A Comparative Analysis on Food Security in Bangladesh, India and Myanmar

Abstract

In 2013, China proposed the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar Economic Corridor initiatives to enhance the economic cooperation between Bangladesh, India, and Myanmar. To serve the priority setting of agricultural cooperation in the initiatives, an analysis is necessary to understand the food security situation and its key influencing factors in the three countries. For this purpose, this study applied a food security index (FSI) to measure the food security level at state scale and analyze its changes in the three countries during 1990–2013. Further, a factor decomposition method was used to quantify the contribution of major factors to the FSI changes. The results showed that the food demand was generally secured in Myanmar and India during 1990–2013 but in shortage by around 10% in most years before 2008 in Bangladesh. The annual FSI values showed a rather obvious periodic variation and a slightly increasing trend during the whole period. Although the grain production in the three countries increased significantly, the FSI was not accordingly improved, as a result of the simultaneous increase of grain consumption. In Bangladesh and India, the grain production increase was mainly driven by the improvement of crop yield, while the grain consumption increase was mainly caused by the population growth. In Myanmar, the production increase was largely caused by the expansion of cropping area, and the consumption growth was mainly due to the increased grain requirement per capita. To meet the increasing food demand in the future, it is essential to improve the irrigation and drainage systems and crop management to increase the land use efficiency and crop yield. In addition, the adaptation of appropriate policy for family planning could be important to slow down the quick population growth and thus the food demand.