ah, the right to food: you can eat the 'right to food' bill if onions not available

apr 3rd, 2011

but india won the cricket world cup! so who cares about the starving?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:

     The Indian exception

Many Indians eat poorly. Would a “right to food” help?

Mar 31st 2011 | from the print edition

“LOOK at this muck,” says 35-year-old Pamlesh Yadav, holding up a tin-plate of bilious-yellow grains, a mixture of wheat, rice and mung beans. “It literally sticks in the throat. The children won’t eat it, so we take it home and feed it to the cows.”

... deleted

The nursery is part of India’s Integrated Child Development Services Scheme (ICDS), the largest child-nutrition programme in the world. Its woes in Rajasthan are part of a larger problem. India is an outlier. Its rate of malnutrition—nearly half the children under three weigh less than they should—is much higher than it should be given India’s level of income. And the burden has shifted more slowly than it ought to have done given Indian growth. Lawrence Haddad, the director of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, reckons that every 3-4% increase in a developing country’s income per head should translate into a 1% fall in rates of underweight children.

In India the rate has barely shifted in two decades of growth. Per person, India eats less, and worse, than it used to. Mr Haddad calls the country the world’s Jekyll and Hyde: economic powerhouse, nutritional weakling. Over a third of the world’s malnourished children live there.

Related topics

• India

When India was poor, its failure to feed itself properly did not seem odd. Poverty was explanation enough. But after one of the most impressive growth spurts in history, the country’s inability to lift the curse of malnutrition has emerged as its greatest failure—and biggest puzzle. Nothing fully accounts for it. True, farming has not shared in the same dazzling success as the rest of the economy, lately rising by only a point or two per person per year. But some African countries have seen farm output per head actually fall—and they have still cut malnutrition more than India.

... deleted

So the most convincing explanations for India’s nutritional failures probably lie elsewhere. Women are the most important influences upon their children’s health—and the status of women in India is notoriously low. Brides are deemed to join their husband’s family on marriage and are often treated as unpaid skivvies. “The mothers aren’t allowed to look after themselves,” says Mrs Khan. “Their job is simply to have healthy babies.” But if mothers are unhealthy, their children frequently are, too.

... deleted

But that cannot be the whole story. Astonishingly, a third of the wealthiest 20% of Indian children are malnourished, too, and they are neither poor nor excluded. Bad practice plays some part—notably a reluctance to breastfeed babies. There may also be an element of choice. Long ago, a study in Maharashtra showed that people spend only two-thirds of their extra income on food—and this is true whether they are middle-income or dirt-poor. That may seem perverse. But a mobile phone may be more useful to the poor than better food, since the phone may generate income during the next harvest failure, and good food will not.

... deleted

Economist.com/blogs/banyan