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Agriculture’s role in the Indian enigma: help or hindrance to the crisis of undernutrition?

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Abstract

In recent decades India has achieved one of the fastest economic growth rates in the world, yet its progress against both child and adult undernutrition has been sluggish at best. While this Indian variant of the so-called Asian enigma presents many puzzles, one of the puzzles pertains to agriculture’s role. Many researchers and policymakers have high expectations of agriculture’s potential to reduce undernutrition, despite a lack of substantive evidence. In this paper we assess this tenuous evidence base by exploring two key channels by which agricultural production conditions can influence nutritional outomes: a food consumption pathway and a maternal employment–time use pathway. We conclude with an appraisal of some possible entry points for pro-nutrition agricultural policies.

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Notes

  1. These data are drawn from the National Family Health Surveys (NHFS) (IIPS 2007).

  2. The NHFS is conducted jointly by the Macro International (the standard implementers of Demographic Health Surveys) and the Indian Institute of Population Studies (IIPS). However, the 1992/93 NHFS was carried out by a number of different partners, so concerns are occasionally raised about the quality of that particular round. In general, however, the NHFS of 1998/99 and 2005/06 have not been seriously questioned. The surveys are nationally representative and representative at the state level and at rural and urban levels. More on the design of the surveys can be found at the DHS and IIPS websites.

  3. There are other linkages between agriculture and nutrition, such as the impacts of zoonotic diseases, irrigation and malaria, fertilizer and pesticide use, and general sanitation issues. Generally these issues relate more directly to health than nutrition, however. We also note that India faces an unusual double burden in that over-nutrition is a rapidly growing problem.

  4. Many commentators make particular note of inequality as a deeper determinant of sluggish performance in reducing undernutrition. There are mixed results in terms of providing support to this hypothesis. On the one hand, a recent World Bank (2011) study found that income inequality in India is much higher than consumption inequality, making India one of the poorest countries in the world. On the other hand, NSS and DHS data do suggest that the poor did see some material gains on multiple fronts in the 1990s and early 2000s.

  5. See also Himaz et al. 2008; Kanjilal et al. 2010, and Bhagowalia et al. 2011.

  6. It should be pointed out that there are major inconsistencies between different sources of data on food consumption trends. Neither FAO, NSS, nor NNMB produce estimates that are fully consistent with each other in levels or in trends, and in some instances the differences are staggeringly large. Moreover, NNMB data suggest that intake of a number of micronutrients has declined in recent decades, including calcium, iron, thiamin, niacin, and folic acid (GOI 2007).

  7. Using a different methodology, Mittal found that income-calorie elasticities were negative for non-poor income groups in India. Sharma (2006) also found that calorie-income elasticities were declining over time, but not for the poorest groups or states.

  8. For example, a recent study by Ecker and Qaim (2011) found that expenditure-iron elasticities in Malawi were 0.87, albeit with a somewhat different methodology.

  9. The issue of iron intake is an important one, but it is harder to accurately measure changes in the sources of iron intake.

  10. Deaton and Dreze (2008) noted this shift but argued that “the shift out of agriculture within the rural sector has been modest” (p. 52) and therefore too small to account for the calorie decline.

  11. Whether those calculations are accurate or not, they at least demonstrate the great uncertainty that surround calorie requirement in India (or in any rapidly developing economy). For example, the recent ICRM and NIN (2008) assessment found that the adjustment made for heavy work in the 1988 guidelines was excessive, such that the more recent guidelines downgraded that adjustment by around eight percent. But even if the levels are accurate, there is very little information on how many Indians are actually engaged in heavy, moderate, or sedentary work, and what little data there is suggests that relatively few Indian workers are engaged in “heavy” work (Borgonha et al. 2000). This could mean that estimates of hunger levels over-apply the heavy work calorie requirements, thus overestimating calorie deprivation in India.

  12. Moreover, once one goes beyond aggregate numbers to disaggregate consumption trends by income quintiles, the picture is far more complex. The lowest quintiles tend to have increased their calorie consumption somewhat, although even those diets are diversifying slowly.

  13. Specifically, area cropped to cereals rose by about 10% as a result of the Green Revolution investments. Areas cropped with coarse cereals have declined by 40% from 1960 to 2010, while areas cropped to pulses are generally 5–10% lower than they were in 1960.

  14. In the case of meat consumption, part of the issue almost certainly relates to the prevalence of vegetarianism and abstinence of beef consumption among the Hindu population.

  15. Seasonality and income volatility is also a widely researched issue in the Indian context, although very few studies have examined the impacts of shocks on women’s time use. An older literature looked at gender biases in food distribution, which were found to be magnified by income and agricultural shocks (Babu et al. 1993; Behrman 1988; Mishra et al. 2004). A recent report on the Young Lives survey in Andhra Pradesh also found that the occurrence of drought increased the chances of stunting and underweight by around 6% (Himaz et al. 2008). The same study also found that droughts led to a high participation in child labor. So while the evidence of effects of seasonality and income volatility on nutritional outomes is rather scanty in the Indian context, what evidence there is points to the link’s being quite strong, especially in rural areas.

  16. We also note that occupational choice could technically be considered endogenous because nutritional outomes might influence occupational choice, rather than vice versa. For example, people with very low BMI might be unsuited to the physical demands of agricultural or other manual labor. This could mean that the coefficients on agricultural employment might be biased downward, although we suspect that this bias is relatively small: most of the very poor people who work in agriculture are born into it or work in agriculture because they have virtually no other options.

  17. However, this could be because the wealth index is not very good at distinguishing welfare levels among poorer groups (Chaudhury et al. 2008).

  18. Indeed, existing evidence has found that even urban slum dwellers have better nutritional outomes than rural people (Guha-Khasnobis and James 2010).

  19. The time women allocate to childcare has also been found to be influenced by local labor market conditions. Skoufias (1993) used a time allocation survey of a four-year panel of households from six villages in semiarid parts of India, although time allocations were broken up only into “market,” “home activities,” and “leisure,” with childcare falling under “home activities.” Somewhat counterintuitively, he found that women allocated more time to home activities when male wages were low and female wages were high, when farms were more valuable, and when there were more boys and more adult and older women but fewer elderly women in the household.

  20. The question of who takes care of a child was not asked in the 2005/06 round, hence our reliance on the 1998/99 round.

  21. The World Bank (2006) writes: “The Tamil Nadu Integrated Nutrition Project (TINP) project in India provided a supplementary snack food to pregnant women, which was accepted largely because of its timing, convenience, and image as a snack, though there is little documented evidence of improvements in birthweight in TINP. TINP’s early morning supplementation was at a time when mothers could bring children under three—the most nutritionally vulnerable—to the nutrition center before they went to work.”

  22. With most Indian states containing more than 40 million people, this is a major limitation on the capacity of researchers and policymakers to identify high malnutrition areas.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for their support for the project upon which this research was based, Tackling the Agriculture-Nutrition Disconnect in India (TANDI).We also wish to thank other TANDI project members, particularly Stuart Gillespie, Purnima Menon, Akhter Ahmed, Marie Ruel, and HPS Sachdev.

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  1. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

    Derek Headey

  2. Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China

    Alice Chiu

  3. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), New Delhi, India

    Suneetha Kadiyala

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  1. Derek Headey
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  2. Alice Chiu
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  3. Suneetha Kadiyala
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Correspondence to Derek Headey.

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Headey, D., Chiu, A. & Kadiyala, S. Agriculture’s role in the Indian enigma: help or hindrance to the crisis of undernutrition?. Food Sec. 4, 87–102 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-011-0161-0

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