oilier words, Sen is quite right (and I have conceded it already) that what FAD considers to be the "initial cause55 of famine is not a necessary condition for famine. But then one has to insist also that Sen^ entitlement approach concentrating on the entitlement mappings of the victims of famine does not provide any clues about the "initial cause55 and in that sense does not provide a sufficient explanation of famine. One is reminded of E H Carr^ famous example: "Jones, returning from a party at which he has consumed more than