Leveraging agriculture for nutrition

Policy-makers in South Asia are stuck in a quagmire. On the one hand, they have genuine grounds to celebrate achievement of self-sufficiency in foodgrains production, mostly led by the Green Revolution. Agriculture ministers are happy over better performance of the sector than before, the food ministers are happy with large stocks of foodgrains in silos, farmers celebrate increased yield and the people in general satisfied with a regular supply of food in the market with less volatility in prices. More importantly, donors have started to stop food aid in the wake of development in agricultural and food sectors. By and large, a general feeling of happiness prevails in the region.
On the other hand, despite experiencing extraordinary economic growth - particularly praiseworthy agricultural performance that lifted food production and farm income by a few folds - South Asian countries have the highest rate of child malnutrition in the world. More painfully, the potential of the agriculture sector to address under-nutrition is not being realised when agriculture is the main livelihood for the majority of rural households. The grim scenario perhaps reminds us that increased supply of foodgrains may be necessary but not sufficient to avert exposed or hidden famine (malnutrition).
Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA), a research programme (funded by the British Department for International Development  or  DFID), is exploring ways in which agriculture and agri-food systems, policies and strategies can be better organised to reduce malnutrition. The programme kicked off with the premise that the solutions to severe malnutrition lies within agricultural sector itself - not anywhere else.  In other words, look at your lost luggage where the boat has capsized. It is working on three research themes. The first relates to enabling environment for nutrition - how agriculture and food systems can be better linked to other drivers of nutrition. The second theme centres round agri-food policies and markets - how nutrition can be improved by agricultural policies, strategies and market-based approaches. Or, is there any scope to improve upon the existing public foodgrain distribution systems, and safety networks to address the issue of malnutrition? And the last one deals with nutrition-sensitive agriculture - how interventions in agriculture can be designed to improve nutritional status. It may be mentioned that, along the themes, the programme also targets three cross-cutting themes: innovation system, gender and nutrition, and fragility.
While the first issue implies networks that embed new ideas in agriculture and nutrition, the last two issues are in tune with ongoing concerns of climate change and women's empowerment in agriculture and food sectors.  The concern is whether growing engagement of women in agriculture would cost in terms of nutrition for children (opportunity cost). However, all the themes and cross-cutting themes tend to carry the message that if the disease is malnutrition, then the medicine lies in agricultural and food production and practices. The onus lies on the policy-makers of South Asia to orchestrate polices based on sound research observations in each of the fronts described above.
LANSA focuses on four countries which are  faced with the dreadful dilemma of poverty in plenty - malnutrition persists with massive production. For example, Bangladesh has quadrupled its food production, sustained a rapid reduction in stunting but still around 2 in 5 pre-school children are chronically malnourished. India has been witnessing unprecedented economic growth; yet it is the home to one-third of the world's undernourished children.  The readers could be reminded of an interesting observation by Amartya Sen and J Derez. In 2001, India had a foodgrain stock of 62 million tons which, if piled in sacks one above the other, would equal a distance of one million km - implying a distance of going to the moon and coming back. But even with that amount of stock of foodgrain, India's magnitude of malnutrition at that time was above that of sub-Saharan Africa. The third country in the league of four is Pakistan where over 40 per cent of children under five are stunted and the incidence is increasing. Finally, Afghanistan claimed a berth as more than 3 in 5 pre-school children are stunted. Led by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in India, the consortium of LANSA comprises six research and development organisations including the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
In the platform of the policy-makers in South Asia, agricultural sector is generally believed to face a sunset in the wake of sunrise for other sectors. Mistakenly though, the premise draws upon the declining share of agriculture to GDP (gross domestic product). Perhaps based on the perception, the sector has witnessed massive cuts in budgetary allocation in research and extension as well as in infrastructure. The LANSA-initiated themes and cross-cutting themes arguably show otherwise -  it is high time that we revisited agriculture's role not merely in terms of augmenting food production (or a slash in the share to GDP) but in terms of the capacity in reducing the hidden hunger, called malnutrition. Around the globe, the so-called middle-income countries are allegedly the hubs of malnutrition and mal-distribution of income.
The answer to the malady of malnutrition lies in agriculture itself through creating enabling environment for nutrition, agri-food policies and markets and nutrition-sensitive agriculture. So it is not a question of hands-off from agriculture but of hands-on to agriculture. The sooner our policy-makers realised this imperative, the better it is for a healthy nation. Short of that would possibly indicate that silos full of food or even green fields of crops could invite the catastrophe of malnutrition where the children would eat foods, given households'  entitlements to access food, but they wouldn't grow physically or mentally. Celebration of food self-sufficiency or middle-income country status should be pitted against the painful prevalence of massive malnutrition. LANSA's lens thus point to a shift in the perceptions of policy-makers in this region from curative to preventive measures to address pervasive malnutrition gripping the areas with higher economic growth.
The writer is a Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University.
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