Recommendations

Certain conclusions have emerged from the previous discussion, though much remains inconclusive and in need of further work. (Some of these areas are indicated in the next chapter.) The first point to bear firmly in mind is that adequate supply of food is not enough to ensure the eradication of hunger, malnutrition, undernutrition and starvation. Policies must also ensure that people have the purchasing power or other forms of ‘entitlements’ (such as access to subsidized or free food rations). Indeed, an integrated nutrition policy must embrace much more than ensuring supply of, demand for, and access to food. It must aim at adequate health standards, particularly the elimination and prevention of intestinal and parasitic diseases, so that the food is properly absorbed by the body; at adequate education, particularly of women, so that people know what food to eat, how to prepare it, and how to keep themselves healthy through hygienic practices; and at ways to improve the distribution of food within the household, so that vulnerable groups, such as pre-school age children or pregnant and lactating mothers, get enough to eat. These changes often depend on changes in the political power structure. The contribution of price policy is to combine incentives to producers with ensuring access to food by consumers. Once the problem of hunger is understood as in need of a multipronged attack, the danger is seen to be, as Amartya Sen has pointed out,1 not Malthusian pessimism, but Malthusian optimism, i.e. the view that all that is needed is to make the land more fertile and women less fertile: higher prices for food and lower benefits for children.