The Fourth Indian Nobel 73 liberal, nobody can fail to note his distance from Marxism. On the question of famines and their causes, the difference between Amartya Sen's analysis on the one hand and that of the nationalists and Marxists on the other, is clear enough: there is no recognition of imperialism by the former. It is not clear whether Professor Sen does not believe at all in the existence of imperialism, or whether he does but prefers not to talk about it. Whatever the case might be, in his theoretical writings on famines in particular the absence of a perspective on imperialism is particularly striking for an economist from a third world country which has a long history of being under colonial domination. Sen argues in his book Poverty and famines that it is not decline of food availability, but the 'failure of exchange entitlements' which causes famine (thus such failure can arise when the rate at which products or labour-power can be exchanged against food, turns sharply against the producers and labourers.) The stress on failure to exchange is quite correct; the problem arises not with what Sen says, but what he leaves unsaid. From Dadabhai Naoroji to Romesh Chandra Dutt, the nationalist writers had connected the incidence of the new types of famine in India, not to harvest failure or poor transport as did the imperialists, but to the systematic colonial transfers of tax revenue abroad via an export surplus of—mainly, but not exclusively;—commodities from agriculture. Dutt in particular had pointed out that commercialisation for export to pay the revenue and other charges on the peasants, meant lower food reserves and higher vulnerability to famine. Professor Sen however considers food availability decline as arising from the effect of short-term exogenous factors like bad rains, cyclones and floods; and he is silent on the structural, endogenous reasons for food availability decline, arising from imperialist exploitation, even when he is discussing the 1943 Bengal famine. In particular he does not mention the large fall in Bengal's per head food availability— by nearly 40 per cent in the inter-war period according to a reputed foreign scholar's estimate—which was directly related to colonial export production and which preceded the war-time shock of deficit financed inflation, the proximate cause of the famine. In more recent years plenty of evidence has accumulated to show that famine conditions in sub-Saharan African countries are related to their strong primary products export thrust under SAP and trade liberalisation, which has been at the expense of food production. This has declined on a per head basis and has also involved decline in per head food availability, because falling unit dollar values of their exports has prevented food imports to the required extent. The absence of a perspective on historical processes and the silence on imperialism, is consistent with the somewhat ambivalent position Professor Sen has been taking of late on the questions of liberalisation and globalisation. While in the past he supported liberalisation for India, now in interviews he has argued that in some areas the market can do a good job, and state intervention through permits and licences to direct investment is not necessary, but the state needs to intervene in the spheres of provision of food, health and education. The hard fact that the policy package pushed by the Bretton-Woods institutions is a package embodying the retrogressive theories of the