"the ordinary trade machinery could not be relied upon to feed Calcutta. The [food security] crisis had begun". 1942–1943: Shortfall and carryover Whether the famine resulted from crop shortfall or failure of land distribution has been much debated. According to Amartya Sen: "The ... [rice paddy] supply for 1943 was only about 5% lower than the average of the preceding five years. It was, in fact, 13% higher than in 1941, and there was, of course, no famine in 1941." The Famine Inquiry Commission report concluded that the overall deficit in rice in Bengal in 1943, taking into account an estimate of the amount of carryover of rice from the previous harvest, was about three weeks' supply. In any circumstances, this was a significant shortfall requiring a considerable amount of food relief, but not a deficit large enough to create widespread deaths by starvation. According to this view, the famine "was not a crisis of food availability, but of the [unequal] distribution of food and income". There has been very considerable debate about the amount of carryover available for use at the onset of the famine. Several contemporary experts cite evidence of a much larger shortfall. Commission member Wallace Aykroyd argued in 1974 that there had been a 25% shortfall in the harvest of the winter of 1942, while , responsible to the Government of Bengal from August 1942 to April 1943 for managing food supplies, estimated the crop loss at 20%, with disease accounting for more of the loss than the cyclone; other government sources privately admitted the shortfall was 2 million tons. The economist George Blyn argues that with the cyclone and floods of October and the loss of imports from Burma, the 1942 Bengal rice harvest had been reduced by one-third. 1942–1944: Refusal of imports Beginning as early as December 1942, high-ranking government officials and military officers (including John Herbert, the Governor of Bengal; Viceroy Linlithgow; Leo Amery the Secretary of State for India; General Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in India, and Admiral Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of South-East Asia) began requesting food imports for India through government and military channels, but for months these requests were either rejected or reduced to a fraction of the original amount by Churchill's War Cabinet. The colony was also not permitted to spend its own sterling reserves, or even use its own ships, to import food. Although Viceroy