MacroScan - Food Insecurity in South Asia

Across South Asia, food insecurity remains a major policy challenge. This is despite the fact the food production has increased in all the countries of South Asia (albeit at a declining rate) so that at a macro level, these countries do not face aggregate shortage. The table below reveals that all countries in the South Asian region have even been exporting some amount of food grain, and the balance is positive in all countries except Bangladesh for 2002. These countries have transformed themselves from food deficit countries in the 1960s and 1970s to food surplus countries in the 1980s and 1990s. However, increased food production has not been accompanied by greater household and individual food security for significant sections of the population.
Table 1 >>

Across the region, there is evidence of inadequate nutrition and food insecurity, reflected most starkly in declining per capita calorie consumption even among the poorest quartile of the population. In India, per capita food-grain consumption declined from 476 grams per day in 1990 to only 418 grams per day in 2001, and even aggregate calorific consumption per capita declined from just over 2200 calories per day in 1987-1988 to around 2150 in 1999-2000. This decline was marked even among the bottom 40 per cent of the population, where it was unlikely to reflect Engels curve type shifts in consumer choice, but rather relative prices and the inability to consume enough food due to income constraints.

Nutritional deficiencies remain huge - at least half the children in India (and possible more in Pakistan) are born with protein deficiency, and anaemia and iron deficiency are also widespread and severe problems. World Bank estimates reveal that around 35 per cent of the population is chronically undernourished in Bangladesh followed by 25 per cent in India, 20 per cent in Nepal and Pakistan, and 25 per cent in Sri Lanka.

What is worse is that there has been little change in the prevalence of under-nutrition in South Asian countries from the early 1990s through the late 1990s, and if anything level of food insecurity have worsened slightly during the 1990s. This is unlike other parts of the developing world - such as China, Indonesia, Malawi and Kenya, all of which have made more than a 25 per cent reduction in the level of undernourishment during the last decade.

Two policy related forces have played substantial indirect roles in declining food security: the agrarian crisis and inadequate employment generation, both of which have meant that patterns of changes in purchasing power have not encouraged better food security. But there are also direct effects of misguided policies which have directly damaged food security - as in the case of India since the mid 1990s, when attempts to reduce the central government’s food subsidy by increasing the price of food in the public distribution system led to declining sales and excess holding of food stocks. These meant more losses, and therefore a larger level of food subsidy, even as more people within the country went hungry, and ultimately several million tones of foodgrain were exported at ridiculously low prices despite widespread hunger and malnutrition within the country.

Even without these extreme cases, the general tendency to run down public distribution systems for food has been evident across South Asia, even in countries like Sri Lanka where this was earlier an integral part of the overall development strategy. This obviously has an impact on poor households in general, but it also has a very specific gender dimension, as women and girl children in poor households get disproportionately deprived.

Loss of livelihood is typically the key shock factor that then generates a process that culminates in greater hunger and malnourishment. This has certainly been the case in most of South Asia, and explains the apparent conundrum of the coexistence of higher production and lower prices of food with continued, widespread and even increasing incidence of hunger. As world trade prices of food have fallen, incomes of the poor (especially the rural poor) in most parts of South Asia have fallen even further, reflecting the general stagnation of productive employment opportunities and worsening of livelihood conditions.

The irony is that cultivators are suffering from this - and from related increases in food insecurity - just as much or even more than other groups. And this is probably the most significant single conjunctural cause of the continued prevalence of widespread malnourishment. The macroeconomic causes for livelihood insecurity come dominantly from the effects of market deregulation and reduction of state expenditure that have marked the last decade and a half across South Asia.

This means that, just as land reforms and more equal property distribution remain the key to solving the structural problem of hunger, the more transient or temporary evidence of hunger must be dealt with through macroeconomic policies that firmly commit government to much greater degrees of involvement, investment and regulation.