A guarantee of access to benefits through rights, or through legal agreement. By entitlements, A. Sen (1981) means one’s ability to achieve the commodities necessary for basic needs (including food and shelter), either through income-generating work or from direct production of these goods. The size of one’s entitlement determines the amount of food (and other commodities) one can command. Thus Smith (2001) PHG 25, 140 writes that access to food in urban areas is affected by a wide range of entitlements and blockages, most of which revolve around the fact that unlike rural areas where self-sufficiency or exchange is possible, cities operate on the basis of a cash economy. Sen uses the entitlement approach to explain famines. Watts (2000) Zeitschrift 88 comments that ‘one of the great strengths of Sen’s approach to hunger is that its entitlements are part of a larger architecture of thinking about development as a state of well-being and choice or freedom’. See also G. Robinson (2004).