Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) is a multi-country engagement of research in establishing the nexus between agriculture and nutrition. Funded mainly by the British Department for International Development (DFID), the research project produced a number of insightful policy prescriptions on nutritional improvement - much needed for alleviation of malnutrition in South Asia, also known as Asian Enigma. Look at the Bangladesh case that can duly take a pride in achieving self-sufficiency in food grain production, especially in rice.
The success has been mainly driven by the Green Revolution. Now the country is said to be out of the shadow of famine, and arguably most of the people now have a three 'satisfactory' meals; rice prices tend to remain within reasonable limit. But the darker side of the development is that, alongside improvement in food grain production, a large proportion of population, especially the children population, still live under serious malnutrition.
It is not to say that there was no improvement over time - it was despite moderate improvement over time. "Although a priori reasoning would suggest that agriculture would be an important sector for influencing nutrition outcomes, there is a remarkable dearth of rigorous evidence on the role of large scale agricultural programs, such as Asia's Green Revolution". While South Asia is generally synonymous with high rates of under-nutrition and poor progress against this problem, the good news is that Bangladesh has managed to consistently reduce rates of stunting for at least two decades. But for some reasons or other, the pace of progress has stalled. The principal finding by a group of researchers earlier observed that the process of nutritional change in Bangladesh has been highly multidimensional. Bangladesh's experience shows that it is possible to achieve rapid and sustained nutritional change even in the absence of large and effective nutritional programmes, provided that there is sufficient broad economic and social development.
One of the most important policy-related paper has been contributed by Derek D Heady and John Hoddinott of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The paper is an attempt to analyse the nexus between agriculture and nutrition linkages in Bangladesh. The reason for choosing Bangladesh as a test case seems to be twofold: it is a country that achieved rapid growth in rice productivity at a relatively late stage in Asia's Green Revolution, and apparently waged a war against under-nutrition. The methodology followed by the researchers is robust and representative such as the authors created a synthetic panel that aggregates nutritional data from the five rounds of Demographic Health Surveys (1997 to 2011) with district-level estimates of rice yields.
Using various panel estimators, they find rice yields significantly explain weight gain in young children but not linear growth. The authors further show that rice yields have large and positive effects on the timely introduction of complementary foods for young children but not on dietary diversity indicators and that this complementary feeding indicator is positively associated with child weight gain but not with linear growth.
The reverse holds for dietary diversity indicators, which influence linear growth but not weight gain. "The results therefore suggest that Bangladesh's Green Revolution has made a large contribution to improvements in weight gain but has had little effect on postnatal linear growth. Achieving the latter would appear to require greater efforts to diversify diets out of cereals and into more micronutrient-rich foods".
The impact of productivity growth in staple food production on preschool children's nutritional status has been assessed by these two ace researchers of IFPRI. The findings are worth noting despite the cost of paraphrasing.
They find that increases in rice yields have large and statistically significant impacts on child weight gain. The result appears to be explained by increased food consumption by young children, particularly the timeliert introduction of solid and semisolid foods in the critical early window of child development. Conversely, they find no substantial evidence that growth in rice productivity has significantly improved linear growth of young children or the dietary diversification processes that are significantly associated with linear growth. Thus, while the estimated effects of yield growth on WHZ (Weight against height Z score) scores are large enough to account for much of the improvement in weight gain observed in rural areas of Bangladesh from 1997 to 2011, they find no evidence that yield growth explains much of the rapid improvement in stunting observed during this period.
Of course, this does not mean that no such effects exist. Rice productivity growth might have had general equilibrium price effects-which the model is not suited to identifying-that favourably affected linear growth in children. Another possibility is that rice productivity growth had improvements on maternal nutrition, which heavily determines a child's birth size. While there are some indirect indications that birth size improved quite substantially from 1997 to 2011, the DHS do not directly measure birth size, meaning that we are unable to directly test this hypothesis.
Bearing these caveats in mind, the findings yield some important policy implications. In particular, while agricultural productivity growth in Bangladesh has made a significant contribution to alleviating food insecurity and acute under-nutrition, its contribution to reducing chronic under-nutrition has been more limited because of the limited effects of rice productivity on the dietary diversification of young children. A major challenge is to understand the determinants of dietary diversification in Bangladesh and policy options for promoting diversification.
Examples include a rebalancing of Bangladesh's agricultural research and development portfolio toward more micronutrient-rich crops and livestock products, expansion or improvements in homestead gardening programmes, and more effective use of trade mechanisms to bolster domestic production with imports. "Linking these to improvements in women's schooling and autonomy, with improved hygiene, sanitation, and child care practices (particularly around the introduction of more diverse diets), may well have especially large impacts. Further research, however, is needed in this area."
The writer is a Professor of Economics at Jahangiranagr University.
© 2024 - All Rights with The Financial Express
