Enabling poor rural people
to overcome poverty
This study looks at IFAD’s activities in Guatemala, reviewing
two of the Fund’s projects there and analysing their impact
on household food security and on the socio-economic status of women.
On the basis of a detailed analysis of IFAD project data, the author
has gone further and developed a functional indicator of household
vulnerability to food insecurity, which is illustrated and discussed
herein.1
The problem of widespread hunger and food insecurity came into prominence in the 1960s, culminating in the 1974 World Food Conference organized in response to the world food crisis of 1972-74. Since then, world hunger and household food security have been high on the development agenda of many countries and international donors. While the importance of the problem has been conceded universally, the policies, strategies and results of efforts to cope with it have been diverse.
Concern over food security following the famines of the sixties and the world food crisis of 1973 provided an impetus to increase world food production. This resulted in the high growth in agricultural production throughout the world in the seventies and early eighties. Such growth has been sustained mainly by improvements in yield and, to a lesser extent, an expansion of land under cultivation. Recent declines in production growth rates have raised doubts concerning the sustainability of area expansion or intensification as a suitable strategy for meeting the food demands of a rapidly growing population. Furthermore, it is increasingly recognized that an improvement in output at the global level is not sufficient in itself to address the problem of hunger. In spite of recent success in providing adequate global food supplies, there are still 800 million chronically undernourished people in the world – a clear indication that an abundant world food supply, while necessary, is by no means sufficient for a country to be able to eradicate the hunger and food insecurity problems of its people.
The overall tendency in Latin American countries over the last decade has been towards an increase in food dependency. The number of undernourished people in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) countries increased from 54 million in 1970 to 59 million in 1990 (CEPAL). In this region, the number of people living below the poverty line increased from 87 million in 1985 to 108 million in 1990. In the face of an overall increase in cereal production worldwide, Latin American countries have changed from being net exporters to being net importers of these staples. In the period between 1969 and 1971, an average of 3.5 million tonnes of cereals were exported annually from LAC countries, compared with the average of more than 10 million tonnes imported annually between 1988 and 1990. The import-export ratio in Central American countries, including Guatemala, was similar. During the so-called ‘lost decade’ of the eighties, per capita corn production in Central America dropped from an annual average of almost 1 100 lbs in 1980-82 to less than 950 lbs towards the end of the decade. Over the past twenty years, Guatemala’s self-sufficiency ratio for cereals decreased from 105 to 88. Between 1970 and 1990, the total domestic production of corn, Guatemala’s main staple crop, increased from 751 000 to 1 228 000 tonnes. In per capita terms, however, corn production fell.
One can see from the literature on food security that the focus of the seventies on national food stocks and food supply was replaced in the mid-eighties by concern over household access to food and, in the nineties, by interest in individual access. The first shift in the food security paradigm in the mid-eighties was prompted by a new food crisis affecting Africa, where food surpluses at the national and regional level coexisted with widespread malnutrition and starvation at the community and household level. At that time, it became clear that the cause of food insecurity ought to be seen as an erosion of food entitlements, a process that deprives large segments of the population of adequate access to food. More recently, a new shift in the food security paradigm got under way, fuelled by an increased awareness that sufficient entitlement at the household level does not always translate into food adequacy for all household members.
The misconception underlying many development policies and programmes in the past has been that the food insecure would share in the benefits of broad-based programmes, even when not specifically targeted by those programmes. This paradigm is being increasingly challenged. The notion that proper targeting is necessary for improving effectiveness and reducing leakages is now more widely recognized. In the specific case of nutrition-related policies, a consensus has emerged on the importance of targeting women, for at least two reasons: (i) women represent a large portion of the population at high risk of malnutrition; and (ii) they appear to be the best intermediaries for reaching the remaining share of those most at risk, i.e., children. In adopting this view, IFAD and other international donors have supported those programmes that clearly target women. This is in line with the emerging effort to include nutritional concerns in rural development projects through the greater involvement of women in income-generating activities.
Of crucial importance to the design, implementation, and monitoring of food and nutrition-related programmes is the identification of practical indicators capable of easily highlighting the socio-economic features of vulnerable groups, in terms of food security. Such indicators are necessary for targeting and prioritizing interventions. Socio-economic indicators have become increasingly important in HFS and vulnerability assessment. In order to use them effectively, however, one must have an in-depth knowledge of the local area of intervention. International donors and governments both have often been reluctant to provide the necessary resources to obtain this type of detailed information (Maxwell & Frankenberger 1992).
Using data from a household survey in eight rural communities in the intervention area of two IFAD projects in Guatemala, an attempt was made to identify the determinants of HFS and to appraise the roles played by women and by IFAD projects in enabling a household to cope with food insecurity. The conceptual framework adopted in this paper builds upon previous efforts in HFS literature by allowing for intrahousehold and risk considerations. The ultimate goal is to identify the set of socio-economic characteristics distinguishing food vulnerable groups and to construct a composite indicator of household vulnerability to food insecurity.
The remainder of this report is in seven sections: Section II describes the objectives of the report and identifies its likely users. Section III presents the conceptual framework of the HFS debate, focusing on those aspects that will be pursued empirically in the course of the report. Section IV contains a brief description of the survey methodology, while Section V – based on households’ participation status in one IFAD project – contrasts the set of single-factor indicators for the two groups highlighted in Section III, and a series of women’s statistics relative to time allocation and resource control. This section also gives an analysis of the impact of adoption of non-traditional agro-exports on a set of variables presumed to be linked to HFS. These comparisons represent a first step in an attempt to reveal archetypes of households based on entitlements and the ability to cope with entitlement failures. To this end, Section VI presents a composite indicator of household food insecurity, and relates this measure to women’s economic roles, the participation of households in project activities, and NTX adoption. Based on the findings, Section VII provides recommendations that have operational implications for both project implementation and policy-making. In conclusion, Section VIII suggests some possible areas for further research.
This report is directed at two audiences. It aims, first, to provide project staff with in-depth descriptions of the communities in which they operate, focusing in particular on those factors relevant to the assessment of household vulnerability in terms of food adequacy. Second, the report aims to provide both IFAD and policy-makers with a set of operational guidelines for the assessment of household vulnerability to food insecurity.
Among the multiple objectives, are the following: (i) the identification and description of those features that, by contributing to household food entitlements, are most likely to affect household food security and vulnerability to food entitlement failures; (ii) an assessment of women's labour contribution in both remunerated and non-remunerated activities and women’s degree of control over household resources, in an attempt to introduce intrahousehold considerations to the concept of household food entitlements (with the ultimate goal of relating the concept of household food insecurity to women’s position within the household); (iii) an evaluation of the impact of two IFAD projects on improving women’s entitlements and thereby enhancing their role in achieving HFS and reducing household vulnerability to food entitlement failure; (iv) an analysis of the relationship between the adoption of non-traditional agro-exports and a set of variables presumed to affect household food security; and (v) an operationalization of the concept of household vulnerability to food insecurity, based on the empirical construction of a composite indicator that, by including several determinants of food security, simultaneously accounts for the concepts of food supply
1/ This study was financed by supplementary funds from the Government of Norway.
