The Global Landscape of Poverty, Food Insecurity, and Malnutrition and Implications for Agricultural Development Strategies

Abstract

For many years poverty reduction was the overarching welfare objective of a wide range of development institutions and programs, particularly in the context of agricultural development. Yet in recent years the development community has increasingly set for itself more specific welfare objectives by distinguishing between monetary poverty, food security, nutrition and, most recently, resilience. This paper first outlines a basic framework for thinking about the relationships between these different concepts, and then explores the empirical relationships among different indicators of these concepts, and some of their potential determinants. The empirical analysis highlights several important stylized facts. First, key indicators of these three dimensions of welfare suggest strong correlations among the subset of chronic welfare indicators but much weaker relationships between chronic and acute measures of welfare. Put another way, many countries are chronically poor, food insecure or malnourished, but a much smaller set of countries suffer from acute ill-being. For example, countries in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and South Asia suffer disproportionately from high rates of child and maternal wasting, and a relatively small subset of developing countries are highly prone to natural disasters. Conceivably these acutely vulnerable countries require quite different development strategies. Second, gross domestic product per capita, agricultural productivity, literacy rates, fertility rates, and health burdens all share fairly robust relationships with poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition indicators, as expected. But somewhat novel is a strong relationship between a simple indicator of dietary diversity and a wide range of both chronic and acute welfare indicators. This perhaps suggests that dietary diversity is a relevant intermediate welfare indicator of particular relevance for agricultural development initiatives.