Bengal Famine of 1943
Between two and three million people died in Bengal in 1943 in a province with a food surplus in the region. The proximate causes were several. The fall of Burma in 1942 cut off about fifteen per cent of Bengal's rice imports; a cyclone and flooding in October 1942 destroyed the winter crop in the coastal districts; and a fungal epidemic hit what was left. The policy decisions turned a shortage into a catastrophe. The denial policy removed some 66,000 boats from the coastal districts to deny them to a Japanese invasion, destroying the transport and the fishing economy of the delta together, and confiscated surplus rice from the same districts. Provincial governments in Punjab and elsewhere banned exports across their own borders, so a national market ceased to exist. Prices quadrupled, and the government bought at any price to supply Calcutta's war industries, which guaranteed that rural labourers could not. Requests from Delhi for imports were refused or reduced in London on shipping grounds, with Churchill and his advisers arguing that vessels were needed elsewhere; some ships carrying Australian wheat sailed past India to the Mediterranean. Relief was not organised until the army took it over in October 1943, and the famine was never officially declared, which would have triggered obligations under the existing famine codes. The Famine Inquiry Commission of 1945 blamed the provincial government and criticised Delhi. Amartya Sen used it to argue that famines occur where entitlements fail, not where food is absent. The argument about Churchill's personal responsibility has been running since the archives opened and is narrower than the popular version. The shipping decisions were made in London with his participation and his recorded contempt, and the provincial and imperial administrations failed at every level below him as well.
- Year: 1943 CE
- Category: Humanitarian
