Whither food security?

According to the Food and Agriculture Organi-sation (FAO), "Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets the dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life". The key elements of food security are: (a) availability of enough food from domestic production and/or imports to meet the demand, (b) access of food to all people at all times through enough incomes and affordable prices, (c) proper hygiene and sanitary practices and safe water for utilisation of food to have optimum impact on health and nutrition, and (d) a regulatory framework in place and its proper implementation for controlling contamination to ensure food safety. In this write-up, we shall draw upon a seminal work by Dr Mahabub Hossain on food security and its interfaces.
Food security in Bangladesh has long been synonymous with achieving self-sufficiency in the production of rice, the dominant staple food. Bangladesh has made respectable progress in rice production, tripling production from 11 million tons in 1971 to 33.8 million in 2013. The progress in reduction of fertility has contributed to respectable reduction in the growth of population that has reduced the pressure on demand for food. The per capita rice production has increased substantially over its level at independence. But still Bangladesh has not been able to ensure adequate availability of essential food items.
Notable progress has also been achieved in the production of potatoes and vegetables. The growth had been particularly impressive in the last decade. The major problem now faced by potato and vegetables is the volatility in prices leading to large temporal and seasonal fluctuations in prices and production. The production of most other food crops - pulses, oilseed and sugarcane - has either remained stagnant or has declined. The dependence of Bangladesh on the world market for the availability of pulses, edible oil, sugar and milk has been growing, along with wheat that does not suit the agro-ecological environment of Bangladesh, i.e. the short winter season. Maize, which is a new crop in Bangladesh, has been spreading replacing wheat.
Bangladesh has rich biological resource base for fish production. For balanced nutrition, fish occupies a significant position in the dietary habits of the people. The growth in fish production was sluggish in the 1970s; it picked up in the 1980s, and was very rapid (6.6 per cent per year) in the recent years due to expansion of pond aquaculture. Entrepreneurs have started converting deep-water rice lands into fish ponds for engaging in highly productive and profitable intensive pond aquaculture. The prices of cultured fish such as tilapia, koi, and pangas have declined compared with other fish. Because of low prices for cultured fish, fish is now affordable to most low-income consumers.
Progress made in the production of meat and milk and eggs has remained limited. With economic progress the demand for animal products has grown by more than five per cent per year. But the number of cattle and other animals has grown by only 1.8 per cent per year during 1983-2008 period, while the number of poultry birds has increased by 3.5 per cent. The growth in livestock and poultry farming is constrained by lack of feed, risk imposed by avian flu and other animal diseases, and poor processing, storage and marketing infrastructure.
The availability of food in the market is not enough for achieving food security. In a market economy, the access to food depends on four elements: (a) production-based entitlement that depends on the ownership and operation of land, (b) trade-based entitlement that depends on adequate import and affordable market prices, (c) labour-based entitlement that depends on employment and wages, and (d) transfer-based entitlement that includes gifts, remittances from relatives, and relief and social protection provided by the government. The ability of the household and the people to access food is the outcome of the complex operation and interactions of all these elements.
In Bangladesh, 70 per cent of the people live in rural areas where agriculture is the major source of livelihood. Almost 60 per cent of the rural households are engaged in farming. The farming households can access their food from self-production and/or trading the surplus with other foods available in the local market. But the landownership is highly unequally distributed, and so is the access to food from self-production. Almost 30 per cent of the households do not own any land and another 35 per cent own only up to half an acre. Such tiny landownership is insufficient to meet the food needs of the households, even if the farmer uses cutting-edge technologies. A tenancy market is in operation that provides access to land to landless and marginal landowners for farming. But the terms and conditions of tenancy do not favour tenants. So, a large proportion of marginal and tenant farmers goes to the market to access food as their own production (after payment of rent and interest for loans) is inadequate to meet the household needs.
The dominant determinant of access to food is the level and the growth of income. In Bangladesh, the per capita income remained almost stagnant until the end of the 1980s due to slow growth of GNP and high population growth. The growth of per capita income has accelerated since 1990, reaching 4.5 per cent per year in the last decade. The income distribution, however, remains skewed, and the income disparity has worsened. As a result nearly one-third of the people still (2010) live below the poverty line , with inadequate income to access food from the market.
An indicator often used to assess the capacity of the poor to access food from the market is the level and trend in real wages. This indicator shows that since the mid-1990s there has been a favourable trend in the income of the households which depend on selling labour in the market, such as agricultural wage labourers, transport operators and construction workers. This development has been facilitated by government investment on rural roads linking villages to markets, the growth in microfinance that has reached poor households, rapid rural-to-urban migration and fast expansion of agricultural surplus due to increase in agricultural productivity. The only low-income group which has not been able to increase their real income are industrial labourers, particularly the unskilled workers in the garment industry and the fixed wage earners in the public sector.
The hike in food prices after the food crisis in 2007-08 has had a negative impact on real wages and access to food. Sharp increase in food grain prices significantly decreased the real income of poor households which spend over half of their income on staple food. At the same time, the volatility in producer prices increases risks and uncertainty, and discourages the subsistence farmer to invest in agriculture. The volatility in food prices remains an issue for achieving seasonal and temporal stability in food security.
Currently, nearly two per cent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is allocated for safety nets and social protection. The evaluation of the programmes, however, revealed several limitations; (a) large overheads due to operation of a large number of small programmes by different ministries and departments often with the same objectives, (b) improper targeting of beneficiary households due to political pressure, and (c) leakages in implementation from rent seeking at various stages.
The writer is a Professor
of Economics at
Jahangirnagar University. [email protected]