IFPRI Discussion Paper No. 01085, May, Derek Headey, Alice Chiu and Suneetha Kadiyala (2011)

In this paper the authors reassess agriculture’s role in explaining the Indian enigma – that of the unusual combination of high economic growth coupled with sluggish improvements in child and adult under nutrition. Exploring two key pathways that link agricultural conditions to nutrition outcomes, they find that agriculture is only one of the several factors that explain India’s under-nutrition problems.

Despite high and consistent growth of the Indian economy over the last decade, the country’s record in several indicators of human development remains abominably low. In specific terms, nutritional indicators such as the proportion of children that are stunted, proportion of underweight adult and children have improved only marginally in the last decade. Further, instead of increasing, calorie consumption of the population too has declined over the decade. One of the complex, interlinked factors that can impact nutrition outcome relates to the role of agriculture. This is because, “agricultural growth presumably has profound impacts on diets, potentially influencing both macro- and micronutrient intake”.  However, in the existing literature there are very few studies that focus on the agriculture–nutrition linkages in India.

In order to fill this gap, Derek Headey et al, empirically analyse the role that agricultural growth plays in determining consumption patterns and (child and adult female) nutrition outcomes in India. Theoretically there are two routes through which agriculture can impact nutrition status outcome. One is via the income–production–consumption linkages and the other is through the agriculture-employment–time linkages. While in the former case, the effect should be positive, in the case of the latter on the other hand, “there may be negative impacts of agricultural growth on nutrition via employment and time use”, especially of women. Thus the linkages between agriculture and nutrition can be both positive and negative.

However, even in the potentially positive linkage between agriculture and nutrition, there can be certain ‘leakages’ in the causal pathway that can undermine the positive impacts. The ‘leakages’ can be: changes in taste towards less-nutritional food, inter and intra-household inequality, public health policies that may constrain the efficiency of nutrient uptake. Additional leakages, at the national level, could be: the pattern of agricultural growth, in particular the volatility, and/or its unevenness; the impact that such patterns have on dietary diversity through changes in relative prices and so on.

Using various rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) for the period 1992-2005, the authors argue that at the national level the poor nutritional outcome in the period can be explained by the fact that the importance of agricultural sector’s role in the Indian economy has declined considerably since the 1990s. Further, in this period agricultural growth has been highly volatile with near-zero average growth in per capita food production. Thus, the authors argue, “as food production per capita slowed in the 1990s, so too did nutritional improvements”. However, state-level analysis, based on regression analysis of a range of economic progress indicators with improvements in child and adult female nutritional outcome, throw up a mixed picture. With regard to women’s BMI, results show that agricultural growth rates are significantly associated with improvements in this particular measure of nutritional status. On the other hand, regarding improvements in stunting, in some states agricultural growth plays a positive role, whereas in others there is a total disconnect. The incidence of disconnect with nutritional outcomes, however, reduces significantly (other than for Haryana), when food grain production, instead of overall agricultural growth is taken as the explanatory variable. More refined regression analysis comparing elasticities of various welfare indicators (including agricultural growth) and nutritional outcome shows that economic growth is important mainly for adult nutrition and not so much for child nutrition. This is not surprising given that “child nutrition is determined less by sheer food consumption and more by prenatal and infant health and care practices”.

These results, the authors argue, show that there are a number of leakages between agricultural growth (and overall income growth) and child nutrition that operate in India. Of the various possible leakages, the authors feel, the decline in calorie consumption points towards “welfare improvements in India rather than deterioration” This is because reduced calorie consumption in India during this period is a reflection of change in taste away from coarse cereals (which are more nutritious than refined cereals) as well as reduced calorie requirement. The reduced calorie requirements result from more sedentary lifestyle because of increased mechanisation in agriculture, shift to less arduous non-agricultural jobs, better transport systems etc. Moreover, cross-regional data show that the relationship between calorie availability and nutrition are weak. Therefore decline in calorie consumption is not a serious problem. The more critical concern is the decline in protein and micronutrient consumption. Thistrend is largely explained by relatively large increase in prices of pulses and coarse cereals compared to refined cereals, vegetables etc. The prices changes, in turn, are a result of policy neglect of pulse and coarse grain production as well as diversion of coarse grain as animal feed. On the whole, therefore, it is the lack of dietary diversity, rather than decline in calorie consumption that is of critical importance. This holds for child nutritional outcome as well.

Similarly, with regard to the impact of agricultural employment on nutrition, especially mothers’ employment, empirical analysis carried out by the authors shows that compared to individuals in most other relatively unskilled, those involved in agriculture have slightly worse nutrition outcomes (BMIs). However, there is no conclusive evidence that points towards significant, positive association between mothers’ BMI and their children’s nutrition outcomes. Also, it is difficult to establish that childcare practices are affected by whether the mother is agriculturally employed.

In the light of these findings, the authors conclude on the note that although agriculture does play a nuanced role in determining nutritional outcomes, it is only one of the several factors that explain India’s under-nutrition problems. Given that under-nutrition is partly a health problem and partly an education and information problem, they recommend that the government of India needs to pay more attention to policies regarding health, education, infrastructure. Also, there is a need to make agricultural and food policies more “nutrition-sensitive” for solving the problem of under-nutrition in India.