Meeting food and nutrition security deficits

Quazi Shahabuddin

It is important to view food security from both national and individual perspectives. At the national level, food security means the availability in the country of sufficient stocks of food to meet domestic demand until such time as stocks can be replenished from harvests and/or imports. At the individual level, it means that all members of the society have access to the food they need, either from their own production, from market and/or from various transfer mechanism of the government. In this paper, we shall focus largely on individual/household food security through different transfer mechanism, specially those related to public food distribution and social safety net programs.

Bangladesh is a disaster-prone country, which by virtue of its geographical location, is often at the mercy of natural calamities such as floods and cyclones. Therefore, despite the gains achieved by Bangladesh in augmenting food availability, public food distribution in general and social safety net programs in particular are needed to assist the poor to be food-secure by increasing their access to food through public transfer programs. There are a number of food-assisted programs in operation, each with its specific objective and target population. Some are relief programs that aim primarily at relieving immediate distress, generally due to natural disasters. Other programs have explicit development objectives. Although relief provision remains an important objective, most targeted programs have gradually shifted in emphasis from relief to development.

Economic accessibility: Poverty trends in Bangladesh
Poor people are generally food insecure. Hence, rapid and sustained reduction in poverty is essential to ensure food security at the individual/household level. The nexus between food security and poverty reduction can thus be examined in the light of economic accessibility to food of poor people in Bangladesh. The poverty trend in Bangladesh is discussed below to throw light on the economic accessibility of food in the country.

Although intertemporal estimates of poverty reveal substantial variation due to differences in underlying assumptions and methodologies, some trends can nevertheless be established with available information. The typical sources of data which are nationally representative for measurement of poverty at the household level are several rounds of the Household Expenditure Survey of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS). The poverty estimates based on these data are presented in Table 1 for the 1983-84 through 2005 period.

As can be observed from Table 1, the incidence of poverty, as measured by the head-count ratio, declined from about 59 per cent in 1983/84 to 40 per cent in 2005. Both rural and urban poverty declined. The incidence of rural poverty, however, remained higher than that of urban poverty. The estimates reveal two contrasting trends which are worth mentioning. The urban poverty declined at a faster rate than rural poverty between 1983/84 and 1995/96. The incidence of urban poverty declined appreciably from about 50 per cent in 1983/84 to about 29 per cent in 1995/96. During this period, rural poverty declined only marginally from about 60 per cent in 1983/84 to about 55 per cent in 1995/96. In contrast, the later period (1995/56 2005) witnessed considerable decline in rural poverty (from about 55 per cent in 1995/96 to about 44 per cent in 2005), while urban poverty almost stagnated (28.4 per cent in 2005 compared to 29.4 per cent in 1995/96). In fact, urban poverty actually increased in 2000 compared to that prevailed in 1995/96.

Over the 1984-2005 period, the absolute number of poor in the country remained almost the same, when total population increased by about 44 million. The number of rural poor declined from about 50 million in 1983/84 to about 46 million in 2005. The number of urban poor, however, increased by about 4 million over the same period.

Physical accessibility: Access for most vulnerable groups
Access to food for the most vulnerable groups should be assessed in terms of physical accessibility. The persons who are living in chronic poverty are those who are most vulnerable nutritionally. A picture of the nutritionally vulnerable people can be obtained from the incidence of poverty estimated using Direct Calorie Intake Method (DCIM) by BBS.

The incidence of absolute poverty (in terms of percentage of total population with less than 2122 kcal per day) has declined from about 56 per cent in 1985-86 to about 44 per cent in 2000, and further to about 40 per cent in 2005. As a result, the total number of food-insecure people slightly increased (by 0.8 million) over the 20 year period, when total population increased by about 40 million. The incidence of hardcore poverty (with less than 1805 kcal intake per day), although increased during the late eighties (1988/89) and early nineties (1991/92), declined sharply to 20 per cent, and remained almost the same thereafter (2005). This has led to a decline in the absolute number of vulnerable people by about 2 million in 2000 as compared to those in 1985/86, although it has increased by about the same number in 2005. One, however, gets a contrasting picture in the rural and urban areas in this respect. While the number of food-insecure and vulnerable people declined by 4.1 million in the rural areas, this has increased by 4.5 million in urban areas over the last two decades (between 1985/86 and 2005).

Public food distribution system
In Bangladesh, substantial increases in rice production in the past two decades have, to a large extent, solved the problem of foodgrain availability. The food security dialogue in the country now should increasingly focus on the other two aspects of food security access to food through increased income support to the poor and food utilization and nutrition. The role of public distribution of food for its enhanced access to the poor is discussed below.

The size and composition of the Public Food Distribution System (PFDS) has changed significantly over the last two decades (Table 2). The annual volume of foodgrain under PFDS declined from 2.3 million metric tons in the early 1990s to about 1.7 million metric tons in the second half of the current decade. What is more significant, this has been accompanied by perceptible shift in the composition of foodgrain distribution from monetised channels to non-monetised channels. In fact, the share of foodgrain distributed to the targeted food assistance programs have increased over time about two-third of the total foodgrain distributed through the PFDS is now accounted for by these programs. The remaining one-third passes through the so-called monetised channels of the PFDS such as Essential Priorities (EP), Other Priorities, (OP), and Open Market Sales (OMS) to stabilize market prices.

Most evidence suggest that the shift from monetised to non-monetised, targeted programs significantly improved the overall efficiency of the PFDS.

However, proper management of public stock is essential for the improved effectiveness of the Public Food Distribution System (PFDS). The government has to maintain rolling stocks to cater to the needs of the PFDS, including safety net programs and open market sales (OMS), as well as minimum buffer stocks for emergency distribution in times of natural disasters. This calls for careful planning and management of the amount of grains to be stocked and distributed, and for the establishment of storage facilities, and the improved monitoring of existing storage quality. PFDS maintains stocks in order to (a) provide emergency relief during periods of natural disasters (b) alleviate chronic food insecurity through targeted food distribution to poor households and (c) take steps, when necessary to stabilize the market price of food, especially rice. The costs of procuring, storing, managing and distributing large stocks of foodgrains are high. So it is important that the government does not hold more food than it needs for an adequate national food reserve.

It may be emphasized here that the building up of foodgrain stock is contingent upon the government's capacity to procure grains either from domestic production and/or from external sources (food aid and commercial imports). Total effective storage capacity is also an important determinant of maintaining the amount of annual stock of grains in the country. One important indicator of efficient stock management would be a good balance between actual stock of foodgrain and a carefully estimated budgetary target of stock at a specific point in time. However, the target itself may require revision because of unforeseen events such as natural disasters, which may require an upward revision of the target. Sometimes higher or lower levels of stock resulting from higher or lower levels of procurement are not matched by proper distribution through different PFDS channels.

Social safety net programs
Social safety nets are formal and informal ways of protecting people from deprivation. Formal safety nets include various transfer programs designed to play both a redistributive and risk reduction role. The traditional role of safety net is to redistribute income and resources to the needy in society, so that the impact of poverty is reduced. A more recently identified role of safety nets is to help protect individuals, households and communities against income and consumption risks. Bangladesh's progress in economic growth has contributed to modest reduction in poverty rate at around 1.5 percentage points annually since the early 1990s. This progress in poverty reduction is, however, of little comfort since the overall incidence of poverty persists at a high level. According to the 2005 estimates of consumption poverty, one-fourth of the country's population cannot afford an adequate diet. The need for targeted safety net interventions to improve the food security and livelihoods of extreme poor, therefore, remains strong.

Bangladesh has a comprehensive portfolio of both food and cash based social safety net programs. Currently there are about 58 such programs. The safety net programs can be categorized in accordance with the specific objective that each program is designed to achieve. For example, program may be designed to develop infrastructure, provide education incentives to the poor, mitigate disaster consequences or provide livelihood support to disadvantaged groups such as the aged and the disabled. Using these categorizations, it is possible to group existing programs in Bangladesh into five broad categories such as (a) Infrastructure-building programs (b) Training Programs (c) Education Programs (d) Relief Programs and (e) Programs for other disadvantaged groups.

The key challenges of implementing social safety net programs are coverage issues, targeting of beneficiaries, leakages and disparity in regional distribution. Other important issues and challenges include: First, the existing safety net programs cover only a fraction of the poor and they must be strengthened if they are to adequately address poverty or mitigate the vulnerability to poverty in a sustainable way. Secondly, most safety net programs in Bangladesh address economic vulnerability but pay little attention to demographic vulnerability. The demographically vulnerable including children, the elderly and those who are severely disabled or chronically ill are often not able to perform the intense physical labour involved in cash or food-based public works programs. They need more than a short-term safety net; rather, a broader social protection system is required for them. Programs that involve providing allowances to elderly and disabled people are a start, but coverage and transfer amounts are currently inadequate. Third, there is also a lack of safety nets available to the urban poor. Between 2000 and 2005, the total number of urban poor increased by 4.3 million. The rapid urbanization of Bangladesh calls for a range of measures to tackle urban food insecurity; a strong safety net or social protection system for the urban poor is urgently called for.

Photo: Munir uz Zaman/Driknews

Concluding remarks
Despite impressive gains in increasing domestic foodgrain production, problem of food and nutrition security remains. Bangladesh is yet to achieve comprehensive food security that resolves the problems of inadequate food intake and chronic malnutrition among those who are poor and vulnerable. Addressing these problems satisfactorily would not only require rethinking of strategies and policies to promote food security in the country but decisive actions by all stakeholders - the government, the NGOs, the private sector and individual households. In fact, ensuring food security through physical availability and economic access to food would continue to be a major challenge for Bangladesh in the coming years. To meet these challenges, an integrated strategy encompassing major aspects of comprehensive food security namely (a) adequacy of food supply through increased domestic production and imports; (b) access to food through public distribution and expanded safety net programmes and; (c) improved food utilization and nutrition is required.

The writer is Former Director General Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies.