“There has never been and never can be a situation, in which Russia would not have enough grain to feed her population.”
Aleksei Ermolov had both the expertise and the reputation to make a statement so confident. In 1909, Russia’s former Minister for Agriculture was a leading expert on the “food issue” (prodovol´stvennoe delo) in the country and, looking back at no less than seven severe food crises in the past 20 years, he made clear: Russia had no food problem but a distribution problem. Ermolov’s observation illustrates the significance of the “food issue” not only as major political subject in its own right, but as an actual field of governance. More importantly, he anticipated what would be consensus among scholars decades later: that there is no direct line between crop failure and famine.
Amartya Sen has shown how in order to understand the emergence of hunger one must not ask what resources do exist but rather who commands them to what end. Market and ownership dynamics decide...