ENTITLEMENTS AND OWNERSHIP
Starvation is the characteristic ofsome people not having enough
food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough
food to eat. While the latter can be a cause ofthe former, it is but
one of many possible causes. Whether and how starvation relates
to food supply is a matter for factual investigation.
Food supply statements say things about a commodity (or a
group of commodities) considered on its own. Starvation statements are about the relationship of
persons to the commodity (or
that commodity group).1
Leaving out cases in which a person
may deliberately starve, starvation statements translate readily
into statements of ownership of food by persons. In order to
understand starvation, it is, therefore, necessary to go into the
structure of ownership.
Ownership relations are one kind of entitlement relations. It is
necessary to understand the entitlement systems within which the
problem of starvation is to be analysed.2
This applies more
generally to poverty as such, and more specifically to famines as well.
An entitlement relation applied to ownership connects one set
ofownerships to another through certain rules oflegitimacy. Itis
a recursive relation and the process of connecting can be
repeated. Consider a private ownership market economy. I own
this loafof bread. Why is this ownership accepted? Because I got
it by exchange through paying some money I owned. Why is my
ownership of that money accepted? Because I got it by selling a
bamboo umbrella owned by me. Why is my ownership of the
bamboo umbrella accepted? Because I made it with my own
1 The contrast between commodities on the one hand and the relationship of
commodities to persons on the other is central also to many other economic exercises. The
evaluation ofreal national income is an important example, and for a departure from the
traditional approaches to national income to a relationship-based evaluation in the light
of this distinction, see Sen ! 1976b, 1979a}.
2 The 'entitlement approach' to starvation analysis was presented in Sen (1976c,
1977b), and is developed and extended in Chapter 5 and Appendix A, and applied to case
studies in Chapters 6—9 below .