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Why Are We Unable to Mitigate Hunger When We Are

Producing More Food than Ever?
EPW ENGAGE

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To solve the problem of chronic hunger, we need to rethink our understanding of hunger
and how we address it.

Despite the fact that India’s score in the Global Hunger Index has fallen to 31.1 from 38.8
between 2000 and 2018, the issue of hunger is often relegated to the background. India's
rank in the Global Hunger Index has also fallen to 103 (ranked out of 119 countries). In
terms of policy, hunger, as an issue, is not dealt with directly, and with urgency. Instead, it
is kept under the larger purview of economic development which expects that wealth will
percolate to solve the problem of hunger. This formulation makes a number of incorrect
assumptions about the relationship between hunger and other social structures. It is, at
best, an indirect method that does nothing to immediately address the alarming issue of
hunger that India is facing at present.

In this reading list, we look at the ways in which hunger has been conceptualised and dealt
with in India.

1) How is Hunger and Nutrition Understood in India? ​

When the Food Security Bill was being debated in Parliament, there was a need to
conceptualise hunger and malnutrition in such a way that would enable the estimation of
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entitlements that would be made available by the government. In this context, Anita
Rampal, Harsh Mander’s 2013 article tried to understand the “unconscionable reality” of
those who grapple with critical hunger to fill the gaps in the discourse around hunger. As
part of their study, they looked at the theme of food and hunger in the lives of young
children and how it formed an interface to their understanding their community and place in
society.

“Natural and intimate narratives of food and hunger, reflecting the lives of a
majority of children, are generally absent from the discourse of education.
What can be found, instead, are clinical and insensitive descriptions of what
constitutes a healthy diet, often illustrated with visuals of food far beyond the
reach of most children.”

2) Is Poverty the Primary Factor Responsible for Food Insecurity?

Contrary to the popularly held belief that food insecurity is a symptom of poverty, Debarshi
Das and Deepankar Basu have found that there is a growing divergence in the relationship
between poverty and hunger in India. According to them, India is currently experiencing a
“food-budget squeeze” owing to shrinking social expenditure by the government. This
makes the urban and rural poor dependent on private entities for essential services like
education and transportation, which are likely to be more expensive. Consequently, the
portion of income that can be spent on food also shrinks.

“The findings of our study suggest that rather than being a matter of choice,
the poor have been increasingly forced to spend more on non-food essential
items such as education, healthcare, transportation, fuel and lighting. The
share of monthly expenditure devoted to these items has increased at such a
pace that it has absorbed all the increase in real income over the past three
decades. This has led to a “food budget squeeze”, which has meant relatively
stagnant real food expenditure over the last two decades. Several factors have
led to or compounded the effects of the food budget squeeze.”

3) Who Suffers the Most Because of Hunger? ​

It is quite evident now that women are the worst affected by hunger because the patriarchal
structures of families in India teach them to go hungry, when food is scarce. Anita Rampal
and Harsh Mander’s article mentioned in the previous section dedicates a section to study
the social structures that compel women to live with starvation, based on ethnographic
research. Complicating the scenario further, Leela Sami’s 2002 article explores the
intersections of caste and gender to try and understand which groups are the most
vulnerable to starvation deaths. From the case studies of two devastating famines in the
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19th century, she found that female life chances are relatively better in South India as
compared to North India.

“It is difficult to generalise any one reason for less or more discrimination
against girls or women without reference to local and regional histories.Yet,
the differences in female survival, and by inference, the intra-household
distribution of hunger, are most clearly marked between the brahmin groups
and the agricultural labour castes in Madras, on the one hand. But it also
appears that the dry districts with their low concentration of brahmins and
preponderance of successful trading groups were more adverse to female life
than were the wet districts. This would foreclose any easy conclusion that
gender discrimination stems entirely from brahmanical patriarchy. Yet, it does
not contradict the theory that discrimination against girls with a view to limit
female life chances (including but not restricted to infanticide) is a part of a
process of consolidation of caste control and dominance over political,
economic and symbolic resources within a particular economic and historical
formation.”

4) Why Has India’s Rank Deteriorated in the Global Hunger Index? ​

Between 2008 and 2014, India’s position on the Global Hunger Index seemed to have been
improving. Thereafter, India’s position began to deteriorate again. Neetu Choudhary
explains that India’s rank fell from 2016 because from 2015, the conception of malnutrition
was reformulated. New parameters were introduced to expand what is understood as
hunger to include stunting and wasting in children, because of which a more accurate
perception of the extent of the problem could be estimated.

“Given that malnutrition is a multidimensional phenomenon (UNICEF 1994),

the revised GHI formula is able to depict a relatively truer state of hunger in
countries across the globe. Inclusion of stunting ensures consideration of rigid
cultural factors, while that of wasting represents aspects of diet quality as well.
Also, stunting is an indicator of long-term growth failure, and therefore, must
be accounted for in any analysis of potential threat a given level of child
malnutrition poses for a country. This is one of the key reasons the sustainable
development agenda of the United Nations associate bodies display primary
concern towards stunting.”

5) How Do We Address the Problem of Hunger? ​

Despite the fact that the rate of global food production has been consistently higher than
the rate of population growth, there is a persistent and pervasive crisis when it comes to
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food security. A recent editorial in EPW suggests that hunger can only be dealt with by,
“carrying out policies of income redistribution, which respond to objectives of social justice
rather than economic efficiency as perceived by neo-liberalism.” Analysing data on a global
scale, Praveen Jha and Nilachala Acharya have argued that a substantial push in public
provisioning towards social protection might go a long way in ensuring food security.

“In most developing countries one of the biggest issues, with respect to public
provisioning towards social protection, to address hunger and food insecurity
is organically connected with that of adequate “fiscal” or “expenditure” space.
Contrary to the view that countries with low GDP cannot create such a space,
we would argue that even at low levels of income it is possible to mobilise
adequate resources for the provisioning of social protection. Neither
conceptually nor historically, there is no reason to believe that a country needs
to wait to reach relatively high levels of per capita income before it can make
adequate progress in this regard, even though, higher income of course helps
in doing so.”

Read More:

Hunger-free India by 2007 | Ashish Bose, 2004

Hidden Hunger | Tara Gopaldas, 2006

Living with Hunger: Deprivation among the Aged, Single Women and People with
Disability | Harsh Mander, 2008

The Political Economy of Hunger in 21st Century India | Jayati Ghosh, 2010

An earlier version of this article only mentioned India's rank in the Global Hunger Index. It
has been amended with information about India's score as measured by the Global Hunger
Index as well.

Image-Credit/Misc:

Social Media Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Shiva Dayal Lal/ Public Domain
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