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Simone D'Alessandro
Modernization, Climate Variability and Vulnerability to Famines
 

Abstract:This paper shows that under climate variability the transformation from a rural to an incomplete market economy can increase the vulnerability of peasants to famine. This can occur even if improvements in technology have raised agricultural productivity and made production less responsive to environmental shocks. This paper helps explain the catastrophic effects produced by widespread droughts in large areas of tropical regions during the second half of the 19th century. Indeed, the results of the model largely confirm Karl Polany's view that the millions of fatalities of that period resulted from the introduction of market mechanisms by colonial institutions, which lowered the ability of agricultural societies to keep food stocks from good seasons to compensate for poor harvest of others. Although the introduction of new modes of production and the modernization of infrastructures imply a greater stability of wages, capitalist decisions can easily increase the risk of famine. Indeed, negative environmental shocks can produce a drop in wages that outweighs the increase in wages due to an equivalent positive environmental shock. Consequently, the level of the stocks increases more slowly in good seasons than it decreases in bad ones. Such an asymmetry crucially depends on the degree of labour market competition between capitalists: the higher their market power, the more likely it is that this institutional change has negative effects on vulnerability.

 
JEL: N50; O13; J10.
Keywords: Climate Variability; Feast-Famine Cycles; Population Dynamics; Subsistence Consumption; Colonialism.

 

 

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