Rethink on food security, poverty

The government will have to rethink its approach to food security and poverty alleviation keeping in mind the declining per person consumption of cereals.

The decline suggests that cereals may have become 'inferior' goods""those whose consumption drops as income rises. This is according to Pronab Sen, principal advisor, Planning Commission.

"By and large, these (food security and poverty alleviation) strategies have been based primarily on the provision of cheap, and even free, cereals to the poor and vulnerable classes," Sen says in his paper titled 'Poverty-Undernutrition Linkage : of calories and things'.

Despite the leakages that take place in these schemes, it appears more than likely that the average cost of cereals for the poor has declined over the years, at least in relative terms.

The large decline in observed calorie intake of the poverty-line class could be the outcome of the government policies on food subsidisation, in a context where cereals are treated as inferior.

Sen shows that the shortfall in calorie intake is not so much the result of a lack of income or purchasing power as it is the choice of a food basket which yields lower calories per rupee spent than is actually feasible.

If there has indeed been a change in perception, making cereals 'inferior goods', the expansion of the current programmes, which subsidise cereals, needs to be questioned, the paper says, adding that "a careful appraisal needs to be made of the consumption behaviour of different expenditure classes in different parts of the country in order to gauge the appropriateness of such interventions".

He also makes a case for altering the poverty line to include consumption of other nutrients as calorie intake is an inadequate measure of nutritional adequacy.

The poverty line in India is based on estimates of the nutritional requirement of the average person in rural and urban areas.

In rural areas, it is fixed at 2400 kcal per day, based on the age, sex-and occupation-specific nutritional norms, and in urban areas, it is 2100 kcal per day. To this is added the expenditure required for other basic necessities of life, and the total is the poverty line.

A case could be made for saying that the calorie norms are excessive and it may have been better to have a more balanced food basket""lower calorie norms and a minimum consumption of proteins and other nutrients""to have superior health.