In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic closed restaurants and schools almost overnight, dairy farmers in the United States dumped thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and plowed fields of ripe vegetables back into the soil (Yaffe-Bellany and Corkery), even as lines of cars stretched outside food banks. The food existed; it simply could not reach the people who needed it. That single season exposed a reality that holds even in ordinary times. We already grow approximately one and a half times more food than the current population needs (Mulhern). And yet hunger has not disappeared: the United Nations estimates that around 645 million people faced hunger in 2025 ("State of Food Security"). These two facts sit uncomfortably beside each other. If there is enough food, hunger cannot simply be a matter of scarcity, of the world running short. It must instead be a problem of distribution: who is able to obtain the food that exists, and who is not.
This shift in thinking was made famous by the economist Amartya Sen, who argued that starvation results from “some people not having enough food to eat,” rather than from there being too little food in the world overall (Sen). His central concept is what he called entitlement: the set of legitimate means through which a person can get hold of food, whether by growing it, buying it with wages, trading for it, or receiving it from the state. On this view, people go hungry not when food physically disappears, but when their entitlement fails: when they lose the ability to command food through any of these channels, even while food still sits within reach, untouched.
This essay argues that hunger persists in a world of plenty because food is distributed through social structures that allocate it according to power rather than need. It examines two such structures—the labor market and the household- and shows that, in each, people go hungry not because they are excluded, but because the terms of their inclusion deny them control over food.
One of the clearest ways an entitlement can fail is through paid work itself. It is tempting to assume that people who are chronically poor and hungry have simply been left out of the economy—that they lack jobs or have been cut off from markets and growth. The reality is closer to the opposite. Development scholars Sam Hickey and Andries du Toit challenge this assumption directly with the concept of adverse incorporation—a technical name for a simple idea: the poor are often not excluded from the economy at all. They are pulled into it, but on conditions so disadvantageous that participation itself becomes the mechanism that keeps them poor. As Hickey and du Toit note, outright exclusion is in fact rare; the more common condition is inclusion on terms that entrench poverty rather than relieve it.
What do such terms look like in practice? They include arrangements like debt bondage, where a person borrows money, they cannot repay and must work off the debt under conditions that ensure it never actually clears; insecure day-labor that provides no stable income; and exploitative tenancy, where farming someone else's land on unfavorable rental terms leaves the worker with too little to live on. Debt bondage is the starkest of the three. In Pakistan’s brick kilns, which employ around 4.5 million people, families often take cash advances to cover emergencies such as illness or funerals. They then work to repay the debt under a system designed to keep them permanently indebted. One worker, paid about 960 rupees (around US$6) for molding a thousand bricks a day, explained that when she borrowed another 500 rupees, the kiln owner recorded the debt as 1,000 (Ghani). With inflated interest, unlawful deductions, and ledgers the workers are never allowed to see, repayment becomes permanently out of reach, and the debt commonly passes down to their children. In each case, the worker is economically active and fully included in the market, yet their earnings remain too low to ever secure enough food. Their entitlement, the ability to obtain food through what they earn, is effectively capped by the very terms of their employment. The hunger, in other words, is not a sign of being left outside the system; it is produced within it.
Du Toit’s study of the Ceres fruit-farming district in South Africa illustrates this dynamic clearly. Ceres is one of the centers of the country’s deciduous-fruit export industry, a region marked by “continued and relatively sustained economic development and growth” (Du Toit). The work behind that growth is seasonal and physically demanding: pruning, thinning, harvesting apples and pears, and grading and boxing them in packing sheds. Labor is abundant during harvest and scarce for the rest of the year. As permanent farm-resident employment has declined, much of this work has become casual, supplied by the day through labor brokers who sometimes fail to pay even the legal minimum (Du Toit). That minimum is strikingly low. When farmworkers across the Western Cape’s fruit-growing districts went on strike in 2012–13, the sectoral minimum stood at about 69 rand a day (about US$8 at the time). Workers demanded 150 rand and, after months of protest, won an increase to 105 (South African History Online). Yet a review presented to Parliament during the dispute concluded that even the 150-rand workers were demanding would still not have been enough to guarantee food security (Parliamentary Monitoring Group). If inclusion in a growing economy were enough to cure poverty, these workers should have prospered. Instead, poverty persisted alongside a booming export industry. Their incorporated into a thriving global supply chain did not lift them out of hunger, because the terms of that incorporation—insecure, seasonal employment with wages below the cost of an adequate diet—were themselves the trap. This reshapes what a workable solution would have to look like. If hunger came from exclusion, the remedy would simply be to connect more people to jobs and markets. But if inclusion on unequal terms is itself what impoverishes people, then expanding participation alone cannot help, and may even deepen the problem. The real question is not whether people are included in the economy, but on what terms.
Improving employment conditions alone, however, would eliminate hunger, because access to food can break down again at a second, more intimate level: inside the home. It is easy to imagine a household as a single unit that pools resources and distributes food according to need. The picture is only half the story. The economist Bina Agarwal argues that households are not harmonious units but “sites of cooperation and conflict.” The members of a household are better off sharing a home and pooling what they earn than any of them would be alone; but when the food that money buys is served, they are also in quiet competition over how it is divided: who gets the meat and who gets only rice, whose hunger is treated as urgent and whose is expected to wait. That division is settled by power, and not by need alone.
What decides a person’s share in that competition is what Agarwal calls the fallback position, “the outside options which determine how well-off she would be if familial cooperation fails” (4). In other words, a person’s claim to food within the household depends partly on how well they could survive outside it. Someone with independent income or land can make stronger claims; someone with none, often women and girls, has much less leverage and is therefore more likely to eat last and least. The evidence bears this out: women and girls make up “around 60% of the world's chronically hungry people” (Stavropoulou). A study of extremely poor women in Bangladesh found that most reported eating “least and last” within their own families (Munro and McIntyre). This pattern becomes more visible under scarcity. Among displaced families whose supplies had been sharply cut, women reported that when there was not enough to go around, “they gave the children food and mothers did not eat” (Migration Policy Institute). The detail matters because it shows what happens to a shortfall inside a household: it is not shared evenly among members but absorbed by whoever holds the weakest claim, and gendered norms place mothers last. A shortage does not press on a family as a single unit. It distributes internally and settles on the person least able to resist it.
A household that looks adequately fed on paper, its total food divided by the number of residents, can therefore still conceal someone going hungry. Just as national averages obscure individuals failing beneath them, household averages hide unequal shares within the family
These two mechanisms are not separate problems but a single one operating at two scales, joined by the fallback position. A person’s power inside the household depends on their outside options, and adverse incorporation is precisely what strips those options. Low-paid, insecure work leaves a woman little independent economic standing, weakening their claim to food at home. The pressures in the labor market are then funneled, by household hierarchy, onto the least powerful person in the home. Because this hunger is produced at two levels at once, a policy that pulls only one lever, like higher wages, for example, or a campaign to change attitudes within the family, leaves the other free to cancel its effect. What breaks the cycle is an intervention that reaches both at once, giving a woman resources she holds in her own right (her own income, land, or legal entitlement) since that independent standing is the very fallback position on which her claim to food, inside the home and beyond it, depends.
This essay has deliberately approached hunger through a single analytical lens, treating it as a problem of social and economic distribution. It does not claim to be the whole picture, however, and other angles are equally valid. Stephen Devereux, for instance, criticizes a purely economic framing for its “privileging of economic aspects of famine above sociopolitical determinants” (245), such as war, disease, and forced displacement, all of which are serious causes of hunger in their own right. The essay’s angle does not compete with those; it explains something they cannot. Adverse incorporation and unequal distribution within the household are not the product of any crisis: they operate in ordinary times, when there is no war and no shortage, and so they do not disappear once a conflict ends or a drought passes. The hunger they produce is a standing feature of how food is shared out, which is why it persists even where food is plentiful.
Hunger persists in a world of plenty not because there is too little food, but because of the social arrangements that decide who can command it. This hierarchy operates at more than one scale at once. The same economy that loads export crates and stocks supermarket shelves also fixes the terms on which a brick-kiln worker borrows, a fruit-picker is paid, and a mother divides a pot of food among her children. Enough food at the global, national, and even household level can still leave particular people starving, because layered structures of unequal inclusion push deprivation onto the weakest. The problem is not how much food the world produces, but who controls access to it, and on what terms.
Works Cited
Agarwal, Bina. “ ‘Bargaining’ and Gender Relations: Within and Beyond the Household.” Feminist Economics, vol. 3, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1–51.
Devereux, Stephen. “Sen’s Entitlement Approach: Critiques and Counter-Critiques.” Oxford Development Studies, vol. 29, no. 3, 2001, pp. 245–63.
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