Social Dynamics and Determinants of Food and Nutrition Security: Empirical Research Evidences in Uttar Pradesh

摘要

Ensuring food security continues to be an issue of vital importance. The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) provide us with the starting point to assess the level of food security and prioritise our efforts to achieve it. The first development goal seeks to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. In the post-economic reform period in India, the Relative Price of Food (RPF) has become one of the important factors in explaining variations in poverty. How does an increase in the RPF affect rural poverty in India? This question necessitates an analytical and empirical understanding. Sen (1996) claims that agricultural productivity and public development expenditure result in a much better explanation of pre-reform and post-reform poverty. Ravallion (1998)uses 24 observations of the National Sample Survey (NSS) rounds from 1958 to 1993-4, and obtains a correlation of 0.76 between poverty (the Headcount ratio, HCR) and RPF. Although this confirms the claim made by critics of the economic reforms of a strong positive correlation between measured poverty and RPF, Ravallion rejects the explanation that this correlation is driven by the adverse distributional effect of changes in RFP, and maintains that the correlation is due to the mean effect via depressedmean per capita consumption. It may be mentioned here that many of the poor are unambiguously hurt by the inflation. Higher food prices hurt all households who are net purchasers of food. Apart from the whole of the urban population who are net purchasers, even among the rural households more than 50% are net purchasers of food. Despite the fact that NSS tabulations do not reveal which rural households are net consumers or producers of food, there is sufficient proxy evidence.