Climate Risks, Seasonal Food Insecurity and Consumption Coping Strategies: Evidences from a Micro-level Study from Northern Bangladesh

This paper examines the food insecurity status and coping strategies among the households in the Northern Bangladesh. A three stage stratified random sampling followed by a structured questionnaire was employed to collect primary data from nine different primary sampling units. Locally adjusted reduced consumption coping strategy index is used to quantify the food security status, especially for mainland and flood affected riverbanks of the study areas. Nine explanatory variables are considered for an interval regression to assess the impacts of these predictors on changing reduced consumption coping strategy index score. Moreover, body mass index of household heads and dependency ratio of respective households are analyzed to compare strata-wise food insecurity.Food Insecurity, Climate Risks, Consumption Coping Strategy Index, Interval Regression, Northern Bangladesh.

Climate Risks, Seasonal Food Insecurity and Consumption Coping Strategies: Evidences from a Micro-level Study from Northern Bangladesh

This paper presents the food insecurity status and coping strategies among the households in the Northern Bangladesh. A three stage stratified random sampling followed by a structured questionnaire was employed to collect primary data from nine different primary sampling units. Locally adjusted reduced consumption coping strategy index is used to quantify the food security status, especially for mainland and flood affected riverbanks of the study areas. Nine explanatory variables are considered for an interval regression to assess the impacts of these predictors on changing reduced consumption coping strategy index score. Moreover, body mass index of household heads and dependency ratio of respective households are analyzed to compare strata-wise food insecurity.Food Insecurity, Climate Risks, Consumption Coping Strategy Index, Interval Regression, Northern Bangladesh.

Localization Recall Precision (LRP): A New Performance Metric for Object Detection

Average precision (AP), the area under the recall-precision (RP) curve, is the standard performance measure for object detection. Despite its wide acceptance, it has a number of shortcomings, the most important of which are (i) the inability to distinguish very different RP curves, and (ii) the lack of directly measuring bounding box localization accuracy. In this paper, we propose 'Localization Recall Precision (LRP) Error', a new metric which we specifically designed for object detection. LRP Error is composed of three components related to localization, false negative (FN) rate and false positive (FP) rate. Based on LRP, we introduce the 'Optimal LRP', the minimum achievable LRP error representing the best achievable configuration of the detector in terms of recall-precision and the tightness of the boxes. In contrast to AP, which considers precisions over the entire recall domain, Optimal LRP determines the 'best' confidence score threshold for a class, which balances the trade-off between localization and recall-precision. In our experiments, we show that, for state-of-the-art object (SOTA) detectors, Optimal LRP provides richer and more discriminative information than AP. We also demonstrate that the best confidence score thresholds vary significantly among classes and detectors. Moreover, we present LRP results of a simple online video object detector which uses a SOTA still image object detector and show that the class-specific optimized thresholds increase the accuracy against the common approach of using a general threshold for all classes. At https://github.com/cancam/LRP we provide the source code that can compute LRP for the PASCAL VOC and MSCOCO datasets. Our source code can easily be adapted to other datasets as well.Comment: to appear in ECCV 201

Benefit-Cost Assessment of Different Homestead Vegetable Gardening on Improving Household Food and Nutrition Security in Rural Bangladesh

Homestead vegetable gardening can play a significant role in improving food security for the resource poor rural households in developing country like Bangladesh. The present study quantifies costs/benefits of traditional and developed homestead vegetable production systems, and analyzes the underlying factors contributing to food security. The result suggests that developed gardening has better performances in terms of calorie intake and economic performances over traditional but the optimal calorie intake with least-cost technology could be a feasible livelihood strategy for resource poor people. The result also suggests that education, sex, and garden area have significant effect on food security. The occupation and family size are also positively associated with food security.Community/Rural/Urban Development, Food Security and Poverty,

Review of Agri-Food Chain Interventions Aimed at Enhancing Consumption of Nutritious Food by the Poor: Bangladesh

Bangladesh is primarily an agrarian nation. Most of the people of the country directly or indirectly depend on agriculture. Rural people are more involved in this sector compared to urban people. Agriculture is the single largest producing sector of the economy. The performance of this sector has an overwhelming impact on major macroeconomic objectives like employment generation, poverty alleviation, human resources development and food security. The acceleration in economic and agricultural growth has made a positive impact on the diversity of food intake, away from the rice- and vegetable-based diet in favour of quality food. However, nearly 20 per cent of the population is still calorie deficient and the gender disparity in calorie intake still persists. Bangladesh has made significant progress in reducing under nutrition of children. However, progress in reducing stunting, the indicator of chronic malnutrition, shows a less encouraging picture. A review on existing agriculture value chain-based interventions that focus on enhancing the availability, affordability, acceptability and/or consumption of nutritious foods in households beyond the farm gate in Bangladesh has been undertaken. This review covers: interventions focused on foods that are naturally nutrient-dense interventions focused on enhancing the nutritional value of foods, including staples and prepared foods, whether directed at particular nutritional uses or for consumption by the general population food distribution programmes that might incorporate foods in either of the preceding categorie

Beyond the risks to food availability – linking climatic hazard vulnerability with the food access of delta-dwelling households

Although climate-driven hazards have been widely implicated as a key threat to food security in the delta regions of the developing world, the empirical basis of this assertion has centred predominantly on the food availability dimension of food security. Little is known if climatic hazards could affect the food access of delta-resident households and who is likely to be at risk and why. We explored these questions by using the data from a sample of households resident within the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) delta in Bangladesh. We used an index-based analytical approach by drawing on the vulnerability and food security literature. We computed separate vulnerability indices for flood, cyclone, and riverbank erosion and assessed their effects on household food access through regression modelling. All three vulnerability types demonstrated significant negative effects on food access; however, only flood vulnerability could significantly reduce a household’s food access below an acceptable threshold. Households that were less dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods – including unskilled day labourers and grocery shop owners – were significantly more likely to have unacceptable level of food access due to floods. Adaptive capacity, measured as a function of household asset endowments, proved more important in explaining food access than the exposure-sensitivity to flood itself. Accordingly, we argue that improving food security in climatic hazard-prone areas of developing country deltas would require moving beyond agriculture or natural resources focus and promoting hazard-specific, all-inclusive and livelihood-focused asset-building interventions. We provide an example of a framework for such interventions and reflect on our analytical approach

Multi-hazard groundwater risks to water supply from shallow depths: challenges to achieving the sustainable development goals in Bangladesh

Background: Groundwater currently provides 98% of all drinking-water supply in Bangladesh. Groundwater is found throughout Bangladesh but its quality (i.e. arsenic and salinity contamination) and quantity (i.e., water-storage depletion) vary across hydrological environments, posing unique challenges to certain geographical areas and population groups. Yet, no national-scale, multi-parameter groundwater hazard maps currently exist enabling water resources managers and policy makers to identify vulnerable areas to public health. Methods: We develop, for the first time, groundwater multi-hazard maps at the national scale of Bangladesh combining information on arsenic, salinity and water storage. We apply geospatial techniques in ‘R’ programming language and ArcGIS environment, linking hydrological indicators for water quality and quantity to construct risk maps. A range of socio-economic variables including access to drinking and irrigation water supplies and social vulnerability (i.e., poverty) are overlaid on these risk maps to estimate exposures. Results: Our multi-parameter groundwater hazard maps show that a considerable proportion of land area (5% to 24% under extremely-high to high risks) in Bangladesh is currently under combined risk of arsenic and salinity contamination, and groundwater-storage depletion. As small as 6.5 million (2.2 million poor) to 24.4 million (8.6 million poor) people are exposed to a combined risk of high arsenic, salinity and groundwater-storage depletion. Conclusions: Our groundwater hazard maps reveal areas and exposure of population groups to water risks posed by arsenic and salinity contamination and depletion of water storage. These geospatial hazard maps can potentially guide policymakers in prioritizing mitigation and adaptation measures in order to achieve the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals across the water, agriculture and public health sectors in Bangladesh

COPING WITH NATURAL DISASTERS: A CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDY WITH PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES IN THE COASTAL ZONE OF BANGLADESH

Coastal zone of Bangladesh is highly vulnerable to different nature induced hydrological and climatological disasters. Disaster disproportionately affects a different group of populations. Among them, “people with disabilities” (PWDs) regardless of their gender face severe challenges in a disaster situation. The response mechanisms of disabled people in disaster context are also different. This paper aimed to examine the coping strategies of PWDs with a natural disaster in the coastal zone of Bangladesh. We conducted a cross-sectional survey among 150 disabled people from Mongla sub-district, Rampal sub-district and Sharankhola sub-district of Bagerhat district. Most of the respondents (60%) did not receive any training on disaster preparedness but the majority of them (88%) had knowledge on the location of the nearest disaster shelters and took shelter at government listed centers before or during the disaster. They were not satisfied with the facilities and services of those disaster shelters. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of the respondents received disaster forecasting through electronic media. More than one-fifth of the respondents (22.7%) changed their occupations after a major disaster and one-fourth of the respondents (26.7%) were displaced or migrated from their original house as a consequence of the disaster. Although disabled people are one of the most vulnerable groups in disaster milieu, they have drawn limited attention by the policymakers, academicians and development organizations. This paper provides few coping strategies of disabled people that will help the policymakers to think and take disabled friendly measures in policy documents and development interventions

Regional Differences of Child Under-Nutrition in Bangladesh

Despite recent progress shown by some of the indicators of Millennium DevelopmentGoals in Bangladesh, the nutritional status among all children of the country is notso satisfactory. Growing evidence suggest that there exist regional differences in childunder-nutrition in Bangladesh. The present article is an attempt to identify the regionaldifferences of child under-nutrition across six divisions of Bangladesh and to understandsome of the determinants of under-nutrition using DHS-2007 Bangladesh dat. This datafocus on under-nutrition and some of the determinants related to household, child andmother. A multivariate model was employed to study the regional differences of undernutritionstatus among children. Across the divisions, a variation of under-nutrition isobserved among the children. The prevalence of under-nutrition is statistically significantin poor households. Economics status, mothers’ education, children’s age, number of familymembers and duration of breastfeeding are important determinants of under-nutritionacross divisions. Child under-nutrition in Bangladesh is still a concern for the householdwith poor economic status. The article calls for improvement of the economic status of thehouseholds across divisions keeping in view the nature of inequality in childhood undernutritionin the country and its differential characteristics across the divisions