Determinants of Food Security Status of Agricultural Households: An Empirical Investigation from Kuttanad Wetland System in Kerala, India

Vijayan D., Ray J.G.

Kadiyala S., Harris J., Headey D., Yosef S., Gillespie S.

In India, progress against undernutrition has been slow. Given its importance for income generation, improving diets, care practices, and maternal health, the agriculture sector is widely regarded as playing an important role in accelerating the reduction in undernutrition. This paper comprehensively maps existing evidence along agriculture-nutrition pathways in India and assesses both the quality and coverage of the existing literature. We present a conceptual framework delineating six key pathways between agriculture and nutrition. Three pathways pertain to the nutritional impacts of farm production, farm incomes, and food prices. The other three pertain to agriculture-gender linkages. After an extensive search, we found 78 research papers that provided evidence to populate these pathways. The literature suggests that Indian agriculture has a range of important influences on nutrition. Agriculture seems to influence diets even when controlling for income, and relative food prices could partly explain observed dietary changes in recent decades. The evidence on agriculture-gender linkages to nutrition is relatively weak. Sizeable knowledge gaps remain. The root causes of these gaps include an interdisciplinary disconnect between nutrition and economics/agriculture, a related problem of inadequate survey data, and limited policy-driven experimentation. Closing these gaps is essential to strengthening the agriculture sector's contribution to reducing undernutrition.

Headey D.D.

Summary We utilize a rich cross-country data set to understand within-country changes in nutrition, with a focus on the role of general developmental factors. We find that economic growth is a strong predictor of nutritional performance, as is growth in food production, although only in more food insecure countries. We find no evidence that infrastructure is directly important, but greater asset ownership, improved access to health services, higher rates of female secondary education, and lower fertility rates, are all strong predictors of improvements in nutrition. We show that national success stories are largely consistent with these findings.

Gulati A., Kumar A.G., Shreedhar G., Nandakumar T.

Despite the high and relatively stable overall growth of the economy, India's agriculture sector is underperforming and a vast section of the population remains undernourished.To explore the possible interplay between agricultural performance and malnutrition indicators to see whether states that perform better in agriculture record better nutritional outcomes.Correlation analysis and a simple linear regression model were used to study the relationship between agricultural performance and malnutrition among children under 5 years of age and adults from 15 to 49 years of age at 20 major states using data from the National Family Health Survey-3 for the year 2005/06 and the national accounts.Indicators of the level of agricultural performance or income have a strong and significant negative relationship with indices of undernutrition among adults and children, a result suggesting that improvement of agricultural productivity can be a powerful tool to reduce undernutrition across the vast majority of the population. In addition to agriculture, access to sanitation facilities and women's literacy were also found to be strong factors affecting malnutrition. Access to healthcare for women and child-care practices, in particular breastfeeding within 1 hour after birth, are other important determinants of malnutrition among adults and children.Malnutrition is a multidimensional problem that requires multisectoral interventions. The findings show that improving agricultural performance can have a positive impact on nutritional outcomes. However, improvements in agriculture alone cannot be effective in combating malnutrition if several other mediating factors are not in place. Interventions to improve education, health, sanitation and household infrastructure, and care and feeding practices are critical. Innovative strategies that integrate agriculture and nutrition programs stand a better chance of combating the malnutrition problem.

Christiaensen L., Demery L., Kuhl J.

The role of agriculture in development remains much debated. This paper takes an empirical perspective and focuses on poverty, as opposed to growth alone. The contribution of a sector to poverty reduction is shown to depend on its own growth performance, its indirect impact on growth in other sectors, the extent to which poor people participate in the sector, and the size of the sector in the overall economy. Bringing together these different effects using cross-country econometric evidence indicates that agriculture is significantly more effective in reducing poverty among the poorest of the poor (as reflected in the $1-day squared poverty gap). It is also up to 3.2 times better at reducing $1-day headcount poverty in low-income and resource rich countries (including those in Sub-Saharan Africa), at least when societies are not fundamentally unequal. However, when it comes to the better off poor (reflected in the $2-day measure), non-agriculture has the edge. These results are driven by the much larger participation of poorer households in growth from agriculture and the lower poverty reducing effect of non-agriculture in the presence of extractive industries.

Zezza A., Tasciotti L.

Urban agriculture may have a role to play in addressing urban food insecurity problems, which are bound to become increasingly important with the secular trend towards the urbanization of poverty and of population in developing regions. Our understanding of the importance, nature and food security implications of urban agriculture is however plagued by a lack of good quality, reliable data. While studies based on survey data do exist for several major cities, much of the evidence is still qualitative if not anecdotal. Using a recently created dataset bringing together comparable, nationally representative household survey data for 15 developing or transition countries, this paper analyzes in a comparative international perspective the importance of urban agriculture for the urban poor and food insecure. Some clear hints do come from our analysis. On the one hand, the potential for urban agriculture to play a substantial role in urban poverty and food insecurity reduction should not be overemphasised, as its share in income and overall agricultural production is often quite limited. On the other hand, though, its role should also not be too easily dismissed, particularly in much of Africa and in all those countries in which agriculture provides a substantial share of income for the urban poor, and for those groups of households to which it constitutes an important source of livelihoods. We also find fairly consistent evidence of a positive statistical association between engagement in urban agriculture and dietary adequacy indicators.

Abebaw D., Fentie Y., Kassa B.

With the financial support from various development partners, Ethiopia has designed and implemented several programs to improve household food security. Yet, food insecurity is still a major challenge to several millions of people in the country and it is questionable whether the different food security programs implemented over the past years have been successful. Using a propensity score matching method to control for pre-intervention differences, this study examined the impact on household food calorie intake of an integrated food security program (IFSP), which had been implemented in Northwestern Ethiopia by two non-governmental organizations as a case study. The estimated results provide evidence that IFSP has a positive and statistically significant effect on food calorie intake. In particular, IFSP has raised physical food calorie intake by 30% among the beneficiary households. However, we also found that IFSP has differential impact depending on family size, landownership and gender of head of household. Overall, the paper provides evidence that supporting integrated food security programs is important to improve food security in rural areas.

Feleke S.T., Kilmer R.L., Gladwin C.H.

Vakulabharanam V.

This article analyses the impact of agricultural liberalisation on different farming classes in the region of Telangana in South India. The region has been witnessing significant growth in real agricultural output over the last 15 years. At the same time, as NSS (National Sample Survey) household survey data indicate, there have been significant welfare declines not only for marginal farmers and landless labour, but for other groups as well. There have also been more than a thousand farmer suicides between 1998 and 2002. I argue in this article that during the liberalisation period, that is, post 1990, agricultural growth and increased distress have become mutually intertwined. I use the terms, growth-inducing distress and distress-inducing growth to explain this apparent paradox.

Chettri D., Datta P., Rahut D.B., Behera B., Sonobe T.

ABSTRACTFood insecurity is a serious concern in many developing countries, especially for forest communities, who grapple with unique challenges stemming from their dependence on natural resources and limited access to vital livelihood capitals. Despite extensive research on food security, there still remains a gap in understanding the distinct factors affecting food security within forest communities in conservation zones of the fragile Eastern Himalayas. This study seeks to fill this gap by examining the factors determining household food security among forest villagers in the Buxa Tiger Reserve, located in the eastern sub‐Himalayan region of India, which is characterized by significant environmental and socio‐economic challenges. Households were evaluated using the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) and grouped into four levels: food secure, mildly food insecure, moderately food insecure, and severely food insecure. The partial proportional odds model and marginal effects were estimated to analyze the effects of various explanatory variables on the severity of food insecurity. The results revealed that 28% of households were food secure, whereas 72% experienced varying degrees of food insecurity, with a majority falling into the mildly (37.33%) and severely (21.67%) food insecure categories. Key factors influencing food security include the age and education of the household head, landholding size, farming experience, dependency ratio, distance to the bank, and livestock loss due to leopard predation. Additionally, non‐farm income, social transfers, and remittances significantly contribute to improved food security. These findings highlight the urgent need for targeted interventions to enhance educational opportunities, diversify income sources, and strengthen social safety nets to effectively address food insecurity among forest communities.