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• Sowing the Seeds of Famine


  The Political Economy of Food Deficits in Sudan

  
• After escaping the ravages of the Sahelian famine of 1968-73, Sudan has begun to experience famine in the current drought

  
• This paper examines recent commercial and subsistence patterns of food production in Sudan in relation to shifting structures of accumulation in order to account for Sudan's rising vulnerability to famine

  
• The combination of the cumulative effects of capitalist agricultural expansion with the ascendancy of policies of 'trilateral co-operation' under Arab foreign capital during the 1970s set Sudan firmly on a course toward chronic and increasing food deficits

  
• Peasant producers face a rapidly declining ability to meet their consumption needs, including food, through direct production at the same time that rain-fed capitalist agriculture is being reoriented toward increased export production
• Severe famine threatens to spread throughout this country which is expected to provide both for its own population, and for a million refugees from the surrounding region

  
• Sudan's central zones - apart from the areas immediately bordering the Nile - showed mean precipitation departures of between 0.25 and 0.85 below normal for 1968, 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1973, comparable to the deficits experienced in most of the drought-stricken areas of the Sahel

  
• The effects of unfavourable timing and pattern of rainfall in relation to plant growth were reported by cultivators to have further damaged yields in some areas
• Starvation does not appear to have been a major problem in Sudan in those years

  
• The conditions which were responsible for Sudan's good fortune derived from a pattern of agricultural development during the 1960s which was rare in Africa and indeed in the entire Third World, based as it was on the expansion of capitalist food production supplying internal markets rather than on expansion of export production
• Since the early 1970s, a two-pronged attack has been transforming the earlier pattern and setting the stage for possible future famine

  
• The World Bank, IMF and other external agencies have placed renewed emphasis on policies favouring expansion of export production, a peculiar brand of 'smallholder' projects and, under the rubric of 'stabilisation' plans, have carried out a frontal assault on the purchasing power of the Sudanese population
• Arab capital has promoted Sudan as the potential 'breadbasket' of the Arab world and begun to intervene in various ways which have the effect of reorienting agricultural production in Sudan from local to foreign Arab markets
• These changes have been creating conditions in Sudan which leave its rural population, especially in the northern savanna zones, increasingly vulnerable to the drought-induced famine which had by 1983 begun to affect many Sudanese

  
• The large-scale expansion of domestic food production in Sudan got its start with the political ascendancy of the agrarian bourgeoisie following independence and the concurrent decline in profitability of the cotton-producing, pump-irrigated agriculture which had served as the basis of the initial accumulation of capital in Sudanese agriculture in the colonial period

  
• Partially mechanised sorghum production in the central rainlands provided an equal opportunity

  
• Rapid post-independence expansion of capitalist agriculture boosted internal demand for commercial food crops to feed the large seasonal wage labour force, which was paid partly in kind
• Such payments played a key role in keeping cash wage rates from rising as demand for seasonal labour soared
• To support the pattern of investment dominated by rainfed mechanised agriculture which began to emerge in the late 1950s, the agrarian bourgeoisie in power used the facilities of the state to aid this sector, often at the expense of the mostly government-operated export (cotton) sector
• The effects of these and related policies of the period on the export sector were severe
• Lack of resources and insufficient maintenance were not the only problems faced by the cotton schemes and the export sector in general
• Twenty years after Poverty and Famines elaborated the entitlement approach as an innovative and holistic approach to famine analysis, debates about some of its fundamental assertions remain unresolved

  
• This paper examines four limitations acknowledged by Sen himself: starvation by choice, disease-driven rather than starvation-driven mortality, ambiguities in entitlement specification and extra-legal entitlement transfers

  
• The entitlement approach is significantly weakened, both conceptually and empirically, by its methodological individualism and by its privileging of economic aspects of famine above sociopolitical determinants
• As export revenues declined the central government sought to make up the declining revenues by increased taxation of foreign trade
• Pursuit of capitalist growth led by expansion of good production for the internal market without solving the problem of export dependency to finance the imports involved thus paved the way for a crisis of massive proportions
• A complementary analysis is required, one that recognizes the importance of non-market institutions in determining entitlements, famine as social process and epidemiological crisis, and violations of entitlement rules in the complex emergencies that typify most contemporary famines

  
• Entitlements


  The set of alternative commodity bundles that a person can command in a society using the totality of rights and opportunities that he or she faces
• In a recent study of the agricultural production performance in 35 sub-Saharan African countries between 1961-65 and 1976-80, Hinderink and Sterkenburg (1983:2) found only two countries which showed a substantial growth in per capita food production at the expense of export crop production. These were Sudan and Botswana

  
• The overall structure of Sudan's rural economy led peasants to become oriented toward the production of commercial crops rather than food crops for their own consumption
• Entitlements derive from legal rights rather than morality or human rights
• In Sen's framework, people destituted by famine are not entitled to food; instead they are "entitled to starve"
• Entitlement set


  The full range of goods and services that a person can acquire by converting his or her "endowments" (assets and resources, including labour power) through "exchange entitlement mappings"
• Legal sources of food

  • Production-based entitlement (growing food)
  • Trade-based entitlement (buying food)
  • Own-labour entitlement (working for food)
  • Inheritance and transfer entitlement (being given food by others)
• The entitlement approach shifts the analytical focus away from a fixation on food supplies and on to the inability of groups of people to acquire food
• Famine can be caused by "exchange entitlement decline" (adverse shifts in the exchange value of endowments for food, e.g. falling wages or livestock prices, rising food prices) as well as by "direct entitlement decline" (loss of food crops to drought, for instance)

  
• A study of the agricultural production performance in 35 sub-Saharan African countries between 1961-65 and 1976-80 found only two countries which showed a substantial growth in per capita food production at the expense of export crop production - Sudan and Botswana

  
• In Sudan and Botswana, per capita food production rose from an index of 100 to 112 while overall per capita agricultural output was virtually stagnant

  
• Only five other countries in the study showed significant growth in per capita food production, and among them only Ivory Coast showed a greater increase in food production than in export production
• The entitlement approach does not exclude the possibility of famine being caused by direct entitlement decline