Exploring the Significance of Food Insecurity Mediated Poverty and Low Productivity Traps: Furthering Policy by Reconciling Secondary Data with Primary Survey

Food security has important positive implications for cognition, the basis for human capital formation. This paper points to the highly probable food insecurity mediated poverty trap—on the basis of a collation of researches by nutrition and paediatric scientists, and neuroscientists—by which poverty causes malnutrition and thus poor human capital formation, resulting again in poverty in the next generation. It marshals empirical support for the existence of this trap—National Sample Survey data for India as a whole showing that households with low economic status are indeed associated with a significantly higher statistical probability of malnutrition and anthropometric deficiency than other households. However, at the same time, it qualifies this conclusion on the basis of a primary survey of two villages carried out in 24 South Paraganas district of West Bengal which indicates that the results for India as a whole are not necessarily true for each narrowly defined region: in this specific case, nutritional deficiency or qualitatively poor dietary intake is poorly associated with income status and often observed for high income households. Second, households in these two villages are observed to remain in the wealthier part of the economic distribution in spite of poor dietary intake. An important parallel finding also emerges from National Sample Survey data: alleviation of income poverty over time is not necessarily a cure for food insecurity with income enhancement often associated with copycat status good consumption. A case thus emerges for nutritional counselling whereby households could be advised how changes in their diet can enhance their productivity and wellbeing. Finally, the study of two villages’ points to the likelihood of poor nutrition being determined more by cultural characteristics born out of religious, caste and geographical affiliations than income. It thus concludes that region specific studies for determining the significant drivers of food insecurity are called for.