Multiple authors agree that "wage labourers suffered the highest mortality for all groups". Crude death rate "among landless families was three times higher than that for families with three or more acres". Causes As with most famines, the causes of the Bangladesh famine were multiple. These included flooding, rapid population growth, government mismanagement of foodgrain stocks, legislation restricting movement of foodgrains between districts, foodgrain smuggling to neighbouring countries and so called distributional failures. The famine did not occur among all areas and populations but was concentrated in specific areas; particularly those hit by flooding. In their studies of the 1974 famine, various scholars find that 1974 average foodgrain production was a 'local' peak. For this reason, scholars argue that, "food availability approach offers very little in the way of explanation of the Bangladesh famine of 1974". Rather, they argue that the Bangladesh famine was not caused by a failure in availability of food but in distribution (or entitlement), where one group gained "market command over food". Two distributional failures stand out. The first failure was internal: the specific configuration of the state rationing system and the market resulted in speculative hoarding by farmers and traders and a consequent rise in prices. The second failure was external: the US had withheld 2.2 million tonnes of food aid, as the then US Ambassador to Bangladesh made it abundantly clear that the US probably could not commit food aid because of Bangladesh's policy of exporting jute to Cuba. And by the time Bangladesh succumbed to the American pressure, and stopped jute exports to Cuba, the food aid in transit was "too late for famine victims". Government response The Government's response to the famine primarily focused on the institution of soup kitchens. By November, 1974, the government claimed it had 6,000 soup kitchens in operation across the country. A government official claimed that this helped save "five million lives". The government soup kitchens provided basic rations consisting of either a single roti, or four ounces of a porridge made of rice and daal. Other facilities provided "survival biscuits" donated by the United States. See also Bengal famine (disambiguation) Hunger in Bangladesh References Alamgir, M. (1980). Famine in South Asia: Political economy of mass starvation. Massachusetts: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain Sen, A. (1982). Poverty and famines: An essay and entitlement and deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon. Baro, M. & Duebel F.T. (2006). Perspectives on vulnerability, famine and