The 1943 Bengal famine killed millions in a year food supply wasn't unusually low

Economist Amartya Sen showed that famines are rarely just about how much food exists — they're about who has the money or entitlement to buy it. Bengal's 1943 famine killed an estimated 2–3 million people even though the region's food supply that year was comparable to non-famine years; wartime inflation had simply priced the poor out of the market.

— Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation — Oxford University Press, 1981
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