Abstract
I am delighted to be here in Florence today - a city of extraordinary beauty, historical splendour, intellectual achievement and aesthetic elegance. I am also very privileged to be a guest of the distinguished University of Florence. I have been asked by my hosts to speak on “food entitlement and agricultural production.” It was in the 1970s that I made my first attempt to argue that the concept of entitlement must be an integral part of the analysis of hunger and starvati0n.l These were very preliminary attempts, and my presentation was, in many ways, geared to the policy debates that were going on at that time. There was considerable scope for argument on the identification of the exact policy implications of focusing on entitlement. Fortunately, the idea of entitlement has received extensive exploration in the writings of many analysts of famine and undernourishment. The literature is well surveyed by Siddiq Osrnani and Martin Ravallion.2 The implications of entitlement analysis are now much ~learer.
