Hunger and Nutrition Deficit Amid High Growth
Sanjay Roy
OVERWHELMING concern on growth metrics often tend to undermine issues related to wellbeing. Human wellbeing is not directly linked to growth and Prof Amartya Sen argued long back that rising per capita income is not sufficient to ensure augmenting human capabilities. Growth might increase the inputs necessary to sustain a level of welfare, but the outcomes of growth are not automatically welfare enhancing. Sen’s argument was essentially underlying the point that wealth is only a means to achieve certain goals and there are intrinsic values of wellbeing which may not be guaranteed by rising per capita incomes. In other words, the transmission mechanism of income inputs to capabilities output or social goods depend upon several factors such as distribution, public provisioning and institutional delivery and finally how societies value different vectors of achievements. The astonishing figure of Food and Agriculture Organisation of UN shows that one in every eleven people in the world and one in every five in Africa experienced hunger in 2023. Hunger is on the rise in some parts of the world and in Asia prevalence of undernourishment and hunger remained same in the past three years despite recovery in GDP growth. This is significant particularly when the world is entering into a new wave of technological change with a promise of high growth in productive capacity. It is also important that India which is going to be the third largest economy in the world at the end of this decade has performed worse than many of her peers on several counts of nutrition indicators. India records greater prevalence of undernourishment than Bangladesh even if India records a higher per capita income.
It is not so surprising since capitalism essentially is a system that thrives by producing exchange values and continuously subverting use vales of goods and services. The distinctive feature of capitalism by which it is different from all other previous societies is universal commodity production. People must produce and sell something to earn money to buy necessities for survival. Food is not something special in capitalism rather like any other a commodity and people must have purchasing power to fulfil the requirements of calorie. On the other hand, existence and fulfilling of nutrition requirements of a person or a human being is relevant to capital so long such person as labour power contributes to the process of surplus production. Capitalism recognises human beings only as labour power or a commodity that is unique in producing more value than itself. The necessities of human beings in capitalism are important only if they serve the purpose of generating surplus value, otherwise the existence of the person is peripheral rather incidental to the system. And this is precisely the reason why we see that countries experiencing high growth may be lagging in fulfilling nutrition requirements of its citizens.
NON-AFFORDABILITY OF HEALTHY DIET
The insensitiveness to human needs and the predominance of exchange value assuming monetary form in capitalism results in contradictory outcomes. Undoubtedly global economy gradually recovered from the massive downturn experienced during the pandemic. Supply chains reinstated, business and finance recovered but the proportion of world population facing hunger persisted at the same level for the past three consecutive years. One of the SDG goals is to achieve zero hunger in the world by 2030 seems to be far fetching. Hunger is measured by prevalence of undernourishment and roughly in the range of 8.9 to 9.4 per cent of global population suffered prevalence of undernourishment. It is estimated that compared to pre-pandemic year of 2019, in 2023, 152 million more people faced hunger in the world. In 2030 as the report claims that 582 million people will be chronically undernourished and 53 per cent of them will be concentrated in Africa. Besides hunger, global prevalence of moderate and severe food insecurity continues to be higher than the pre-pandemic levels and demands immediate attention. Currently 28.9 per cent of world population are moderately or severely food insecure. FAO also measures cost and affordability of healthy diet and observes that the average cost increased significantly and reached a peak in 2022 when 2.8 billion people of the world could not afford a healthy diet. In terms of purchasing power parity on an average 3.96 dollar per day per person is the cost of affordability of healthy diet but what is important that healthy diet is costlier in Asia and Latin America compared to Europe and America. Affordability of healthy diet shows strict correlation with income groups of countries. In the low-income countries 71.5 per cent of population cannot afford a healthy diet and the figures for lower-middle-income countries 52.6 per cent, upper-middle-income countries 21.5 per cent and high-income countries 6.3 per cent.
INDIA’S WORRISOME FACTS
India’s story on this count is also worrisome even though the country currently records the fastest growth in the world. According to the National Sample Survey Organisation Nutrition Intake report of 2022-23 and 2023-24 we see a declining trend in per capita calorie intake both in rural and urban India. In fact, rural per capita calorie intake declined consistently for four decades since 1972-73. In 1972-73 it was 2266 kcal per day which came down to 2020 kcal per day in 2009-10 and in urban India it declined from 2107 kcal to 1946 kcal during the same period. During 2009-10 to 2011-12 per capita nutrition intake grew in both rural and urban areas followed by a stagnation for the entire period of 2011-12 to 2022-23. The recent report shows that once again average per capita per day calorie intake declined from 2233 kcal in 2022-23 to 2212 kcal in rural areas and from 2250 kcal down to 2240 kcal in urban areas during the same reference period. Therefore, for average Indian per capita calorie intake has declined even if per capita income increases.
Also, it is important to note that the regional overview of food security and nutrition report of FAO reveals worrisome facts. Nutrition is measured considering several indicators such as prevalence of undernourishment, prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity, prevalence of anaemia among women of age 15-49 low birth weight and so on. The figures show that prevalence of undernourishment during the reference period 2020-22 was 16.6 per cent in India which is higher than Bangladesh (11.2) and Sri Lanka (5.3) and slightly lower than Pakistan (18.5). India (53 per cent) records the highest prevalence of anaemia among women in South Asia followed by Pakistan (42.3) and Bangladesh (36.7). In case of China and Vietnam these figures are 15.5 per cent and 20.6 per cent respectively. Finally, FAO also provides data on the proportion of population unable to afford healthy diet in these countries. It is alarming that 74.1 per cent of Indians are unable to eat healthy diet according to FAO’s estimates. In case of Pakistan the proportion is even higher that is 82.8 per cent and Bangladesh with 66.1 per cent. The proportion of population who are unable to afford healthy diet in China is 10.9 per cent and for Vietnam it is 21 per cent. Prevalence of hunger and undernourishment, food insecurity and other nutrition deficits for a sizeable population and high non-affordability of healthy diet in many parts of the developing world is a result of various factors, namely, ethnic conflict, climate variability and extremes, unhealthy food environment and rising income inequality. India ranks 105 out of 127 countries in the world according to Global Hunger Index and this reflects the severity of the problem of food security despite official claims of massive decline in poverty. Prof. Utsa Patnaik has been arguing for quite some time that a faulty measure of poverty line which is increasingly delinked from direct calorie intake grossly underestimates the number of people lying below the poverty line in India. Rising hunger, high incidence of poverty and prevalence of undernourishment is often glossed over by high growth and relative global position in terms of GDP.
