POVERTY AND FAMINES 69 his usual ration of alcohol, in a car whose brakes turn out to have been defective, at a blind corner where visibility is notoriously poor, knocks down and kills Robinson, who was crossing the road to buy cigarettes at the shop on the corner'5. What was the cause of the occurrence? While I am willing to agree with Sen that the driver's drunkenness is not a necessary condition for the occurrence, I would find it difficult to go along with him when he insists that a detailed study of the victim Robinson's habits will provide a better explanation of what happened. Since the FAD view's "initial cause" of famine is not a necessary condition for famine to occur, Sen states that FAD "isn't much of a predictor to rely on55 (p 120). On the other hand, he claims that when fully spelt out the entitlement approach can help in "understanding the precise causation of famines and in devising famine policies: anticipation, relief, and prevention" (p 164). Here again it can be conceded that because it has more empty boxes to be filled in by empirical evidence, the entitlement approach can become a more adequate ex post explanation of famines. But Sen has not given any reasons to believe that it has or can have more powerful ex ante predictive power than FAD. In fact, because the entitlement approach insists that famine can break out any time (both when foodgrains production is good and when it is deficient) k cannnt liave any early warning signals, and so it cannot anticipate a famine. Hence in terms of famine policy the entitlement approach can at best be one more device to fight a war that is already over. None of these criticisms should deflect attention from one of Sen's major achievements - establishing that famines are not acts of god, but acts of men. However it is not the entitlement approach as such that establishes it; but the detailed empirical evidence that shows that it is some human intervention such as witliholding of stocks (rather than decline in food production) that leads to the sharp increase in food prices. If so, some form of food availability decline is a precondition for starvation to become widespread and acute. In the FAD approach the food availability decline is in the economy; in the entitlement approach the food availability decline is in the market. And, if in Bengal in 1943 there was an "abnormally higher withholding of rice stock" wasn't the Famine Inquiry Commission literally right when it claimed that the famine resulted from "the serious shortage in the total supply of rice available for consumption"? One final point about Sen's treatment of poverty in terms of entitlement. It may be stated that the main thrust of the entitlement argument - that an increase in output will not percolate to the poorer sections unless their ability to purchase goods is augmented, and that therefore eradication of poverty calls for "redistribution with growth"— had entered into the discussions of poverty at least from the "new economics" of the early 1970s. Sen relates poverty and entitlement by categorising entitlement relations into trade-based entitlements, production-based entitlements, own-labour entitlements and inheritance