User:Fowler&fowler/Profiteering and hoarding in the Bengal famine of 1943


 * Quote: “Research on twentieth-century famines contend that on the contrary, speculative hoarding can exacerbate famine situations. Amartya Sen’s influential analysis of the Great Bengali Famine of 1943–44 … builds on the findings of the official Famine Inquiry Commission, which argued that the rise in food prices was ‘more than the natural result of shortage of supply that had occurred.’  Sen blames farmers and grain merchants for converting a ‘moderate short-fall in ‘’production’’ … into an exceptional short-fall in ‘’market release’’ ‘, and found that the famine was due in large part to ‘speculative withdrawal and panic purchase of rice stocks … encouraged by administrative chaos.’ “
 * Quote: “During the war, in 1943–44, Bengal was struck by a terrible famine that claimed somewhere between three and five million lives through starvation and epidemics. Generally regarded as man-made, the famine has long been the subject of much discussion, analysis, and some controversy over the particular contributions of the Allied war effort, hoarding and profiteering in causing it. Although the worst effects were to be found in the villages, the famine had a major impact on Calcutta.   H. S. Suhrawardy was the food minister in the provincial government throughout the famine.  In May 1943, just as it was beginning, he gave a public assurance that there would be no shortage of food in Bengal.  Although there were rumors about lack of rice supplies due to hoarding and profiteering, the Bengal government&mdash;which was by then almost entirely Indianized&mdash;did nothing to prepare Calcutta for the invasion to come.  Villagers walked into the city in search of scraps, some dying by the wayside, the rest arriving half-dead.  There they dragged their emaciated bodies from door to door begging  for ‘’phyan’’, rice water, the starchy liquid left after boiling rice that is usually poured away or used for stiffening clothes.”.
 * Quote: “The year 1943 was a very critical one for the Government of India because it had to cope with the distribution of food grains, a task for which it was not equipped. A Food Department had been established only in December 1942 after the Japanese advance had led to price increases which the government had tried to control in vain.  There was actually no shortage of supply as all the war years had good harvests, but the market went out of gear as traders hoarded grain in expectation of further price rises.  Food grain procurement and storage by government agencies and rationing in the cities were the only effective means of counteracting hoarding and inflationary pressure.  British India became an interventionist state in the last years of the war.  But before the interventionist machinery was fully established, a terrible man-made famine killed about one million people in Bengal in 1943 and many more died subsequently due to malnutrition and diseases.  In the former Congress provinces the British bureaucracy was in full control and could cope with the problems of food administration.  But in Bengal there was still an ‘autonomous’ provincial government which did not want to go against the interest of the grain traders.  The new viceroy, Lord Wavell, finally deployed units of the army to distribute grain in Bengal, but by that time the famine had already claimed its victims, many of whom had died within sight of rice bags whose contents they could no longer afford to buy and which they did not dare to snatch because they were used to a regime which maintained law and order very rigorously.”.
 * Quote: “Second, in Phase II the demand forces were reinforced by the ‘indifferent’ winter crop and by vigorous speculation and panic hoarding.  The hoarding was financially profitable on the basis of even ‘static expectations’: rice prices had more than doubled in the preceding year, while ‘bazaar bill rate’ in Calcutta still stood around 7 per cent per year (the bank deposit rate was below 2 per cent per anum).  There was an abnormally higher withholding of rice stock by farmers and traders from the winter harvest of 1942–3; the normal release following harvest did not take place.   A moderate short-fall in ‘production’ had by then been translated into an exceptional short-fall in ‘market release’.
 * Quote: “For (Adam) Smith, political meddling had long been the cause of famines, not markets or traders. Thomas Malthus, whose second publication was inspired by a near-famine in England in 1799–1800, agreed.  On the other had Amartya Sen blames much of Bengal’s tragedy in 1943–44 on vigorous speculation and hoarding on the part of produces.  Farmers, he claims, exacerbated the crisis by holding back the rice crops they had grown in 1942–43: … Something similar was often alleged during earlier Indian famines.  A contemporary observer compared the speculation during the famine of 1860 to ‘the excitement due to South Sea Schemes of railway manias.’  In western India, ‘dearth was of such obvious advantage to the usurers that it was commonly believed that they used sorcery to prevent rain from falling.’”
 * Quote: “As Sen has shown, the worst Indian famine of the last century&mdash;the Bengal catastrophe of 1943 in which some 3 million people are estimated to have died&mdash;appears actually to have been a ‘boom famine’, the central feature of which was the inflationary economic pressure produced by the contemporary war. … However, in order to identify mechanism of famine prevention, detailed studies are needed of the way in which specific economic and social structures work to preserve or compromise such entitlements.  (What we want to know for instance, is why inflation in food prices led to widespread hoarding and speculation in the Bengal famine of 1943; whereas the same inflationary phenomenon during the Sahelian famine of 1973 encouraged grain stock owners to capitalize on their profits&mdash;without, moreover, averting mass starvation.)”
 * Quote: “A price rise may be of two types, to each of which the market reacts differently.  When a long period of scarcity is anticipated, the universal tendency is to hoard.  This further diminishes supply, and the psychosis of greed and fear, thus reinforced, may push up prices to unprecedented heights, as happened in Bengal in 1943.  On the other hand, when the shortfall is expected to have only a temporary effect, producers and dealers try to sell their stocks while prices remain high.  According to the Lyall Commission, this attitude prevailed in Bengal in 1896–94, there being hardly any large-scale speculation or combination of grain dealers to keep up prices.  Yet, complaints against local banias were not uncommon this year.  There were numerous instances of hoarding and rigging of the market by traders in Patna, Palamau, Lohardaga, and other places … This led to widespread grain riots and intensified local distress, as seen in Patna in October 1896, and in Lohardaga and Rajshahi in 1897.”
 * Quote: “For instance, Sen states that destitution is the ‘road’ to famine. Analysing the Bengal famine of 1943, he points out that many rural families passed through marginal occupations such as paddy husking on their way to total  destitution.  What the analysis fails to capture is that which is reflected in the evidence before the Famine Enquiry Commission.  That the farmers were selling at the top of the market even while their fellow villagers were dying.  That there was evidence of profiteering.  (Nanawathi Papers: Bengal Famine Enquiry Commission, 1945).  That death came at the end of a period of five years of transfer of lands from the poorer peasants to the farmers.  That such a process was long-drawn and its beginnings can be traced to the transfer of lands (‘land theft’) assets five years earlier.”
 * Quote: Though the impact of the famine of 1943 in Jalpaigiri was not as bad as in other parts of Bengal, the stories of misery, coupled with visible signs of hoarding and profiteering by all those who had surplus paddy (this did not include only the bigger jotedars) led to a considerable erosion of the traditional relationship between the adhiar and his giri. It is very difficult to substantiate the feelings of the poorest sections of the adhiars, but many of them evidently received the message that their giris were concerned more with monetary gains and less with their welfare during the war and the famine of the 1940s.  There is no doubt that at this time the biggest jotedars (combining trade and lending) were the biggest hoarders, and thus the thrust of the left-led movements were against such persons … In Dinapur, for example, there were jotedars who had massive stocks of up to 60,000 maunds of paddy in their kholans.
 * Quote: “The situation was worst in Bengal, where the loss of Burmese rice fields and grain hoarding by merchants contributed to a million starvation deaths in 1943 (another 2 million Bengalis died from the effects of famine by 1946).”
 * Quote: “The great famine in Bengal in 1943 was created by rapid inflation, vigorous speculation, and panic hoarding in anticipation of further price increases in time of war, plus administrative chaos through failed procurement, abolition of wholesale price control, and restriction of grain movement which prevented inflows into Bengal.”
 * Quote: “What happened in 1943 was one of the great disasters of the twentieth century: a famine of colossal proportions in which a million and a half people died in Bengal. Its basic cause was the loss of the normal rice imports from Burma because of the Japanese occupation, combined with a devastating cyclone in West Bengal and poor harvest in many parts of India in 1942.  That year had imposed staggering additional burdens on the Bengal administration.  The advance of the Japanese into Assam and the arrival of thousands of British and American troops had choked the Calcutta port facilities and the transport system of Eastern Bengal.  Further dislocation had resulted from the compulsory evacuation of strategic areas of the province, the influx of refugees from Burma and Assam, and bombing raids on Calcutta itself.  Finally, the Quit India uprising of August had again snapped the overextended line of British authority in many districts.  The Bengal Government had no resources left to deal with the food shortage, with its ugly consequences, maldistribution and profiteering, and the summer of 1943 brought hideous tragedy.  For the Hindu bhadralok, forced to be helpless witnesses to the agonising death of thousands upon thousands of their fellow-countrymen, the breakdown was in indictment on the alien Government and its Muslim associates who, in their view, had reduced the Hindus to political impotence.”
 * Quote: “There were several famines during the British period and the last was in 1943 in which, officially, 1.5 million died. But parallel estimates of the number of dead in the Bengal famine were put around 3.5 million.  Enquiries revealed that the famine was created by hoarding and speculation that led to an artificial rise in food prices which people without any purchasing power or cash could not afford.  Secondly, the severeness of (the) famine could have been curtailed had the government stopped exporting food grains during the lean years.”
 * Quote: “The price of rice, using 1939–1940 as an index of 100, increased from 109 in 1941 to 385 in 1942, while the wages of rural agricultural and craft workers rose only from 110 to 125 in the same years.  This mean that their ability to purchase enough rice to survive fell precipitously.  Poor sharecroppers did not suffer, even though they many have been equally 'poor' (in terms of annual income) because their “income” was paid in rice, so its rising price did not affect them.  When famine became widespread among rural wage laborers, farmer and merchants also began hoarding rice, further increasing its price.  High prices encouraged farmers to grow more rice in 1943 and 1944.  The irony of this was that ‘while the famine filled millions … Bengal was producing the largest rice crop in history in 1943’ “.
 * Quote: “There were a few natural factors of course, like a devastating cyclone in Midnapur; but that alone did not cause the famine. As Greenough points out, the per capita entitlement of rice was gradually going down in Bengal over a long period.  In 1943 it reached a crisis point due to multiple factors, such as the breakdown of an already vulnerable rice marketing system, which had for long remained completely unsupervised and uncontrolled, leading to hoarding and speculation.  What added to this were a government procurement policy that prioritised official and military requirements over local needs of subsistence and the wartime stresses, like the ‘denial policy’, the refugee influx from Burma into Chittagong and the disappearance of imported rice from Burma.  The relief operations failed miserably; while the government tried to save Calcutta at the expense of the countryside, the Marwari Relief Committee and the Hindu Mahasabha relief committees targeted only the middle classes.  The peasantry, the worst sufferers of the famine, had nowhere to go.  It is true that this unusual scarcity of food caused by the exorbitant price of rice&mdash;that shot beyond the reach of ordinary people&mdash;did not cause any food riot in Bengal; instead, the violence, as Greenough argues, turned ‘inward’ and ‘downward’ destroying all conventional relationaships of patronage and dependency.”
 * Quote: “According to Sen, the cause of the famine was not lack, of food per se, but rather a perceived lack of food that led to widespread panic and hoarding among millions in the Bengal region. The British who ruled India at the time, were too distracted by their involvement in World War II to effectively head off the tragedy.  Because the ruling government lacked the resources and will to counteract what was essentially a rumor of food shortage, people hoarded food and refused to share with neighbors.  People died in the shadows of well-stocked stores because the state protected the legal rights of the storeowners to deny food to those who needed it.”
 * Quote: Though the impact of the famine of 1943 in Jalpaigiri was not as bad as in other parts of Bengal, the stories of misery, coupled with visible signs of hoarding and profiteering by all those who had surplus paddy (this did not include only the bigger jotedars) led to a considerable erosion of the traditional relationship between the adhiar and his giri. It is very difficult to substantiate the feelings of the poorest sections of the adhiars, but many of them evidently received the message that their giris were concerned more with monetary gains and less with their welfare during the war and the famine of the 1940s.  There is no doubt that at this time the biggest jotedars (combining trade and lending) were the biggest hoarders, and thus the thrust of the left-led movements were against such persons … In Dinapur, for example, there were jotedars who had massive stocks of up to 60,000 maunds of paddy in their kholans.
 * Quote: “The situation was worst in Bengal, where the loss of Burmese rice fields and grain hoarding by merchants contributed to a million starvation deaths in 1943 (another 2 million Bengalis died from the effects of famine by 1946).”
 * Quote: “The great famine in Bengal in 1943 was created by rapid inflation, vigorous speculation, and panic hoarding in anticipation of further price increases in time of war, plus administrative chaos through failed procurement, abolition of wholesale price control, and restriction of grain movement which prevented inflows into Bengal.”
 * Quote: “What happened in 1943 was one of the great disasters of the twentieth century: a famine of colossal proportions in which a million and a half people died in Bengal. Its basic cause was the loss of the normal rice imports from Burma because of the Japanese occupation, combined with a devastating cyclone in West Bengal and poor harvest in many parts of India in 1942.  That year had imposed staggering additional burdens on the Bengal administration.  The advance of the Japanese into Assam and the arrival of thousands of British and American troops had choked the Calcutta port facilities and the transport system of Eastern Bengal.  Further dislocation had resulted from the compulsory evacuation of strategic areas of the province, the influx of refugees from Burma and Assam, and bombing raids on Calcutta itself.  Finally, the Quit India uprising of August had again snapped the overextended line of British authority in many districts.  The Bengal Government had no resources left to deal with the food shortage, with its ugly consequences, maldistribution and profiteering, and the summer of 1943 brought hideous tragedy.  For the Hindu bhadralok, forced to be helpless witnesses to the agonising death of thousands upon thousands of their fellow-countrymen, the breakdown was in indictment on the alien Government and its Muslim associates who, in their view, had reduced the Hindus to political impotence.”
 * Quote: “There were several famines during the British period and the last was in 1943 in which, officially, 1.5 million died. But parallel estimates of the number of dead in the Bengal famine were put around 3.5 million.  Enquiries revealed that the famine was created by hoarding and speculation that led to an artificial rise in food prices which people without any purchasing power or cash could not afford.  Secondly, the severeness of (the) famine could have been curtailed had the government stopped exporting food grains during the lean years.”
 * Quote: “The price of rice, using 1939–1940 as an index of 100, increased from 109 in 1941 to 385 in 1942, while the wages of rural agricultural and craft workers rose only from 110 to 125 in the same years.  This mean that their ability to purchase enough rice to survive fell precipitously.  Poor sharecroppers did not suffer, even though they many have been equally 'poor' (in terms of annual income) because their “income” was paid in rice, so its rising price did not affect them.  When famine became widespread among rural wage laborers, farmer and merchants also began hoarding rice, further increasing its price.  High prices encouraged farmers to grow more rice in 1943 and 1944.  The irony of this was that ‘while the famine filled millions … Bengal was producing the largest rice crop in history in 1943’ “.
 * Quote: “There were a few natural factors of course, like a devastating cyclone in Midnapur; but that alone did not cause the famine. As Greenough points out, the per capita entitlement of rice was gradually going down in Bengal over a long period.  In 1943 it reached a crisis point due to multiple factors, such as the breakdown of an already vulnerable rice marketing system, which had for long remained completely unsupervised and uncontrolled, leading to hoarding and speculation.  What added to this were a government procurement policy that prioritised official and military requirements over local needs of subsistence and the wartime stresses, like the ‘denial policy’, the refugee influx from Burma into Chittagong and the disappearance of imported rice from Burma.  The relief operations failed miserably; while the government tried to save Calcutta at the expense of the countryside, the Marwari Relief Committee and the Hindu Mahasabha relief committees targeted only the middle classes.  The peasantry, the worst sufferers of the famine, had nowhere to go.  It is true that this unusual scarcity of food caused by the exorbitant price of rice&mdash;that shot beyond the reach of ordinary people&mdash;did not cause any food riot in Bengal; instead, the violence, as Greenough argues, turned ‘inward’ and ‘downward’ destroying all conventional relationaships of patronage and dependency.”
 * Quote: “According to Sen, the cause of the famine was not lack, of food per se, but rather a perceived lack of food that led to widespread panic and hoarding among millions in the Bengal region. The British who ruled India at the time, were too distracted by their involvement in World War II to effectively head off the tragedy.  Because the ruling government lacked the resources and will to counteract what was essentially a rumor of food shortage, people hoarded food and refused to share with neighbors.  People died in the shadows of well-stocked stores because the state protected the legal rights of the storeowners to deny food to those who needed it.”
 * Quote: “There were several famines during the British period and the last was in 1943 in which, officially, 1.5 million died. But parallel estimates of the number of dead in the Bengal famine were put around 3.5 million.  Enquiries revealed that the famine was created by hoarding and speculation that led to an artificial rise in food prices which people without any purchasing power or cash could not afford.  Secondly, the severeness of (the) famine could have been curtailed had the government stopped exporting food grains during the lean years.”
 * Quote: “The price of rice, using 1939–1940 as an index of 100, increased from 109 in 1941 to 385 in 1942, while the wages of rural agricultural and craft workers rose only from 110 to 125 in the same years.  This mean that their ability to purchase enough rice to survive fell precipitously.  Poor sharecroppers did not suffer, even though they many have been equally 'poor' (in terms of annual income) because their “income” was paid in rice, so its rising price did not affect them.  When famine became widespread among rural wage laborers, farmer and merchants also began hoarding rice, further increasing its price.  High prices encouraged farmers to grow more rice in 1943 and 1944.  The irony of this was that ‘while the famine filled millions … Bengal was producing the largest rice crop in history in 1943’ “.
 * Quote: “There were a few natural factors of course, like a devastating cyclone in Midnapur; but that alone did not cause the famine. As Greenough points out, the per capita entitlement of rice was gradually going down in Bengal over a long period.  In 1943 it reached a crisis point due to multiple factors, such as the breakdown of an already vulnerable rice marketing system, which had for long remained completely unsupervised and uncontrolled, leading to hoarding and speculation.  What added to this were a government procurement policy that prioritised official and military requirements over local needs of subsistence and the wartime stresses, like the ‘denial policy’, the refugee influx from Burma into Chittagong and the disappearance of imported rice from Burma.  The relief operations failed miserably; while the government tried to save Calcutta at the expense of the countryside, the Marwari Relief Committee and the Hindu Mahasabha relief committees targeted only the middle classes.  The peasantry, the worst sufferers of the famine, had nowhere to go.  It is true that this unusual scarcity of food caused by the exorbitant price of rice&mdash;that shot beyond the reach of ordinary people&mdash;did not cause any food riot in Bengal; instead, the violence, as Greenough argues, turned ‘inward’ and ‘downward’ destroying all conventional relationaships of patronage and dependency.”
 * Quote: “According to Sen, the cause of the famine was not lack, of food per se, but rather a perceived lack of food that led to widespread panic and hoarding among millions in the Bengal region. The British who ruled India at the time, were too distracted by their involvement in World War II to effectively head off the tragedy.  Because the ruling government lacked the resources and will to counteract what was essentially a rumor of food shortage, people hoarded food and refused to share with neighbors.  People died in the shadows of well-stocked stores because the state protected the legal rights of the storeowners to deny food to those who needed it.”
 * Quote: “There were a few natural factors of course, like a devastating cyclone in Midnapur; but that alone did not cause the famine. As Greenough points out, the per capita entitlement of rice was gradually going down in Bengal over a long period.  In 1943 it reached a crisis point due to multiple factors, such as the breakdown of an already vulnerable rice marketing system, which had for long remained completely unsupervised and uncontrolled, leading to hoarding and speculation.  What added to this were a government procurement policy that prioritised official and military requirements over local needs of subsistence and the wartime stresses, like the ‘denial policy’, the refugee influx from Burma into Chittagong and the disappearance of imported rice from Burma.  The relief operations failed miserably; while the government tried to save Calcutta at the expense of the countryside, the Marwari Relief Committee and the Hindu Mahasabha relief committees targeted only the middle classes.  The peasantry, the worst sufferers of the famine, had nowhere to go.  It is true that this unusual scarcity of food caused by the exorbitant price of rice&mdash;that shot beyond the reach of ordinary people&mdash;did not cause any food riot in Bengal; instead, the violence, as Greenough argues, turned ‘inward’ and ‘downward’ destroying all conventional relationaships of patronage and dependency.”
 * Quote: “According to Sen, the cause of the famine was not lack, of food per se, but rather a perceived lack of food that led to widespread panic and hoarding among millions in the Bengal region. The British who ruled India at the time, were too distracted by their involvement in World War II to effectively head off the tragedy.  Because the ruling government lacked the resources and will to counteract what was essentially a rumor of food shortage, people hoarded food and refused to share with neighbors.  People died in the shadows of well-stocked stores because the state protected the legal rights of the storeowners to deny food to those who needed it.”
 * Quote: “According to Sen, the cause of the famine was not lack, of food per se, but rather a perceived lack of food that led to widespread panic and hoarding among millions in the Bengal region. The British who ruled India at the time, were too distracted by their involvement in World War II to effectively head off the tragedy.  Because the ruling government lacked the resources and will to counteract what was essentially a rumor of food shortage, people hoarded food and refused to share with neighbors.  People died in the shadows of well-stocked stores because the state protected the legal rights of the storeowners to deny food to those who needed it.”
 * Quote: “According to Sen, the cause of the famine was not lack, of food per se, but rather a perceived lack of food that led to widespread panic and hoarding among millions in the Bengal region. The British who ruled India at the time, were too distracted by their involvement in World War II to effectively head off the tragedy.  Because the ruling government lacked the resources and will to counteract what was essentially a rumor of food shortage, people hoarded food and refused to share with neighbors.  People died in the shadows of well-stocked stores because the state protected the legal rights of the storeowners to deny food to those who needed it.”