Introduction

The Nature and Scope of Food Security, Poverty, and Nutrition Policy Analysis

The issues of chronic food insecurity, poverty, and malnutrition continue to be fundamental human welfare challenges in developing and developed countries. Problems related to increasing food availability, feeding the population, improving their nutritional status, and reducing poverty levels continue to confront decision makers. Program managers and policy makers who constantly deal with design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of food security, nutrition, and poverty-related interventions have to make best decisions from a wide range of program and policy options. Information for making such policy and program decisions must be based on sound data-based analysis. Such analysis should be founded on statistical theory that provides an inferential basis for evaluating, refining and, sometimes, rejecting the existing policy and program interventions.

This book deals with the application of statistical methods for analysis of food security, poverty, and nutrition policy and program options. A range of analytical tools are considered that could be used for analyzing various technological, institutional, and policy options and for developing policy and program interventions by making inferences from household level socioeconomic data.

The objective of policy analysis is to identify, analyze, and recommend policy options and strategies that would achieve the specific goals of policy makers (Babu, 2013; Babu et al., 2000; Dunn, 1994). Issues related to increasing food security, reducing malnutrition, and alleviating poverty are high on the global development policy agenda as evidenced by recent unprecedented increases in food prices, resultant unrest in several developing countries, and a series of international summits convened to mitigate the effects of food price increase (UN Summit, 2008). This book addresses a wide range of policy and program options typically designed and implemented by government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and communities to address the development challenges such as hunger, poverty, and malnutrition faced by households and communities.

Such policy and program options, for example, aim at increasing the availability of food, increasing the household entitlement, improving the efficiency of food distribution programs, enhancing the market availability for selling and buying food commodities, reducing malnutrition through the school feeding and nutrition programs, increasing technological options through introduction of high yielding varieties of seeds that farming communities in rural areas could grow to increase income, investing in technological advancements, implementing land reforms and distribution of land to poor households, increasing the education of mothers, improving child-care and promoting changes in consumption patterns, and so on. Using such real-world policy options and interventions as case studies, the chapters of this book attempt to show how using the analysis of socioeconomic datasets can help in the development of policy and program interventions. The chapters also introduce various approaches to the collection of data, processing of collected data, and generation of various socioeconomic variables from the existing datasets. They also demonstrate applications of analysis of the relationship between causal policy variables and welfare indicators that reflect household and individual food security, nutrition, and poverty.

Why Should a Book that Teaches Statistical Methods for Analyzing Socioeconomic Data for Generating Policy and Program Options be Important?

The goal of the decision maker is to select the best option for intervention from a set of choices that are politically feasible and economically viable (Babu and Mthindi, 1995a, 1995bBabu and Mthindi, 1995a, 1995b). Yet making such decisions requires a full understanding of the intended and unintended consequences of the proposed interventions. While the need for rigorous analysis—through assessment of the existing situation—is largely recognized by the policy decision makers before taking necessary action, the needed capacity for undertaking such analysis is grossly lacking in many countries. Hence much of the policy and program decisions related to food security, poverty, and nutrition continue to be made under the veil of ignorance.

Improved capacity for food security, poverty, and nutrition policy analysis is essential for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) (UN, 2005). At the global level, the major Millennium Development Goal of “reducing hunger, poverty, and malnutrition by half by the year 2015” remains unachievable in many parts of the world. It has been recognized that one of the major constraints in attaining the MDGs related to hunger and malnutrition is the lack of capacity for scaling up of food and nutrition interventions (World Bank, 2006). Scaling up requires capacity for monitoring, evaluation, and adoption of successful food and nutrition programs. Such capacity is severely lacking at the global, national, and local levels (Babu 1997a, 1997b; 2001).

A good conceptual understanding of the issues related to food and nutrition, economic concepts, statistical techniques, and policy applications with case studies will help in understanding how quantitative analysis could be used for designing program and policy interventions. Students who take up jobs that involve designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluation of development programs are often ill prepared to undertake these tasks. Based on one statistical course students take in the undergraduate program and with their little exposure to food and nutrition issues, for example, they are expected to perform the role of policy and program analysts. Even if they are well trained in the individual disciplines such as food and nutrition, statistics, monitoring and evaluation, or policy analysis, they are often not adequately trained to combine these disciplines to address real-world food and nutrition challenges (Babu and Mthindi, 1995b).

A book that brings together concepts and issues in food security, nutrition, and poverty policy analysis in a self-learning mode can serve thousands of policy analysts, program managers, and prospective students dealing with designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluation of food security, nutrition, and poverty reduction programs.

Objectives of the Book

The purpose of this book is to provide readers and practitioners with skills for specifying and using statistical tools that may be appropriate for analyzing socioeconomic data and enable them to develop various policy and program alternatives based on the inferences of data analysis.

The chapters of the book introduce a wide range of analytical methods through the following approaches:

Organization of the Book

The 16 chapters of the book are organized into three broad sections. The first section deals with food security policy analysis, the second section addresses nutrition policy analysis, and the third section covers the special and advanced topics on food and nutrition policy analysis including measurement and determinants of poverty. This section also provides an introduction to modeling with linear programming methods and program evaluation.

To show the interconnectedness of the issues addressed by the chapters of this book to broad development goals, Figure I.1

identifies the placement of the chapters as they relate to specific policy challenges. The broad conceptual approach used throughout this book, explained later in greater detail, is also depicted in Figure I.1.

The conceptual framework outlined in Figure I.1 is a tool for analyzing the impacts of policies and programs on food and nutrition security outcomes at the household level. It links various policies at the macro, meso (markets), and micro (household) levels (Metz, 2000). Economic changes induced by various macro policies influence markets which, in turn, affect food security at the household level. Food entitlements in terms of availability and access to food at the household level are affected by various policy interventions. Both macroeconomic (exchange rate, fiscal and monetary policies) and sector-specific policies (agriculture, health, education, and other social services) affect markets, infrastructure, and institutions. The markets can be subclassified into food markets and other markets for essential consumer goods, production inputs, and credit. The main issues addressed in the chapters of this book relate to policy changes that affect food security through these markets. Infrastructure comprises the economic, social, as well as physical infrastructure; institutions are also affected by policy changes and affect household food security.

Changes induced by policies on different markets and on infrastructural factors affect household incomes, assets, human capital, and household...