Sen says that after people read reports of famines and widespread malnutrition, they tend to make the pessimistic assumption that hunger can never be eliminated. Population growth seems to only make this problem worse. However, he says that the facts do not justify such pessimism, particularly regarding famines. The issue with famine is, surprisingly, not the amount of food that is available, but rather the substantive freedom of individuals and families to gain ownership of food either by growing it or buying it on the market. In most cases, there is sufficient food within a country to prevent people from starving if it were distributed differently—but the poorest people lack access to it. In the minority of cases where this isn’t true, the freedom to buy food on the international market would cover the remaining gap. So, it is the lack of economic power to buy food that causes famine, rather than the lack of food itself.

A family’s ability to earn ownership (or “entitlement”) of food depends on three major factors: Their “endowment” or ownership of productive resources like labor and land, what they can produce using these endowments, and the exchange conditions for selling their labor or their products.