India’s performance in the Global Hunger Index has shown a downward trend in the last few years. It seemed to be improving between 2008 and 2014 but its score has fallen from 38.8 in 2000 to 31.1 in 2018, with a ranking of 103rd amongst 119 countries. This can be juxtaposed with India’s rising economic growth and increasing levels of food production during the same period. This entails a critical need to change the widespread understanding of hunger and food security.
In 2015, the conception of malnutrition was expanded and reformulated, with the introduction of new parameters, including stunting and wasting amongst children, in order to achieve a more accurate perception and estimation of the hunger problem.
“Given that malnutrition is a multidimensional phenomenon (UNICEF 1994), the revised GHI formula is able to depict a relatively truer state of hunger in countries across the globe. Inclusion of stunting ensures consideration of rigid cultural factors, while that of wasting represents aspects of diet quality as well. Also, stunting is an indicator of long-term growth failure, and therefore, must be accounted for in any analysis of potential threat a given level of child malnutrition poses for a country. This is one of the key reasons the sustainable development agenda of the United Nations associate bodies display primary concern towards stunting.”
Malnutrition in India has not garnered sufficient policy focus and instead, has been left under the purview of economic development, hinged on the belief that the problem of hunger will be solved by the “trickle-down” effect as money will percolate down through the different strata of society. However, this the orization is based on multiple problematic assumptions about the relationship between hunger and social structures in India.
According to a 2013 EPW article, the “unconscionable reality” of those who grapple with critical hunger, their understanding of food formed a particular interface with their understanding of community.“Natural and intimate narratives of food and hunger, reflecting the lives of a majority of children, are generally absent from the discourse of education. What can be found, instead, are clinical and insensitive descriptions of what constitutes a healthy diet, often illustrated with visuals of food far beyond the reach of most children.”
The article further debunks the popular perception that lack of food security is an indicator of poverty. In understanding the relationship between poverty and hunger in India, the dependence of the rural and urban poor on private entities, for essential and relatively more expensive services like transport and education, has led them to deal with a “food-budget squeeze.” This is a product of the government’s shrinking social expenditure.
“The findings of our study suggest that rather than being a matter of choice, the poor have been increasingly forced to spend more on non-food essential items such as education, healthcare, transportation, fuel and lighting. The share of monthly expenditure devoted to these items has increased at such a pace that it has absorbed all the increase in real income over the past three decades. This has led to a “food budget squeeze”, which has meant relatively stagnant real food expenditure over the last two decades. Several factors have led to or compounded the effects of the food budget squeeze.”
Thus, even though the rate of global food production has been consistently greater than the rate of population growth, the persistent and pervasive food security crisis prevails.
“In most developing countries one of the biggest issues, with respect to public provisioning towards social protection, to address hunger and food insecurity is organically connected with that of adequate “fiscal” or “expenditure” space. Contrary to the view that countries with low GDP cannot create such a space, we would argue that even at low levels of income it is possible to mobilise adequate resources for the provisioning of social protection. Neither conceptually nor historically, there is no reason to believe that a country needs to wait to reach relatively high levels of per capita income before it can make adequate progress in this regard, even though, higher income of course helps in doing so.”
According to a recent EPW editorial, the panacea of the hunger problem in India lies in the implementation of well-designed public policies of income redistribution that are grounded in social justice and social security objectives, rather than those of neo-liberal objectives of economic efficiency. The Brazilian model of curbing malnutrition illustrates the effectiveness of strengthening measures to support smallholder agriculture to curb hunger. Low levels of per capita income cannot serve as a rationale for the lack of creation of adequate fiscal spaces for the social protection of basic human needs.
Aditi Rukhaiyar
December 6, 2018
source https://indiaoutbound.org/reformulation-of-the-hunger-problem-in-india/
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