Page "Great Chinese Famine" Paragraph 10

According to the work of Nobel prize winning economist and expert on famines Amartya Sen, most famines do not result just from lower food production, but also from an inappropriate or inefficient distribution of the food, often compounded by lack of information and indeed misinformation as to the extent of the problem.

In the case of these Chinese famines, the urban population had protected legal rights for certain amounts of grain consumption.

Local officials in the countryside competed to over-report the levels of production that their communes had achieved in response to the new economic organisation, and thus local peasants were left with a much reduced residue.