Policy options to leverage agriculture to improve nutrition security

Accelerating undernutrition reduction in India requires realigning agriculture and rural development policy to empower women in agriculture. Resources targeted to women and women’s groups significantly improve agricultural productivity, women’s control of resources or assets, and health and nutrition outcomes. The country should promote women’s cooperatives, producer women’s groups, and other forms of group efforts, where they do not already exist. This would enable women to overcome the constraints of small, marginally profitable land holdings, thereby improving the dissemination of agricultural technology and other inputs, as well as marketing of produce. The National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) under the Ministry of Rural Development offers a significant potential for convergence with the agriculture sector to empower women to care for themselves and their children. NRLM’s federations of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) could radically alter the balance of power not only in the markets they participate in as both producers and consumers, but also in their communities and households.Women’s groups, including SHGs under NRLM, can become instrumental in meaningful convergence of health, nutrition, education, and other broad-based schemes addressing the deeprooted causes of undernutrition. Examples of such group-centric pro nutrition approaches include producing and consuming nutrient-rich foods through homestead horticulture and poultry interventions; establishing and maintaining micronutrient food fortification units; producing and marketing low-cost, nutrientdense supplementary foods; developing primary food processing; enabling women and their children to access essential health and nutrition services; and catalyzing critical behavior change for optimal health and nutrition outcomes in the long run through community mobilization, including the involvement of Panchayati Raj Institutions, around nutrition-specific issues and actions. Empowering women in agriculture which is essential to India’s nutrition security requires securing women’s rights to land, providing efficient and effective legal support, and enhancing women farmers’ access to inputs. For example, entitling women in land records as cultivators on family farms, where women operate the land registered under the name of the male household members, would make a significant difference in accessing various government program benefits.

Almost one in two Indian children is stunted and 40 percent are underweight. One-third of all Indian women are underweight. Rates of micronutrient deficiencies are extremely high, with almost 80 percent of children and 56 percent of women being anemic (see Figure 1). Countries such as China, Thailand, and Brazil have taken bold actions to successfully accelerate reductions in undernutrition and are on track to reach the first Millennium Development Goal on target, by the year 2015. But India will do so only in 2043 with its present pace of actions. In the meantime, undernutrition continues to exert a physical, cognitive, and economic toll, costing India as much as 3 percent of its GDP per year. The Copenhagen Consensus 2008 lists combating micronutrient undernutrition as the best development investment, with the rate of return in terms of improved health, reduced deaths, and increased income opportunities more than 15 times than the investment. The multiple causes of undernutrition, at the individual, household, and societal levels, are now well recognized (see Figure 2). Globally and in India, reasonable scientific consensus exists on what direct health and nutrition interventions will work. The central and state governments allocate substantial resources to an array of health and nutrition programs or schemes, such as the Integrated Child Development Scheme, Mid-Day Meals, Reproductive and Child Health Program, and National Rural Health Mission, to deliver these direct interventions. The challenge for India now lies in making these interventions truly effective at scale. While effectively scaling-up direct nutrition and health interventions is essential, it is not enough: direct nutrition interventions, if scaled-up and implemented effectively, will address only one-third of India’s undernutrition burden. Undernutrition reductions in countries such as Brazil, China, Senegal, and Thailand have shown the need to complement these interventions with approaches that address undernutrition’s deep rooted causes. This comprehensive approach to solving the undernutrition crisis is gaining momentum in India. The Prime Minister’s National Council on India’s Nutrition Challenges, formed in 2008, is multisectoral, with representation from more than one dozen ministries. The Council’s key recommendations include creation of new institutional arrangements that encourage different sectors to work together. Several states, including Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Orissa, are experimenting with moving with moving nutrition into “Mission Mode” at the state level to  accelerate reductions in  undernutrition.

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Gillespie, S. and Kadiyala, S. (2011) Exploring the Agriculture, Nutrition Disconnect in India. 2020. Prime Minister’s National Council on India’s Nutrition Challenges (2010) Record of Discussions Held in First Meeting, November 24. World Bank (2007) From Agriculture to Nutrition: Pathways Synergies and Outcomes. Washington, DC.