Bowbrick (2022) - Falsehoods and Myths in Famine Research, The Bengal Famine

Received: 30 August 2021 Revised: 24 January 2022 Accepted: 26 January 2022
DOI: 10.1002/jid.3635
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Falsehoods and myths in famine research: The

Bengal famine and Daoud
Peter Bowbrick
Independent researcher, Edinburgh, UK

Abstract
Correspondence Decision makers on famine and food policy may be
Peter Bowbrick, 99/3 Warrender Park Road,
influenced by myths, some of which reappear after being
Edinburgh EH9 1EW, UK.
Email: peter.bowbrick@blueyonder.co.uk refuted. The subject of famine is highly emotive and politi-
cally charged which means that many authors cherry-pick
or invent evidence, suppress evidence or use bad econom-
ics. Daoud's (2018) paper ‘Synthesizing the Malthusian and
Senian approaches on scarcity: A realist account’ contains
many falsehoods supporting myths, both misrepresenta-
tions of what people have written on the 1943 Bengal fam-
ine (suggestio falsi) and suppression of what they did say
(suppressio veri). The statistics are unacceptable. The claims
about the Malthusian approach are untenable.
KEYWORDS
Bengal famine, famine falsehoods, famine myths
1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N
But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis. (Wollstonecraft,
1994/1792, p. 110)
The subject of the 1943 Bengal famine is highly emotive and politically charged, and many of those writings on
it carefully select evidence that supports what they want to believe, suppressing evidence that does not. Some
invent evidence to support their beliefs. Many use economics that is illogical and bears little relation to the econom-
ics of food markets. The result may depend on the writer's nationality, provincial origin, religion, politics, gut feeling
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permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no
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2 BOWBRICK
or favourite research programme. Myths—beliefs that may be passionately held, though there is no evidence or the-
ory to support them—get more attention than evidence. Some people have an almost religious belief in certain myths
or conclusions. Fraud is now rife throughout academia; the top editors in health and medicine are now suggesting
that fraud is so widespread that about 20% of published papers are fraudulent and that they should start with the
presumption that a paper is faked (Smith, 2021). Almost inevitably, honest famine researchers today, people who are
themselves rigorous and who stick to the rules, inadvertently use and cite research that is faked or research that
itself uses and cites faked research. The literature is contaminated. We must assume that most chains of research on
the Bengal famine have been contaminated since 1943. It is now unsafe to rely on secondary sources or commentar-
ies: We must go back to contemporary sources.
In normal food policy work, we have to deal with myths, but the number is small, and they are familiar, produced
by a small set of people. A wider range of myths and rumours circulate as a food crisis develops (I give an insider's
view of a real food crisis in Griffiths (2003), written under a nom de guerre as I was whistleblowing against the World
Bank). A few myths appear time after time in food crises, such as blaming evil speculators for shortages.
In this paper, I discuss how one set of myths, the ones that influenced decision makers in Bengal in 1943, have
been refuted, then revived, then refuted again, then revived again and have become dominant again. Evidence and
analysis that has been shown to be wrong reappears. I show that this process continues, that a recent paper
(Daoud, 2018) contains many falsehoods, in spite of the author citing the papers that show them to be falsehoods.
2 | THE POST-FAMINE CONSENSUS
The post-famine consensus, expressed most fully in the report of the Famine Inquiry Commission (1945), was that
the deaths occurred because of the failure of the decision makers to apply the standard Indian legislation (Bengal
Government, 1913), and making food available were it was needed, by providing it free or as part of a food-for-work
programme to those who could not afford to buy it and by rationing.1 This was largely because decision makers in
the Government of India, the Government of Bengal and other provincial governments believed, or said they
believed myths. These included the belief that Bengal had plenty of food during the famine, that speculation and
hoarding took vast amounts of food off the market, that inflation had an enormous effect and that some groups of
the population were somehow managing to eat vastly more than any group has ever eaten, leaving insufficient food
for the rest. The Famine Inquiry Commission set up these myths as hypotheses to test, then tested them rigorously
and showed them to be false (this formal approach is more obvious in Braund's (1944) evidence to the Commission).
The Indian statistical profession separately assessed the claim that Bengal had plenty of food and showed that it was
untenable (I discuss this below).
This consensus remained dominant until Amartya Sen revived the myths 30 years later, presenting them as his
own contributions. His claim was that if the decision makers had had these beliefs in 1943, there would have been
no famine. I have pointed out that they did have the same beliefs as Sen and that there was a famine as a result
(Bowbrick, 1986), which Sen has not denied. In fact, the Famine Inquiry Commission had refuted Sen's beliefs
30 years before he wrote them.
A model of an impossible situation is necessary illogical, and it is possible to refute an illogical model in many dif-
ferent ways because there are contradictions everywhere you look. It is not surprising, therefore, that people with
different professional backgrounds, different sets of theoretical and analytical skills and different sources of informa-
tion and raw data have refuted Sen's theory of the Bengal famine from a range of perspectives. I refuted Sen's theory
of the cause of the 1943 Bengal famine (Bowbrick, 1986, 1987, 1988, 2008). I presented 13 rigorous, formal,
evidenced, refutations, six of which were fatal to Sen's entire theory and seven of which were fatal to significant
1
Many of the Commission's criticisms fell on Binay Ranjan (B.R.) Sen, the official who was responsible for famine relief in the Bengal Government up to
September 1943, who later became Director-General of Food for all India and became a very effective Director-General of FAO. Tellingly, he accepted the
criticism and was complimentary about the Commission (Sen, 1982, pp. 48–49, 53).
BOWBRICK 3
parts of it. They are independent: Even if one, or several, could be shown to be invalid, the rest would remain
unchallenged. In fact, neither Sen nor anybody else has even attempted to challenge any of them. Nor has there
been any attempt to counter my evidence that Sen systematically misrepresented the facts in his sources in more
than 30 instances. Tauger (2003, 2006, 2009) produced a formal, rigorous, scrupulous, analysis of the famine which,
similarly, refutes Sen again and again, from different directions. Dewey (1978), Das (1949) and Tauger review the ref-
utations by the Indian statistics profession. Other critics include Goswami (1990), Dyson and Maharatna (1991),
Dyson (1991, 1996) and Basu (1984, 1986).2 Again, Sen has made no attempt to reply to the refutations. I do not
suggest that this is in any way a full list of the refutations of Sen: It is difficult to identify them because it is normal in
this programme for people not to cite research which does not support their personal beliefs or which refutes them.
This is suppressio veri (in this paper, I distinguish two forms of falsehood using the formal terms suppressio veri, a mis-
representation of the truth by the omission or suppression of certain key facts—a lie of omission—and suggestio falsi,
a misrepresentation of the truth brought about by implying a falsehood to be true).
These refutations have not been challenged. Yes, people criticising Sen have received personal abuse, but this
would normally be interpreted as admission that there was no answer to the criticisms (Flegal, 2021). Sen has
abused critics, with rants, personal abuse and abuse of the evidence presented: See, for example, Nolan (1991);
Nolan (1993); Nolan and Sender (1992); Sen (1991); Sen (1992); Sen (1993). Sometimes, he combines abuse with
new falsehoods as when replying to Bowbrick (1985, 1986, 1987), to Tauger's (2011a, 2011b) criticisms, and to
Mukerjee's attack on Churchill (Mukerjee, Madhusree, reply by Amartya Sen, 2011). See Bowbrick (2020) for a
detailed analysis of this.
3 | A N E X A M P L E OF F A L S E H O O D S
Researchers in the field have continued to use the myths, the falsehoods and the theory three quarters of a century
after they were refuted. This paper examines a recent example. Daoud (2018) wrote a lengthy paper, ‘Synthesizing
the Malthusian and Senian approaches on scarcity: a realist account’, using the 1943 Bengal famine as the factual
basis. It was published in The Cambridge Journal of Economics, as serious economics—which must alarm economists
specialising in food policy and marketing in poor countries. I show that his statements about this famine and his use
of the literature are falsehoods, of the form suggestio falsi, and suppressio veri.
Fundamental to Daoud's paper, and to all of Sen's theory, is Sen's repeated assertion that there was at least 11%
more food available in Bengal in 1943 than there had been in 1941, when there was no famine, so the famine
could not have been caused by a decline in food availability (Sen, 1984). Sen stated repeatedly that his estimates
were conservative and that the difference he calculated between the figures for 1941 and 1943 was accurate and
reliable.3 This requires that the statistics he uses are virtually 100% accurate: If the availability statistics are wrong
by just 20%, not unusual for agricultural statistics, the 1943 figure is somewhere between 26% below the 1941 fig-
ure and 66% above it, so the claims of accuracy and reliability of the difference are false by a vast percentage. It is
shown below that the availability figures were known to have a far higher error than just 20%, and to be biased,
so the difference which Sen relies on has an extremely high error, and the reliability that he claims has a fantastically
high error.
However, Daoud accepts Sen's claim and says, ‘Given the presented material on the Bengal famine, one of the
central questions is as follows: “How was the Bengal famine possible given that there was enough food?”’
(Daoud, 2018, p. 466). ‘However, given that there was enough food in the first place, this must also be considered a
peripheral action’ (Daoud, 2018, p. 467). ‘… there was a general sufficiency of food in the Bengal system … there
2
I should be pleased to share my personal archive on the Bengal famine with anyone interested.
3
Bowbrick (1986) sets out some examples of Sen's claims (p. 115).
4 BOWBRICK
was enough food in Bengal’ (Daoud, 2018, p. 465). ‘… fact that people did not have to starve because there was
enough food’ (Daoud, 2018, p. 465). ‘Nevertheless, because there was enough food in the Bengal system’
(Daoud, 2018, p. 466), ‘… because there was enough food in the Bengal system’ (Daoud, 2018, p. 467). ‘… cannot
explain the Bengal famine, because the food supply was sufficient’ (Daoud, 2018, p. 463) (His sole source appears
to be Sen).
He states repeatedly that the famine was not caused by a shortage of food, or by a crop failure, and that Bengal
had plenty of food. In spite of this, there was a famine in which, it has been argued, at least two-thirds of the popula-
tion went hungry.4 Millions went very hungry indeed—3.3%–5% of the population died. We may guess that these
people ate one or two million tons less rice, or the calorific equivalent—no meaningful statistics ever existed.5 What
happened to this one or two million tons? Either some of the population ate much more than normal, or someone
took it off the market. Daoud does not suggest any alternatives.
In the next three sections, I examine these propositions showing from three different directions that Daoud's
claims conflict with the evidence in his sources. I then turn to other issues such as his political conclusions, his misuse
of statistics and his Malthusian approach.
4 | COULD EXTRA CONSUMPTION HAVE CAUSED THE FAMINE?
Daoud states repeatedly that there was plenty of food in Bengal. Generally, he takes the view that prices are not
influenced by supply and demand, that there were high food prices in Bengal for some unexplained reason and that
because of severe economic, political and social distress, increased unemployment and wage decline (p. 460) and
because a considerable number of people were not required by the war economy (i.e. unemployment) and those
who had a job did not receive a salary that matched the dramatic price increase (p. 463–464), a large part of the pop-
ulation went hungry. He does not consider that standard economics and our experience would expect such a fall in
effective demand to cause prices to crash, to be well below normal, rather than six times as high. The fact that the
prices increased indicates a large fall in supply.
He also says, 'Bhatia argued that the crop yield in 1928 was sufficient only for 45 weeks and in 1936, for
44 weeks. In both these years there was considerable distress but no abnormal rise in prices and, consequently, no
deaths from starvation’ (Bhatia, 1967, p. 318). Again, there is no relationship between supply and demand. He does
not explain how this could mean anything, but that Bhatia's supply figures were wrong, and there was a very much
lower supply than the statistics state.
Daoud does make passing mention of food going from rural to urban areas, because of government policy and
‘the demand of the labour market’ (pp. 464–467), but gives no explanation. He can be read as saying that (a) there
was plenty of food, (b) there was a fall in demand, particularly in the rural areas and (c) urban dwellers got normal
4
The post-famine consensus seems to be ‘it would probably be an underestimate to say that two thirds of the total population were affected by it’
(Department of Anthropology, Calcutta University, quoted by Rajan, 1944). An independent estimate was made by Mahalanobis et al. (1946), ‘A sample
survey of after effects of Bengal famine of 1943’, based on a sample survey of the survivors. They estimate that of the 10.2 million families in the rural
population, 1.6 million sold some or all of their land or mortgaged it, 1.1 million sold plough cattle, and in 0.7 million the head of the household changed to
a lower status occupation (including 0.26 million becoming destitute). These figures are not mutually exclusive: Many families suffered loss of land and
cattle, and many became destitute because they had sold all they had. Taking an average family size of 5.4, it seems that perhaps 10–15 million people
were affected in these ways. However, many more were affected in ways that would not have been recorded in these statistics. Most went hungry; many
were hit by disease; many were impoverished but kept the same occupation; many sold all they had except their land. ‘Village labourers and artisans, at a
somewhat higher economic level, sold their domestic utensils, ornaments, parts of their dwellings such as doors, windows and corrugated iron sheets, trade
implements, clothes and domestic animals if they had any—sold indeed anything on which money could be raised—to more fortunate neighbours’ (Famine
Inquiry Commission, 1945, p. 67) (Bowbrick, 1986, p. 117).
5
From studies elsewhere, we may guess that average normal consumption may have been 2600 calories per day with the poor eating 2200 calories. The
evidence of the Berlin Airlift, where a blockade by the Red Army meant that the food intake was carefully monitored, is that adults in a sedentary
occupation can remain healthy in the long term on 1550 calories (Magee, 1951). It is quite possible, therefore, that the two-thirds of the population that
went hungry ate 300–500 calories less per head, or one to two million tons rice equivalent. Indeed, they could have eaten significantly less.
BOWBRICK 5
supplies, which leaves no explanation of what happened to the one or two million tons, or of why prices did not col-
lapse as a result. I have not seen this argument in the literature.
The other possibility is that he meant, but did not say, that large quantities of food were bought at famine prices
to feed urban factory workers, including those producing war materials, and so much more was eaten by them that
there was not enough left for the rest of the population. This is broadly in line with the argument put forward by
Sen, for instance. I examine this argument below.
This argument suggests that the famine was caused by some of the six million urban population, workers in Cal-
cutta probably, eating more than they did normally, leaving so little for the rest that more than forty million people
went hungry, ten million went very hungry and two to three million died. This change in eating patterns allegedly
occurred suddenly in November 1942 and ended in January 1944, when consumption returned to normal. He omits
the fact that the famine started at the time of the poor 1942/1943 harvest and came to an end when the excellent
1943/1944 rice crop came on the market, which suggests that the famine was caused by crop failures. [Correction
added on 23 May 2023, after first online publication: In the preceding sentence, the years of the excellent rice crop
have been corrected from ‘1942/1943’ to ‘1943/1944’.]
The Famine Inquiry Commission (1945), which Daoud cites repeatedly, makes it clear that many urban
employees had fixed rations or dearness allowances which did not allow them to eat more, that very few people were
paid enough to buy at famine prices and that the population of Calcutta fell by 15% during the famine so urban con-
sumption was less than normal. The Famine Inquiry Commission also reported that Calcutta had great difficulty in
getting supplies, that the amount distributed was often cut because of shortage of food and that food consumption
in Calcutta fell throughout the famine (e.g. pp. 31, 32, 63). I also mentioned this in a paper Daoud cites repeatedly
(1986, p. 117). See also Das (1949), Brown (1944), Pinnell (1944) and Braund (1944) for contemporary descriptions.
I examined a slightly different claim made by Sen and showed that it would require that some people ate vastly
more than any population in history has eaten (1986). It is a matter for concern, therefore, that Daoud does not
examine how much people would have eaten under his model. Let us assume, contrary to the evidence, that a signifi-
cant number of people in the cities did eat a lot more during the famine, say, one million of the very poorest increas-
ing calories consumed per day from 1800 to 2600, starting in November 1942 and ending in January 1944. Let us
also pretend that nobody left Calcutta. The extra consumption is then 1.4% of the Famine Inquiry Commission's
‘Adjusted Current Supply for 1943’, for rice only, and a smaller proportion of total food, at a time when Sen and
Daoud claim that there was 11% more food available than in 1941. This certainly cannot have produced the price
changes reported or the widespread hunger and starvation. They would have to have consumed something in the
order of 14 times more—eating 2 week's food each day—to cause the hunger and starvation that was reported. This
explanation is impossible and, therefore, wrong.
5 | SPECULATION
The alternative explanation he presents is speculation. There are several myths about speculation being a cause of
famine. These are popular because it is nice to have someone to blame. Those who do not want to believe that a
famine was caused by a drought or floods also like these myths. The myths are dangerous. The Famine Inquiry Com-
mission shows that the Government of Bengal failed to take the necessary action to prevent the famine largely
because they chose to believe that there was enough food available in the country but that very large quantities
were being withheld from the market by speculators (I discuss these below).
Daoud refers repeatedly to speculation as being a cause of the famine. It is important in his claim that the famine
was not caused by crop failures. There is considerable coverage of this in the literature he cites on other things, but
he cites only two publications, which is surprising. He cites the Famine Inquiry Commission repeatedly but does not
mention its examination of and rejection of the hypothesis of speculation causing famine. He ends up with a mixture
of different and contradictory speculation myths.
6 BOWBRICK
5.1 | Speculation that could cause famine
The different types of speculation involved are discussed in detail in my refutation of Sen. I emphasise:
Speculation would only have caused the famine if it reduced the total supply on the market. Neither
the Famine Commission nor anyone else has suggested that speculators reduced total supply either
by exporting or holding stocks until the next season (which would have lost individual traders a lot of
money). On the contrary, the traders imported (legally or illegally) all the grain they could buy. Fur-
thermore, house-to-house searches for grain in mid-1943 showed that there were no enormous
stocks. The failure of speculators to respond to the government's market intervention also suggests
that there were no large stocks. (Bowbrick, 1987 p. 119)
It is surprising that Daoud should cite me repeatedly elsewhere, but suppress my agricultural economics analysis
of speculation—agricultural economics has a large body of theory on, and experience of, agricultural speculation
which the current famine research programme does not draw on.
For speculation to cause a famine, a cartel of traders must combine to withdraw a large amount of food, perhaps
one or two million tons in this case, from the market so the supply falls to famine levels and prices rise to famine
levels. The one or two million tons (28–56 million bags) must be destroyed, exported or kept in store for a year or
two, something that would be difficult to keep secret. If a cartel had existed, it would have to be run by a small num-
ber of very large traders (I have set out the economics of this speculation in some detail elsewhere (Bowbrick, 2022),
covering aspects that do not appear in textbooks showing how it would have to be organised and showing that it
would have been irrational in the extreme for any traders to attempt it).
Again, it is surprising that Daoud does not mention the fact that the Famine Inquiry Commission showed that
this speculation did not happen. The Famine Inquiry Commission (1945) examines whether such stocks existed: ‘In
the first week of June, 1943 the Government of Bengal launched a province-wide “food drive” … “To ascertain the
actual statistical position, to locate hoards …”’ (p. 55). The ‘intelligence staff of the Civil Supplies’ examined the
stocks of the big merchants and traders, the only people who could be holding the vast stocks required6 (p. 57). They
found only that most traders had significantly less than they would have had in normal years. The Food Drive confis-
cated stocks from a wide range of people, without any suggestion that they were unusual speculative stocks: ‘Again,
25% of all stocks in excess of 300 maunds found with any individual owner, whether a trader or agriculturist, was to
be requisitioned. The stocks obtained by requisitioning were 23,000 tons of rice and 18,000 tons of paddy’ (p. 56).
This is miniscule in relation to the one or two million tons needed to cause a famine. This speculation did not happen.
5.2 | Normal speculation with no shortage
If we are to accept Daoud's view that there was no shortage, we could expect normal speculation, where traders buy
grain after the harvest and spread out sales throughout the season. Prices increase to cover storage costs. Towards
the end of the season, prices may rise or fall as traders realise that their beliefs in availability were wrong, and to
allow for the next crop being large or small. The effect is to level out prices and consumption. It cannot cause a
famine.
Daoud appears to believe that traders can just put up their prices regardless of supply or demand. The orthodox
expectation is that if one trader doubles the selling price, customers move to competitors and the trader goes out of
6
Pinnell (1944) and Braund (1944) show that these searches were backed up with Special Branch (security police) interception of letters and telephone
calls, asking banks to identify anyone borrowing enough money to store significant quantities of food, offering rewards to anyone identifying the
speculative stocks, etc. And 60 million hungry Bengalis were looking for these enormous stocks.
BOWBRICK 7
business. If it was possible to cause a famine in this way, just by traders deciding to put up prices, most countries
would have famines most years.
5.3 | Normal speculation after a crop failure
The Commission examined the speculation rumour at length (1945, pp. 54–58) and found that there was indeed nor-
mal, within-season speculation: From late 1942, traders who believed that the crop was going to be very low bought
all the grain they could get finance for in the belief that prices were going to be very high before the end of 1943.
The high prices meant that landlords and rural moneylenders had enough money to withhold rice from the market
rather than sell it immediately at what they could see was a low price. Large manufacturers bought grain to protect
their staff from famine prices. (It is the amount stored rather than who holds it that is significant.)
This normal speculation means that available grain is spread out throughout the year, and it may not change the
death rate, just extract high profits from the consumer. Importantly, though, this normal speculation does not cause
the famine: It enables speculators to profit from a famine that is going to occur anyway. The high prices cause desti-
tution, which in this case resulted in deaths in the long term, years after the famine stopped. The alternative of com-
pulsory purchase by government and rationing with the same total supply, which was adopted in other provinces,
may mean that different groups starve and may reduce the number who die during the famine, but it reduces the
number of destitutes.
With normal speculation, one expects prices to be fairly static throughout the year, with prices rising enough to
cover traders' costs. Prices also rise or fall late in the year, as traders realise they have under- or overestimated sup-
plies and as they make allowance for whether the next crop is expected to be good or bad. This is not just a matter
of a theoretical possibility: It is how grain traders work. However, in 1942–1943, prices continued to rise month
after month and eventually reached a level far higher than the price at harvest time. In spite of the fact that the
1943/1944 rice crop was excellent, there was no collapse in prices before harvest. Daoud's interpretation requires
that wicked speculators just kept pushing up the price regardless of supply and demand (p. 466) and that thousands
of competing traders acted in perfect concert to push up prices, even though individual traders would make a lot of
money by selling their stocks before prices crashed. This is so far from what is considered possible by theory and
what is observed in practice that we cannot call it anything but a myth. But it is a common myth.
The price rise can be explained using standard theory. During the year, traders' perceptions kept changing; it
became apparent that the government was not going to import as wholesalers had recommended, that other prov-
inces were unwilling to sell to Bengal, that the post-harvest damage to fungus-infected rice was greater than
expected and that prices had risen more sharply than they had forecast when the government tried to buy non-
existent surpluses. Changes in Government of India policy increased risk. Accordingly, they expected prices to rise
even more through the year, and so they reduced sales.
There is, however, one way in which normal, within-year, speculation could have caused problems. The traders,
tapping their network of suppliers, concluded that the 1942–1943 rice crop would be perhaps half the average crop
and that a serious famine would follow if there were not major imports, of well over a million tons. Traders could rea-
sonably assume that the Government would act on their warnings and import one to two million tons from March to
July, so they arranged to sell their stocks at the rate that would maximise profit, selling them before the imports
brought the prices down. In fact, these imports did not take place, so, with every day that passed, the stocks per per-
son per day before the next crop arrived fell. This, of course, pushed up prices sharply. This explains why prices con-
tinued to rise during the famine, while normally one would expect that the prices to rise sharply once it was realised
that there would be a short crop and to stay reasonably steady until the next crop.
Surprisingly, Daoud cites the Famine Inquiry Commission and Bowbrick repeatedly, as well as Bhatia, Sen and
Mansergh without mentioning the traders' warnings: suppressio veri.
8 BOWBRICK
5.4 | Mass hysteria
Occasionally, there is mass hysteria in a market with traders investing in a product for irrational reasons—the
Dutch Tulipomania is an often-quoted example. Could all the traders have irrationally and wrongly chosen to
believe that there was a serious shortage when there was not? They would invest in stocks and withhold them
until prices reached the expected level, and they could sell at a vast profit. High prices would cause hunger and
destitution.
In Bengal, it would have been inevitable at some stage that it would become clear that there was more in stock
than could be sold at a high price and traders would have rushed to sell their stocks before their competitors could
and prices would crash below their purchase price. In Bengal, the 1943/1944 crop was excellent, so the crash would
have been dramatic.
Two reasons to reject this myth in Bengal are that prices did not crash like this and, as the Famine Inquiry Com-
mission reports, the traders did not hold abnormally high stocks, but rather abnormally low stocks.
6 | AVAILABILITY STATISTICS
What is the foundation for Daoud's repeated claim that there was plenty of food in Bengal during the
famine? It is deeply disturbing that Daoud repeatedly cites sources which refute these claims
(e.g. Bowbrick, 1986; Famine Inquiry Commission, 1945; Tauger, 2003, 2006, 2009) but suppresses the fact
that they have attacked the claims: suppressio veri. It would not, of course, have been sufficient to mention that
they had attacked the claims: He should have examined their attacks carefully and made sure that he under-
stood what they were and how serious they were. I show below that nobody doing so would have made the
statements he made.
Contrary to Daoud's repeated statements, there were no statistics on food production, rice production or food
availability. There were rice crop forecasts, which are inevitably much less reliable than measurements of production,
and none of the crop forecasts had any statistical credibility. In 1986, I summarised the criticisms of the statistics by
contemporary statisticians in a paper that Daoud cites repeatedly.
Desai (1953) provides a useful review of the agricultural and other statistics of this period, and his rig-
orous use of them is exemplary. He compares the official estimates of agricultural surveys with the
results of scientific surveys carried out by Mahalanobis.7 He shows that the discrepancies are large,
with survey estimates being between 47% and 153% of the official estimate. The discrepancies also
vary from year to year, with the sample estimate of the jute crop being 2.6% above the official esti-
mate in 1941, and 52% above it in 1946. (With jute, where exports provided a check, the sample
proved correct.) Since there was no sample survey of the rice crop until after the famine, we do not
know how inaccurate the 1942 forecast was. (Bowbrick, 1986)
This is an enormous margin of error, identified by some of the world's top statisticians, but Daoud
does not mention it: suppressio veri. I will show here, using contemporary evidence, that the statistics Sen and
Daoud rely on were far worse than I had realised in 1986—wildly inaccurate, biased, not comparable from year
to year, for instance. The Famine Inquiry Commission repeatedly warned that they were unreliable. They had
been discredited by the Indian statistical profession repeatedly and in the strongest terms since 1914:
They were
7
Mahalanobis was one of the half dozen top statisticians in the world at the time and, with a group of other Indian statisticians, laid the foundations for
much of today's agricultural statistics.
BOWBRICK 9
useless for any purpose’,8 ‘not merely guesses, but frequently demonstrably absurd guesses’,9 ‘a
farce … a fraud’,10 ‘blatantly absurd results’,11 ‘disbelieved by the very government that produced
them’,12 ‘no meaningful production statistics’,13 ‘not only incorrect but absurd’14 and ‘produced by a
system inherently vicious’.15
The Indian statisticians blamed the shocking statistics for the failure to deal with the famine. In September 1943,
the Bengal Government, which had now come to the same conclusion, offered Mahalanobis and the Indian Statistical
Institute more money than they could use to develop a crop measurement system as soon as possible
(Mahalanobis, 1943). Over the next 5 years, they produced the first workable way of measuring production in such
situations (not crop forecasting), and this has since been adopted around the world.16 It is difficult to imagine an agri-
cultural economist who has not been influenced by this statistical revolution. See in particular Dewey (1978),
Das (1949), Desai (1953) and Mahalanobis (1944) for reviews of the literature on this. Tauger (2003, 2006, 2009)
has collected an extraordinarily wide amount of contemporary evidence on the production guesses which were cur-
rent, which he examines rigorously and dispassionately. Where his sources overlap with mine, it is clear that he
reports them honestly and accurately, something that is rare in this research programme. He shows that there were
many competing guesses all with their faults but that the official one is the only one with no attempt at statistical
method, that it was universally criticised as the worst and that it produced the highest guess. The official statistics
are far worse than the evidence readily available in the 1980s would suggest.
They show that Sen's repeated claims that the forecasts were virtually 100% accurate—which was necessary if
his claims were to have any meaning—are false, and there was certainly a lot less food produced in 1943 than in pre-
vious years. This confirms the complete refutation of Sen's theory of the Bengal famine. The weaknesses have been
mentioned, with links to key documents, on the Wikipedia page for the famine for the last 20 years, so one might
expect that anyone working on the subject would be aware of them.
The raw data were known to be meaningless. The chaukidars, semi-literate village watchmen with no training in
crop forecasting, were supposed to estimate the probable yield of a standing crop, well before harvest, as a propor-
tion of a mythical ‘normal’ crop. This was an eye estimate with no sampling, crop cutting or measurement and no
pretence at statistical method. The figure they put down might be a guess, or just a figure that a chaukidar believed
would keep his superiors happy (Dewey, 1978).
The figures were given to the local police, who ‘adjusted’ them, and they were then ‘adjusted’ at each level of
administration and politics upwards. Total ‘adjustments’ of over 50% were reported in some instances
(Dewey, 1978). The combination of the errors in data and the ‘adjustments’ means that the only reason we have to
believe that a forecast lay within 90% of the true figure is a suspicion that someone else would ‘adjust’ the figure
again if it had seemed wildly improbable, though they did not always do it—a figure of 153% was quoted by Desai.
There is bias both in the reports by the chaukidar and in the ‘adjustments’, meaning that it is not possible to compare
the forecasts of two different years. It would appear that an extra level of bias and inaccuracy was created by some-
one employed by the Famine Inquiry Commission making further ‘adjustments’, particularly in Appendix IV, without
giving details of sources and calculations. Then, Sen and other academics made more ‘adjustments’. Daoud discusses
‘the food supply data presented in four different studies’ (pp. 461–462). There are multiple problems with this. First,
the figures for rice are ‘meaningless’ crop forecasts, not supply figures, as pointed out by Bowbrick (1986) and
8
Bowley and Robertson (1934, p. 35) quoted by Dewey (1978).
9
Royal Commission on Agriculture in India (1928, p. 605) quoted by Dewey (1978).
10
Dewey (1978), p. 290.
11
Dewey (1978), p. 298.
12
Mahalanobis (1943).
13
Bengal Land Revenue Commission (1940), p. 76.
14
F.H. Villiers to Sir Edward Grey, 1914, quoted by Dewey (1978), p. 284.
15
Trevaskis (1931), p. 200, quoted by Dewey (1978).
16
For example, Desai and Shah (1949); Dewey (1978); Mahalanobis (1943); Mahalanobis (1945-6); Mahalanobis (1946); Mahalanobis (1968); Panse (1954);
Panse and Sukhatme (1954); Spinks (1956); Sukatme (1945); Sukatme (1947); Sukatme and Kishen (1951); Sukatme and Panse (1951).
10 BOWBRICK
Tauger (2003, 2006, 2009), both of whom he cites repeatedly elsewhere. He says that ‘These studies were chosen
because they provide either original data or innovative re-interpretations of data’. They are in fact ‘adjustments’ of
the same ‘meaningless’ data produced by chaukidars and do not produce any independent test. He states, ‘Although
others concur with this critique, no one has presented any original data’. In fact, Tauger presented alternative con-
temporary estimates systems other than the chaukidar system, citing Das (1949). Traders, using their own informa-
tion networks, repeatedly warned government that their own estimates were that a famine situation was inevitable.
Suppressio veri, suggestio falsi.
The methodology used and the ‘adjustments’ made varied from year to year, so no two forecasts are compara-
ble, and no statistical series exists.
Das's (1949) book The Bengal Famine included a six-page analysis of the crop forecasts (pp. 98–105) and showed
that they were meaningless and biased, citing statisticians.
Das' arguments and evidence also raise an ethical issue. Sen, Greenough, and other scholars knew
his book, cited it, and clearly considered it an important and trustworthy source. Yet none of them
so much as mentions these passages in Das's study, let alone the fact that his sources and argu-
ments undermine their evidence and the whole ‘man-made’ or ‘market entitlement’ argument.
These scholars either did not read this passage, which would be negligence, or worse chose to
ignore it rather than address the challenge that it posed to their own evidence and conclusions.
Their writings would then be not an objective attempt to follow evidence wherever it led, but
rather an exercise in contrived use of sources to support a preconceived interpretation, which
because it blames the famine on British policies would have to be seen as a political argument.
(Tauger, 2009, pp. 172–175)
Daoud cited Tauger (2009) repeatedly, but failed to mention this damning comment. It is alarming that he should
cite Bowbrick and Tauger and others repeatedly but fail to mention their criticisms let alone the fact that they refute
Sen's availability claims, and, therefore, his own.
6.1 | Systematic underestimation of poor crops
Mahalanobis stated that the official forecasts had been so obviously wrong, so often, that nobody had believed sta-
tistics indicating an emergency. In particular, the 1940/1941 crop was grossly understated.
In fact, the official estimate had been quite low on several occasions in previous years, for example, in
1913-14, 1914-15, 1918-19, 1926-27, 1927-28, 1935-36, and in 1940-41, only two years earlier,
was only 16.48 crores of maunds (60.43 lakhs of tons) [6.14 million tonnes] which was much lower
than the estimate for 1942-43 and fell short of the ten-year average by nearly 27%, and yet nothing
untoward had happened. It was, therefore, not unnatural on the part of the Government of Bengal to
take the view that the official estimate for 1942-43 was unduly pessimistic as on many previous occa-
sions. The cry of wolf had been so often raised in vain in the past that it was not surprising that every-
one was caught unawares when the wolf really did come. (Mahalanobis, 1943, p. 4)
This, of course, refutes Sen's theory of the Bengal famine and Daoud's. The fact that nearly all the forecasts of
serious shortages were false alarms may have been due to the incompetence of the chaukidars17 or to rumours of a
17
‘Bowley and Robertson's considered judgement was that patwaris [chaukidars in Bengal] tended to report (i) no change from the previous year, or (ii) an
average crop, when the yield is moderate, (iii) to underestimate a good crop, and (iv) to exaggerate the fall in the case of a bad crop (1934, p. 36). This is as
near the mark as we are likely to get’ (Dewey, 1978, p. 28).
BOWBRICK 11
crop failure inspiring successive layers of administration to make downward ‘adjustments’ to the 1940/1941
forecast.
The forecast of the Director of Agriculture in 1942/1943, based on the reports of trained agricultural officers in
the field, was that the crop was 20% below the official forecast (Mahalanobis, 1943, p. 3). The Famine Inquiry Com-
mission, which Daoud cites repeatedly, referred to the Director of Agriculture's forecast as being substantially lower
than the official estimate—11% lower than the official 1940 figure rather than 11% above. If we then make an allow-
ance for the fact that the official 1940 figure was a false alarm, understating the crop, the Director's estimate was
perhaps 23% less than the 1940 figure—which is certainly enough to cause the famine. The fungus, discussed in the
next section, suggests that even this figure is an overestimate of the crop.
In previous years, the Director would have ‘adjusted’ the chaukidar estimate accordingly to produce the ‘official’
estimate. It appears that he did not do so for the 1942–1943 crop. This suggests that, after the expense and waste
of resources caused by the very low forecast of the 1941/1942 crop, officials were told not to ‘adjust’ the figures
produced by chaukidars. This means that the ‘official forecasts’ for 1940–1941 and for 1942–1942 are not compa-
rable. This, again, refutes Sen's theory and Daoud's.
6.2 | The fungus outbreak
Bengal had a drought in 1942; then the drought-struck crops were hit by a cyclone on 16th of October. This caused
massive damage where storm surges hit the coast. Wind and rain damage hit much of rest of the country. We cannot
know how accurate the chaukidars' guesses at the damage were. Weather conditions over the latter part of the year
then caused a very serious outbreak of rice fungus (Helminthosporium oryzae Breda de Haan, now called Bipolaris
oryzae) on the wind- and rain-damaged rice crop which was already weakened by drought. The worst affected areas
were Birbhum, Bankura, Midnapur, Hoogly, Howrah and 24 Paraganas (Padmanabhan et al., 1948). A plant patholo-
gist in the research centres concluded,
Nothing as devastating as the Bengal epiphytotic of 1942 has been recorded in plant pathological
literature. The only other instance that bears comparison in loss sustained by a food crop and
the human calamity that followed in its wake is the Irish potato famine of 1845.
(Padmanabhan, 1973)
Daoud cites Padmanabhan but suppresses this dramatic statement: suppressio veri.
Tauger, who found this research, assessed Padmanabhan's qualifications:
Padmanabhan's key paper thanked a range of plant pathologists from different organizations who had
experienced the outbreak in different contexts. ‘The Great Bengal Famine’ (Annual Review of Phyto-
pathology, Vol. 11 (1973)), cited twenty-five articles in scientific journals (not ‘musings’) by
Padmanabhan, N.K. Chakrabarti, S.B. Chattopadhyay, T. Hemmi, T. Nojima and several other Indian
and Japanese scientists. In addition to this and many other articles, Padmanabhan also published Rice
Research in India, co-edited with P.L. Jaiswal (New Delhi: Indian Council for Agricultural Research
[ICAR], 1985), Breeding for Disease Resistance in Rice, coauthored with S. Gangopadhyay (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press and IHB, 1987), Rice Production Technology (Bombay, 1980), Fungal
Diseases of Rice in India: A Critical Review (New Delhi: ICAR, 1974), and other publications on related
topics. Both the International Rice Research Institute and the Indian Central Rice Research Institute
(click on ‘Overviews’, ‘Background and Location’) attribute the Bengal famine to the plant disease
that sharply reduced the 1942 harvest. (Tauger, 2011a, pp. 3–4)
12 BOWBRICK
An outbreak of this fungus as serious as this was extremely rare, occurring somewhere in the world in 1 year out
of 10 or 20, when there were freak weather conditions. This meant that nobody in Bengal knew what damage to
expect.
The actual yield could not be measured until the crop was harvested, dried out for months and then milled, in
March and April 1943. There were fewer grains per plant in total than normal, they were smaller than usual, and
many were inedible because of the fungus, all of which meant that the crop forecast would have overestimated the
crop.18 Padmanabhan presents a table of the ‘Yield of rice per hectare at the Rice Research Stations at Bankura and
Chinsurah in the epiphytotic year (1942) compared with yield per hectare at the stations in a normal year (1941)’,
showing that for the critical late Aman crop, which provided the bulk of the rice, yields in trials were down by
39.5%–91.2% in different varieties, with nearly all varieties having losses of more than 70%. The yields for the less
important aus crop were down by a smaller amount. It was obviously impossible to quantify the total loss of rice in
the country at this stage. It is surprising that Daoud should cite Padmanabhan and cite Tauger who discussed this
research in some detail, but not mention the results of this scientific research showing a catastrophic crop failure:
suppressio veri.
We know for certain, therefore, that all crop forecasts at the time seriously overestimated the 1942 rice crop
and that any comparison between this crop and any previous crop is invalid. Daoud's claims are false.
6.3 | The availability estimates are also meaningless
Sen relies on ‘availability’ guesses, which were known to be meaningless for other reasons than dreadful crop fore-
casts. The claims about availability in the statistical chapters of the Famine Inquiry Commission Report are based on
what was presented as a rough guess in Mahalanobis's (1943) paper, adding up the rice and wheat (not food) in stock
at the beginning of the calendar year, the new crop and net imports and subtracting the rice and wheat stock at the
end of the year. Mahalanobis (1943, 1944) made wild guesses for illustration and then proceeded to show that none
of the statistics needed to estimate availability existed. Desai (1953) was equally critical of these statistics. For exam-
ple, nobody knew anything about stock levels: Nobody had any idea of what millions of farmers had in stock at any
period of 1942 or 1943, nor of what landlords, moneylenders or small traders had. Pinnell (1944) is clear that Gov-
ernment figures did not cover most traders. Nor did they cover manufacturers' stocks. All that is known is that raids
on traders showed only that they had less in stock than in normal years. I have worked in some 38 countries, rich
and poor: None had the information needed to make the calculations of availability presented by the Famine Inquiry
Commission or Sen.
It is not known how Mahalanobis' (1943) model, drawn up to show that there were no meaningful statistics for
any of the variables, ended up being used as fact in one section of the Famine Inquiry Commission Report. However,
he stated,
I should say that although it is always possible in this country to get some kind or other of statistics
by executive order, in most cases such statistics are likely to be entirely worthless.
(Mahalanobis, 1943, p. 5)
The average administrator in India expects the scientific or statistical technician to supply evidence or
proof in favour of what the administrator thinks to be right rather than to give independent advice on
objective grounds. Intellectual dishonesty … would in such circumstances be an actual advantage in
securing promotion in official posts. (Mahalanobis, 1946, p. 378)
18
See Amery (1988) on the sudden realisation by government that the crop was much shorter than the amount of unmilled grain would suggest.
BOWBRICK 13
Elphinstone supported him, saying,
… the political pressure resulting in an inaccurate census, the hint of the virtual suppression of an
unpalatable report … fixed opinions and unreasoned prejudices, and I know how easy it is to hunt for
figures to prove a theory rather than to hunt in the figures for the truth. (Elphinstone discussing
Mahalanobis, 1946, p. 374)
Total ‘Availability’ figures for the year as a whole hide the fact that the imports were not available for most of
the famine period: The food availability for the period up to August was lower than that for the last quarter.
6.4 | Suppression of alternative crop forecasts
A provincial governor in Siberia told me in 1992 that his first action after Perestroika was to order the destruction of
all Soviet-era statistics. ‘You see’, he said, ‘We have two kinds of fool in our country. One thinks that any statistics
that are printed are correct. The other says, “Yes, it is obvious that these statistics are wrong, but they are the only
statistics we have, so we have to use them and pretend that they are right”’.
Daoud chooses to use only printed statistics based on the official crop forecasts that the Famine Inquiry Com-
mission and the whole Indian statistical profession considered meaningless—worthless data subjected to ‘adjust-
ment’ after ‘adjustment’. The ones published in the Famine Inquiry Commission are subjected to further
‘adjustments and corrections’. Sen puts in further manipulation and ‘adjustments’, and the other statistics quoted
are ‘adjusted’ and manipulated. But they are all based on the same meaningless statistics.
The government are very keen on amassing statistics—they collect them, add them, raise them to the
nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is
that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the chowkydar who just puts down
what he damn pleases. (Lord Stamp, Some Economic Factors in Modern Life (1929) quoted in
Dewey, 1978)
Daoud chooses to ignore the other forecasts mentioned by the Famine Inquiry Commission though he cites their
report repeatedly. Suppressio veri. Most obviously, he suppresses the fact that the only economist on the Commission
disagreed so strongly with these statistics that he wrote a minority report on this, saying, for example:
The correctness of the statistics of acreage, yield, consumption and even population has been rightly
questioned. … With statistics so hopelessly defective either no attempt at all should be made to eval-
uate the position, or the conclusions drawn from the estimates available should be subjected to vari-
ous tests and their reliability determined. (Famine Inquiry Commission, 1945, Minute by Mr M. Afzal
Husain, p. 188)
Again, Daoud chooses to ignore the forecasts of the Director of Agriculture, which were mentioned in his
sources including the report of the Famine Inquiry Commission, though these are based on the observation of agri-
cultural officers, not village watchmen, and they explain the famine. Suppressio veri.
Tauger (2009) identifies alternative contemporary guesses at the rice production and shortfall that helped cause
the famine and points to others. He examines them in some detail. Daoud choses to ignore them. Suppressio veri.
Daoud also chooses to ignore the many warnings which disagreed with the official forecast. The Famine Inquiry
Commission (1945, p. 33) reported that in December 1942, traders were saying that the ‘coming crop was going to
be “the worst for the last 20 years”’. Bhatia (1967, p. 35) reported that that public men and organisations had
14 BOWBRICK
warned the government, citing evidence to the Famine Inquiry Commission. Sen himself quotes pressure, from ‘a
businessman much involved in rice trading’, to increase imports by one million tons as late as October 1943
(Sen, 1977, p. 54, quoting from Document 174 in Mansergh, 1973, p. 390). Daoud is well aware of these, as he cites
the Famine Inquiry Commission, Sen, Bhatia, Mansergh and Bowbrick (1986): suppressio veri. These predictions must
be taken to have more credibility than other predictions, since the wholesale network covered all levels, from farmer,
landlord, moneylender and assembly wholesaler to retailer throughout the country. It would have been in the finan-
cial interest of wholesalers to conceal the disaster, so they could buy cheaply and sell at famine prices, but instead
they did all they could to persuade the government to import enormous quantities immediately. All sources appear
to be agreed that the wholesalers and traders acted on their beliefs that there was a shortage and invested in rice
and grain, making enormous profits out of doing so (Famine Inquiry Commission, 1945).
7 | PRIC E S TATI STIC S
Prices are at the centre of economics, and we know that we must handle them with the greatest caution. Daoud
repeatedly quotes rice prices and draws conclusions from them (e.g. pp. 459, 461, 464), but he does not give any
information on the sources, the methodology, the meaning or the reliability of these ‘prices’. There are no sources,
no explanatory footnotes: They are just numbers. We are warned in undergraduate economic history that prices
quoted in historical documents are usually the extremes, the highest price observed or rumoured in a famine, the
lowest in a glut, with anything ‘typical’ being ignored. The prices quoted in contemporary documents in Bengal often
appear to be rumours of undefined prices in other districts. Daoud gives us no reason to believe that his ‘prices’ are
anything more than guesses or rumours.
What price is he quoting? In Bengal, there were a large number of rice prices at different levels in the market
chain, from farm gate prices to retail, including assembly-market prices, export prices, import prices, wholesale prices,
retail-shop prices, retail-market prices, corn-exchange prices, controlled retail prices and of course the parallel black-
market prices for these—the ‘real’ prices. What price does one put on the rice rations given or provided cheaply by
employers? The prices he quotes could be any of these—I suspect that they are just the prices he happens to have
come across somewhere in the literature—but the conclusions drawn must depend on the type of market. Perhaps,
they were some sort of average including, say, assembly-market prices and the very different Corn-Exchange prices,
which is meaningless? Weighting the prices by the turnover of the markets in the basket is impracticable. Market
margins are complex, so the use of one price as a proxy for another is unacceptable.
The prices varied enormously throughout a province of 63 million people where transport and communications
problems meant that grain could not be moved instantly in response to prices. At any moment, there would have
been hundreds of different retail prices, say, in different towns and cities around the province. But Daoud does not
tell us which town or level the prices he quotes refer to.
The date of the prices is crucial: They changed throughout the famine period. Local assembly markets may pay
the export parity price in normal times, but charge the import parity price at others, a major change in price level
which might be caused by a small change in provincial supply.
Nobody knew how much was sold at any price: Some people suggested that almost nothing was traded at the
‘headline’ prices. Clearly, a family that normally spends half its income on food in normal years will starve if the
prices double. Clearly, a negligible proportion of people can buy rice if the price goes up 20-fold. What do these
prices mean then?
What quality of rice does the price refer to? Even in a single market at one moment in time, there are many
prices. There were, in normal years, perhaps 20 recognised rice qualities in Bengal (Stevenson, 2005). There were dif-
ferent prices for paddy, milled rice and hand-pounded rice, for different varieties, for rice with different percentages
broken and different prices depending on whether it was sold by the ton, by the maund or by the cupful. The ratio
between the prices for different qualities would have changed during the famine, with people buying calories, not
BOWBRICK 15
flavour or texture. The corn exchange reported prices for standard qualities, but it is difficult to imagine that
reporters could have or would have done the same throughout the famine period: It would usually be the going price
for whatever quality is most common at the moment they happened to visit. This makes the price series misleading.
It also makes comparisons between markets misleading. Griffiths (2003) discusses some of the problems with rice
prices in a potential famine situation.
Price statistics are notoriously inaccurate. My paper ‘Are price reporting systems of any use?’ (1988) shows how
and why most reported agricultural prices were wildly inaccurate or meaningless. See also Bowbrick (1976, 1986).
This paper has been credited with triggering a worldwide reform of market information systems so that they pro-
duced, for the first time, statistics which may be reasonably accurate, and supplied them to the people making deci-
sions, at the right time and in the right form. The review by Galtier et al. (2014) shows that the reform started by
tackling the fact that price statistics were inaccurate and did not bear much relation to what people assumed they
did. The next step was developing dissemination systems using radio, then mobile phones and the Internet.
In all price reporting situations, one should ask, ‘Why on earth would they tell the truth?’ People seldom think
that it is wise to tell the truth to a government official. In a famine situation, consumers may overstate the price to try
and get a handout. Landlords, moneylenders and local traders may overstate the price they pay farmers to show what
nice people they are. Final-level wholesalers, retailers and people who are supposed to be selling at controlled prices
may understate the selling price to hide the fact that they are illegally charging a higher price. One of the problems is
that if you ask sellers what the going price is, they are likely to start bargaining with you, quoting a high starting price.
Traders can make money by stating the wrong price—the LIBOR scandal is a recent example of an age-old practice.
I have observed the Punjab Marketing Act of 1936 in action: the Market Superintendent looks at what is coming
into the market first thing in the morning, writes what he thinks is the ‘proper’ price on the blackboard and reports it
to the Ministry as the actual price. Of course, trade continues as usual without reference to this. It may be that such
a system existed in Bengal—this sort of intervention was popular with governments at the time. There were certainly
examples of price reporters in Bengal publishing the legal maximum price rather than the actual price, with exactly
the same price being reported week after week, while all other sources reported rapid increases in price.
Daoud (2018) does not just quote the ‘the price’ (p. 459); he talks of complicated statistics derived from these
meaningless prices using undisclosed weighting systems ‘rice price index’ (Daoud, 2018, p. 461) or ‘exchange index
(wage relative to the price of rice)’ (Daoud, 2018). These are meaningless unless one has a detailed knowledge of
how and where the data were collected, how well they were collected and how observations were weighted. Nobody
could have had this information. More aggregated statistics, such as ‘food price’ (Daoud, 2018, p. 459), ‘food price
index’, ‘indices (food price, food supply …)’ (Daoud, 2018, p. 459) and ‘food supply’ (Daoud, 2018, p. 459), are
quoted. We must ask what conceivable weighting system could have been used for the different foods. Nobody
knew how much the people of Bengal ate of the standard foods: wheat, atta, rice, other grains, roots and tubers, the
different fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, cassava, coconut, yams, mango, breadfruit, oils, etc. especially given that
different religious groups and areas, rural and urban populations and different income groups had different diets. A
little thought suggests that nobody could have quantified the consumption of these foods, and Mahalanobis (1943)
stated that the information did not exist. Nor were retail prices for these food items collected: It would have been
prohibitively expensive to attempt to do so, and impossible in practice. In other countries, I have analysed the prob-
lems of getting prices for a range of foods in retail markets and in small local markets, finding it virtually impossible—
for example, prices frequently double or halve in a single day (particularly with perishable products, but sometimes
with grain). The price recorded would depend on when the price recorder visited, if, indeed, he did not decide to stay
in bed and invent the figures, as commonly happens. Similarly, ‘food availability’ was unknown (Mahalanobis, 1943)—
how could it possibly have been measured? The ‘exchange index (wage relative to the price of rice)’ (Daoud, 2018,
p. 464), again, raises questions of weighting, accuracy of wage and price statistics and, indeed, meaning. Combining
wildly inaccurate prices with weightings that are a wild guess produces a margin of error that is off the scale.
Drawing conclusions from famine rice prices, if meaningful price, quantity and wage statistics did exist, requires
economic skills not evident in Daoud's paper.
16 BOWBRICK
8 | POLITICAL BIAS AND SUPPRESSION
8.1 | Food aid from Britain
Daoud repeatedly mentions Britain's ‘denial of food aid’.

The reason Britain did not give food aid in December 1942 is clear. The allies were losing the battle of the Atlan-
tic: U-boats were sinking so many ships that there was a distinct possibility that the United Kingdom would have to
surrender, which would have been disastrous for the rest of the world, not least the USSR and India. Winston Chur-
chill was later to state: ‘The Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war. Never for one
moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea or in the air depended ultimately on
its outcome’ (Costello & Hughes, 1977, p. 210) ‘The supply situation in Britain was such there was talk of being
unable to continue the war, with supplies of fuel being particularly low’ (Costello & Hughes, 1977, p. 155). The Impe-
rial War Cabinet did get a request for shipping to supply India in late 1942. This would have removed the ships from
the Atlantic for perhaps 6 months. Tauger (2009, pp. 193–194) examines the request and the response, identifying
key issues. This was a half-hearted request from a Viceroy who chose to believe that Bengal had plenty of food—
many Indian politicians and administrators shared this belief. Many other Indian politicians and administrators chose
to believe that India as a whole had enough food, even if Bengal did not, so a famine could be avoided. The people
examining the request in London knew this. It is beyond belief that the War Cabinet would risk surrender by unnec-
essarily diverting shipping. Calling this ‘refusing aid’ while concealing the reasons is unacceptable.
After the Allies won the Battle of the Atlantic, by April 1943, many new ships were being produced by the
United States, and preparations began for D-Day, the invasion of Europe. The choice was then between using these
ships to take weapons and troops to Europe for the invasion, or using the ships to supply India, and risking the failure
of the invasion, which would have been disastrous for the world. Ships were in fact provided for some 350 000 tons
of rice for Bengal, after the Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff had told the War Cabinet that the famine was not
just a humanitarian disaster but a military catastrophe (War Cabinet Paper WP (43) 349 of 31 July 1943 War Cabinet
Paper W.P. (43) 407 R/30/1/4:ff 123-5; Mansergh, IV pp. 139, 217). It is surprising that Daoud does not mention
Tauger's (2009) discussion of food aid.
Economists doing agricultural policy in poor countries face similar problems all the time. A lot of people are going
to die whatever they decide. The number of people who die can be reduced by policies that change the victims, for
example, starving urban children rather than rural children, or vice versa. The number of deaths can be reduced by
policies that the politicians may find inconvenient or politically unacceptable.
There are people who believe not just that Bengal had too little to feed itself, but that India had too little to feed
itself. This belief cannot be rejected, given that India imported substantial quantities in peacetime and had continual
food crises through the war and given that there are no meaningful statistics which could challenge this belief.
Tauger (2009) shows that India had a food crisis in the war years. Knight (1954) believed that in 1943 India had a
first-degree shortage, that the population could have been fed if the available food had been spread more equally
between provinces and that there was rationing. He claimed that a worse shortage in 1946 was handled successfully
in this way. The possibility exists, though, that there was a second-degree shortage, implying that deaths were inevi-
table without imports: Certainly, the statistics give us no grounds to dismiss it. If this were so, the UK's aid to Bengal
was too little, too late. To people who chose to believe, instead, that Bengal had plenty of food already, as Daoud
does, imports must have been just a dangerous and expensive public relations gesture, irrelevant to the famine. But
why, then, does Daoud talk of Britain refusing aid as a factor contributing to the famine?
It must be borne in mind that, as late as 1986, it took 4 months to get rice from Thailand to West Africa
(Griffiths, 2003). This was in peacetime, when there were plenty of ships available near the shipping port, bigger and
faster ships than in 1943. And well into the 1990s, there was the problem that international famine relief frequently
arrived months too late to feed the starving, but just in time to flood the market for the new crop. So, we cannot
assume that food aid would have been easy.
BOWBRICK 17
8.2 | No food from India
Daoud suppresses the evidence set out at length by the Famine Inquiry Commission (e.g. pp. 54, 89, 90, 91) that
other provinces with a surplus refused to sell their surpluses under the Basic Plan, and so Bengal starved: suppressio
veri. Bengal was able to import rather more in September, with imports of wheat and rice reaching their maximum in
October to November—but still not enough to feed all the starving. This refusal to supply Bengal does not fit in with
Daoud's beliefs on the role of Britain or ‘colonialism’. See Knight and the Famine Inquiry Commission's (1945a)
Report on India for the picture for India as a whole.
Bengal had a population of 60.3 million according to the 1941 Census. The total urban population was about
6 million with four million in Greater Calcutta, which included Calcutta with 2.1 million. (Famine Inquiry
Commission, 1945, p. 5).
Bengal had been a net food importer for 30 years. The urban population was largely fed by imports from Burma,
but the Japanese cut these off from March 1942. Since the December 1942 crop was short, it was clear, from all
crop forecasts, that India would have to feed Calcutta, at least, and probably significant rural areas as well. In
December 1942, Calcutta had only 2 week's food supplies, and at times supplies fell to 1- or 2-day's consumption
(Braund, 1944; Famine Inquiry Commission, 1945a, p. 64; Pinnell, 1944). This meant that flood damage to the rail-
ways, sabotage, administrative incompetence or the refusal of other provinces to supply Bengal could lead to four
million people suddenly having no food at all, facing death within weeks. ‘In December 1942 the Governor of Bom-
bay warned the Viceroy that unless Bombay obtained food in the next week, he would have to start moving people
out of the city into the countryside to survive’ (Tauger, 2009, p. 189, citing Mansergh, 1971, pp. 436–437). This is
incompatible with Daoud's (2018) statement, ‘The urban population was much more food secure than the rural pop-
ulation’ (p. 464). It is surprising that Daoud should have missed this as he cites both Tauger and Mansergh.
Since the Indian provinces with a surplus refused to feed Calcutta, it was fed from rural areas of Bengal. Since
many people in the rural areas were already starving, this created a full-blown famine in the rural areas. There was a
desperate hope that imports would come in time to prevent a major disaster in rural areas. However, even when
imports did come, it was found that the Bengal Government did not have the capacity to get food to famine-struck
areas. It was only when the Government of India sent in the army in October and November the food it started to
move (Famine Inquiry Commission, 1945a, p. 62).
It was even claimed by a leading politician that ‘Bengal had been deliberately starved out by other
provinces’ which refused to permit the export of grain. (Moon, 1973, p. 239)
It is surprising that Daoud does not mention this: He cites this source and others like the Famine Inquiry
Commission.
Contrary to what Daoud says, the Government of India did not prevent trade between provinces, just free trade
by commercial firms. Trade between provincial governments continued, under the control of the Government of
India, so Bengal could certainly have been supplied. Market control was not ‘part of their defence preparations’ as
Daoud claims (p. 467) but a desperate attempt to deal with a food crisis. Controls were imposed firstly because a
province which imposed price control had to prevent exports to provinces where prices were higher, or the deficit
would get worse. Secondly, without control of interprovincial trade, wholesalers in provinces facing famine, like Ben-
gal and Bombay Presidency, would strip neighbouring provinces bare, exporting the famine to them. Thirdly, procure-
ment costs are reduced if the central government prevents exports from surplus areas, causing their prices to fall, so
the central government can buy relief supplies there at normal prices rather than famine prices—a common practice
in food crises. I do not defend the Government of India's food policy or its many changes.
Some provinces already had a food crisis, and this would tip into a famine if their food was exported to Bengal.
Others wanted to keep a comfortable reserve supply. There was a racist element: Punjab and the North West Prov-
ince representatives said that their people were physically so constructed as to require a relatively greater proportion
18 BOWBRICK
of foodgrains than Bengalis (Knight, 1954, p. 192). A trainload of food sent by one of the surplus provinces to feed
the starving in Bengal was simply confiscated by one of the provinces it had to pass through to reach Bengal
(Braund, 1944). The politicians and the population of food surplus provinces chose to believe, or stated that they
believed, that Bengal had plenty of food. Punjab farmers and politicians objected to being asked to supply food
below free market prices, when it would then be sold at black-market prices in Bengal. The Viceroy and the Govern-
ment of India had no legal authority to force a province to export, and when they tried to put pressure on Punjab,
The Punjab representative at the Fourth Food Conference emphasized that some 50 per cent of the
combatant ranks of the Indian Army at that time were drawn from the farming classes of the Punjab
and that ‘grave administrative and political repercussions would follow if rationing, statutory price
control and requisition of food grains were put into force’. (Knight, 1954, p. 158)
The fact that a provincial politician could flatly refuse to do what the Viceroy requested, and accompany the
refusal with a very blunt threat of a mutiny that would destroy the Indian army in the middle of a war, does not fit
with Daoud's beliefs about the power balance in the Empire.
Eventually, the new Viceroy, Wavell, was able to persuade surplus provinces to supply Bengal, and the famine
started to come under control from September and October.
8.3 | Taking food from the rural poor
Daoud does not discuss how and why the rural rich took food from the rural poor to sell to Calcutta. Greenough's
study, based on interviews with survivors and a remarkably wide range of contemporary sources, examined this and
exposed horrors. At the village and local level, there was the collapse of traditional obligations to family, neighbours
and community. At the political and administrative level, people accepted famine. And through it all was corruption.
His conclusion was:
But the fuller implications of calling the famine ‘man made’ were that it was not a result of natural
disasters or organic pathologies, that it was shaped by purposeful human conduct, and that the chief
actors were—literally—Bengali men,19 whose actions reflected Bengali values and Bengali conceptions
of what was actually at risk. In short, the ‘man made’ famine was culturally patterned in its onset, cri-
sis and denouement. (Greenough, 1982, p. 265)
Daoud cites Greenough repeatedly, so it is surprising that he should have suppressed such a dramatic statement
and the meticulous analysis of the very nasty behaviour of some Bengali men. It is counter to all his claims on ‘colo-
nialism’ and Britain: suppressio veri.20
8.4 | ‘British’ and ‘colonial’ policy
The repeated references to the ‘British’ and ‘colonial’ in Daoud's paper are unhelpful: It would be standard practice
to start by examining what actually happened, then to examine which decisions contributed to the disaster and then
to ask who made the decisions and what their stated reasons were. Only then could one start to analyse what
19
He is referring to Bengali men as opposed to Bengali women, who suffered as a result of the men's actions.
20
Greenough is a sociologist, and his economics and statistics are untenable: In particular, his claims that there was no crop failure and that the famine was
caused by speculation and his claims on market response were unevidenced and unargued have since been refuted. If, however these are ignored, what is
left is a much more credible, purely sociological, analysis.
BOWBRICK 19
political factors influenced the decisions and whether they were local political factors or colonial. Daoud starts with
the conclusions, missing out what actually happened, and selects only evidence to support his beliefs. He implies,
strangely, and without argument, that any policy failures, incompetence and panic decisions in a crisis were due to
colonialism, but I have worked in a very wide range of non-colonial countries around the world and have found that
blunders like this are the norm.
Daoud's belief that there was a single colonial policy for the British Empire is strange. A third of the world's pop-
ulation were members of the British Empire (which included countries as diverse as Canada, Hong Kong and Tangan-
yika). There were thousands of government organisations in the Empire, with different and often conflicting
objectives and priorities. The Indian Empire itself was extremely diverse: It included 530 independent princely states
as well as the self-governing provinces of ‘British India’, and these had different and often conflicting priorities.
The Famine Inquiry Commission, which Daoud cites repeatedly, was composed of senior civil servants who were
not afraid to be damning about the policies of administrators and politicians from the Viceroy down, a conclusion
that became the post-famine consensus. The Viceroy, Linlithgow, had difficulty in finding people who agreed with
him and took over the food portfolio personally, in addition to his day job of running the Indian Empire (Famine
Inquiry Commission, 1945, p. 107). His successor as Viceroy, Wavell, disagreed with Linlithgow's policies and actions
and, famously, refused to implement Churchill's policies, on independence, for instance, although Churchill had
appointed him. The Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff disagreed with the UK government very bluntly, as did the
minority parties in the coalition government. The suggestion that there was one ‘British’ or ‘colonial’ policy to which
one might exclusively attribute famine deaths is absurd.
8.5 | Counterexamples
It is standard research practice to search for counterexamples before generalising, particularly if one is gen-
eralising from a single situation, as Daoud is. The policies applied in other provinces and princely states of India
were not those applied in Bengal, as shown in the Famine Inquiry Commission's (1945b) Report on India and in
Knight (1954). For example, Travancore was a princely state, and the Bombay Presidency was ruled by the
appointed governor because its elected representatives boycotted the Legislative Assembly. Both had a crop 40%
of the average but had no famine: they imported, rationed and gave relief supplies and food for work,
implementing the standard Indian Famine Code (Knight, 1954; Tauger, 2009). For a completely ‘non-colonial’
example, it would be useful to have a comment on the fact that since independence, the number of people who
died of hunger each year was far greater than the number in Bengal in 1943. In spite of improvements in the last
few years, it is still greater—in a country that spends money on vanity projects like the space programme.21 Simi-
larly, Bangladesh, which is now a middle-income country, has 11 million people suffering from ‘acute hunger’ and
‘approximately 40 million close to starvation’ in recent years, which suggests that they too have more people
dying of hunger each year than Bengal in 1943. This throws doubt on Daoud's political generalisations on the
‘British’ and ‘colonial’ policies and their effect.
8.6 | Corruption reduced supply
Corruption in Bengal was a factor. The two democratically elected Bengal Governments during the famine, those
of A. K. Fazlul Huq (December 1941 to March 1943) and Khawaja Nazimuddin's Muslim League (April 1943 to
21
The Global Hunger Index (2021) indicates that both India and Bangladesh have under-5 mortalities, each of which, allowing for their estimate that 69% of
these are caused by hunger, are much the same as the deaths from hunger in Bengal in 1943. Deaths from hunger of other age groups are not given, but
both counties have serious hunger problems: Bangladesh is the 88th worst out of 197 countries with a GHI of 25.8, and India is 102nd worst with a GHI of
33. The deaths by hunger were much higher over the previous 50 years.
20 BOWBRICK
March 1945), each claimed that the other caused the famine by corruption and failure to act (Sen, 1976,
pp. 174–175). H. S. Suhrawardy, Bengal's Minister of Civil Supplies from 24 April 1943, gave the monopoly for
imports to his friend and political ally M. A. H. Isphani, who had a large grain trading business: This was highly
profitable, when selling at black-market prices, as long as there continued to be a shortage. The extremely inelastic
demand for food meant that traders would lose money if they increased imports. Indeed, the Bengal Govern-
ment cut relief ‘to save money’, though the money could easily have been raised (Famine Inquiry
Commission, 1945, p. 105).
9 | INFLATION
Daoud's references to ‘inflation’ as a cause of famine are unhelpful. Inflation rates higher than the Indian wartime
rate of 20% are common, and hyperinflation at levels hundreds or thousands of times higher occurs without causing
famine. It has been suggested that in some instances, high famine prices have triggered subsequent inflation rather
than vice versa. I have worked in countries with very high ‘inflation’, caused in different ways, with different effects,
and requiring different analyses. ‘Inflation’ in the money economy did not have an equivalent effect on food—supply
and demand determined prices. In all these cases, it has been important for economists to separate out price
increases arising from food shortages from ‘inflation’ in the economy.
10 | CHECKING SOURCES
10.1 | Deaths by occupation
Daoud makes serious errors when discussing the death rates of people with different occupations, because of his
failure to check sources. He says,
In the Bengal case, the most relevant social position or distinction is the one between the urban
and the rural, because those who starved were primarily from the rural areas. Consequently, ‘the
worst-affected groups of people were, in descending order, fishermen, transport workers, paddy
huskers, agricultural labourers, craftsmen and non-agricultural labourers’ (Sen, 1981, p. 70). This
proposition is supported by the Commission (Famine Inquiry Commission, 1945, p. 5).
(Daoud, 2018, p. 466)
This statement is unacceptable for two reasons. Firstly, neither Sen nor the Famine Inquiry Commission
(p. 67) is a primary source. Both were relying on the same source, the survey by Mahalanobis et al. (1946), so
they cannot be supporting each other, as he claims. Secondly, the source gives no information whatsoever on
rural versus urban deaths: It was a survey of 16 000 families in 386 villages (Mahalanobis et al., 1946, p. 345):
suggestio falsi.
It may be noted that surveys carried out in the 1870s (Frere, 1874; Hunter, 1873), when the urban sector was
very much smaller and there was no wartime inflation, noted a similar pattern of rural deaths by occupation. Daoud
does not explain this.
Daoud cites research which questions Sen's facts more generally: For example, Bowbrick (1986, 1987, 1988,
2008) sets out more than 30 instances in which Sen misstates key facts in his sources, always in ways which support
his theory. Nobody has challenged this. Regardless of whether Daoud accepts this, it is unacceptable for him to cite
anything Sen has written without checking it against Sen's sources. Indeed, he should cite the sources rather
than Sen.
BOWBRICK 21
10.2 | Deaths by disease
Daoud says,
Still, deaths that were related to famine epidemics (e.g., cholera, malaria, smallpox) reached a peak
(cf. De Waal, 1990, 2005). This was largely caused by human immune system deficiency caused by
malnutrition (Sen, 1981, pp. 55–56). (Daoud, 2018, p. 460)
Neither De Waal nor Sen has any competence in medicine, so why should we believe them? On the other hand,
one of the members of the Famine Inquiry Commission, Aykroyd, devoted his life to the medicine of malnutrition,
and the Famine Inquiry Commission has a large and detailed section on this. It is in line with the purely medical
papers on the famine that I have encountered. Again, it is unacceptable to cite Sen rather than the sources, which he
may well have misrepresented.
The non-availability of quinine to treat malaria was an important factor.
‘The conquest of Java cut off the main source of world supplies of quinine. Accordingly it became necessary to
ration quinine in the various provinces and regulate its distribution’ (Famine Inquiry Commission, 1945a, p. 137). ‘In
1943, reasonably good supplies were available with the Government of Bengal, but a large proportion of these failed
to reach the districts’ (Famine Inquiry Commission, 1945a, p. 137). About half the amount allocated to Bengal,
43 000 lbs of quinine, enough for more than 2 million five-day treatments, was not distributed by the end of 1943.
(Famine Inquiry Commission, 1945a, pp. 126, 137–138). ‘The Director of Public Health stated publicly in December
1943 that “a vast quantity of quinine issued by the Government had gone into the black market”’ (Famine Inquiry
Commission, 1945a, p. 138). This raises the possibility that the people who stole government stocks and sold them
on the black market had restricted distribution in order to keep the black-market price high. It cannot, therefore, be
assumed that any of the excess mortality from malaria was due to the famine.
One should note the contemporary claim that the malaria deaths were due to a particularly virulent strain of
malaria brought in by the refugees from Burma (Pinnell, 1944) which would also suggest that the famine was not the
cause of all the excess deaths.
11 | THE MALTHUSIAN APPROACH
Daoud (2018) claims that a Malthusian population increase was an important contributing factor, stating that ‘The
Bengal population increased from 37 million in 1881 to 61.5 million in 1941’ (p. 463). He calls it a ‘rapid food
requirement increase (FRI)’22 (p. 453). This is false: The increase of 0.85% per annum (assuming, contrary to fact, that
the starting and ending figures are reliable and comparable) is low; some countries had growth rates of 3%–3.7%
without Malthusian famines in the 1950s and 1960s. Another serious error is that Daoud does not mention the
changes which increased supply over this period—changing agricultural technology, plant breeding and inputs, the
new availability of cheap iron and steel agricultural implements or changes in agricultural policy. This is surprising
since the article is supposedly about the Malthusian approach: Surely everyone would agree that Malthus's predic-
tions proved to be wrong because he assumed a linear progression in the productivity of land?
Daoud (2018) also claims,
A major population increase occurred from 1931 to 1941, which further pressured the Bengal food
system. This strengthens the validity of treating FRI as an important background condition of the fam-
ine. (p. 460)
22
He appears to define ‘FRI’ as being Malthus's geometric progression.
22 BOWBRICK
One might expect anyone working on the Malthusian approach to be aware of the notorious unreliability of cen-
sus statistics. Contemporary sources in Bengal, including the Famine Inquiry Commission, which Daoud cites, men-
tioned this frequently.23 The Director of Census agreed (Government of India, 1946, pp. 3, 24). He stated that the
three censuses before the famine each had their problems and were not comparable, so no population growth rates
could be calculated (Government of India, 1946, pp. 3, 24). He believed that the 1931 census understated the popu-
lation of India because of a political boycott and that the 1941 figure may have overstated the population because
each religious community was trying to overstate its population to increase its influence in future elections. This
meant that the rate of population increase between 1931 and 1941 was certainly overstated. He admitted that the
Bengal figures for 1941 were particularly unreliable: ‘Mr Dutch in Bengal had the heaviest load of all … local excite-
ments and intransigence … in so troubled a post’ (Government of India, 1946, p. 3) The implication is that Mr Dutch
managed to cobble together something that looked like a census report in a province on the verge of insurrection.
Daoud claims a Malthusian cause of this famine, that Bengal's population grew so fast that the province could
no longer feed itself. This is also contrary to his repeated claim that there was plenty of food available in Bengal dur-
ing the famine. He does not address or even acknowledge this contradiction.
Accordingly, Daoud's Malthusian hypothesis has no evidence to support it, though the title of his paper suggests
that a central theme in his paper is that we should incorporate Malthusian analysis into a discussion of how to deal
with a famine. It is surprising that Daoud does not mention that the Famine Inquiry Commission discussed popula-
tion as a factor, including the sudden population increase from the influx of Burmese refugees and the army. Is this
not the new system he proposes?
12 | CO NC LUSIO N
In a food crisis, it would be wrong for economists to base their analysis solely and uncritically on their own best
guesses on key factors like food supply, or on the consensus, or on official statistics. It would also be wrong for econ-
omists to judge the quality of academic sources on the reputation of the author or to rely uncritically on secondary
sources. We have to recognise that all our information is subject to potential error and that a range of possibilities
should be considered so that we do not assume away the factors that lead to disaster.
DATA AVAI LAB ILITY S TATEMENT

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable
request.
ORCID
Peter Bowbrick https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9919-2270
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How to cite this article: Bowbrick, P. (2023). Falsehoods and myths in famine research: The Bengal famine
and Daoud. Journal of International Development, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.3635

Bowbrick (2022) - Falsehoods and Myths in Famine Research, The Bengal Famine

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Received: 30 August 2021 Revised: 24 January 2022 Accepted: 26 January 2022

Falsehoods and myths in famine research: The

Independent researcher, Edinburgh, UK

J. Int. Dev. 2023;1–24. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jid 1

2 | THE POST-FAMINE CONSENSUS

4 | COULD EXTRA CONSUMPTION HAVE CAUSED THE FAMINE?

5.1 | Speculation that could cause famine

5.2 | Normal speculation with no shortage

5.3 | Normal speculation after a crop failure

5.4 | Mass hysteria

6.1 | Systematic underestimation of poor crops

6.2 | The fungus outbreak

6.3 | The availability estimates are also meaningless

Elphinstone supported him, saying,

6.4 | Suppression of alternative crop forecasts

7 | PRIC E S TATI STIC S

8 | POLITICAL BIAS AND SUPPRESSION

8.1 | Food aid from Britain

Daoud repeatedly mentions Britain's ‘denial of food aid’.

8.2 | No food from India

8.3 | Taking food from the rural poor

8.4 | ‘British’ and ‘colonial’ policy

8.6 | Corruption reduced supply

10.1 | Deaths by occupation

10.2 | Deaths by disease

11 | THE MALTHUSIAN APPROACH

DATA AVAI LAB ILITY S TATEMENT

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