Probably the most important immediate cause of starvation during the 1974 famine in Bangladesh was a sharp drop in the food purchasing power of agricultural earnings. Past work has attempted to explain this in terms of conditions in food markets. This paper reports an econometric investigation of wage movements before and after the famine which reveals a significant structural break in the short-run response of wages to prices at the time of the famine. Without this change in labour market conditions real wages would have remained fairly stable during the famine.