Famine and the Failure of Rice Harvest and Great Bengal, India

In October of 1942, the whole east coast of Bengal was hit by a powerful tropical cyclone and areas of land as far as forty miles inland were flooded. The fall crops of rice were washed away and lost. Small quantities of what was already a reduced harvest, the part of the harvest that always had to be retained as seed for planting in the months of winter that followed, had to be consumed for food. As the hot weather of 1943 appeared and there was nothing to eat because nothing had been sown in the winter growing season, famine appeared and before the year was out four million had died. The military authorities had made no provision for food emergencies. Furthermore, all the military commanders in that region were concentrating on the war and gave little attention to domestic issues. The government of India tried to get help to the stricken areas but no one seemed to care in far away Britain at a time when World War II was at a peak of activity. Subsequent records of rice production for the year 1943 revealed that there was enough available to prevent starvation if only the military commanders had chosen to divert supplies of rice to the impoverished peasants. In the late 1990s, Indian author Amartya Sen was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics for his studies of the Bengal and other famines in India. His conclusions were a damning indictment of British administration in India. He showed that rice production in India during the years 1941-1943 were pretty much normal and were sufficient to provide food for everyone. The totals, year by year, varied only slightly from the normal: 1940, eight million tons, 1941, seven million, 1942, nine million, and 1943, eight million tons. Sen was convinced that the 1943 famine was caused, not by a shortage of rice, but by the removal of supplies from the stricken areas to meet the needs of fighting troops. His thesis went on to show that, while malnutrition and hunger remained a common condition in India, no major famine occurred in fifty years following independence. Yet, in those years, 1951-2001, the total population grew from 360 million to more than a billion. By contrast, in one fifty-year period of British rule, 1891-1941, the population only grew from 287 million to 389 million. Sen selected the fifty years from 1951 because the immediate aftermath of independence led to considerable strife and disruption of agriculture.