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

Research Series 69: Structural and rural transformation and food systems: a quantitative synthesis for LMICs

Structural and rural transformation are intricately linked to food systems. Structural transformation captures a country’s level of dependence on agriculture, while rural transformation captures productivity in the agricultural sector. In particular, agri-food system and employment transitions influence structural and rural transformation and shape the spatial distribution of populations by influencing where people live, work and eat, all of which closely relate to food system transitions. Using country-level data from 85 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), this paper outlines a food systems index (FSI) and analyses the linkages between food systems and structural and rural transformation, as well as population distributions. It also selects a number of policy-relevant variables from World Development Indicators and uses machine learning methodology to shed light on patterns related to institutions, female empowerment, infrastructure, and health. The paper finds that countries in the lowest FSI group will see their youth populations more than double in the next 30 years, indicating that the food system investments of today will affect one third of global youth in the future. It also finds that structural transformation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for desirable food system outcomes. Rural transformation by itself without structural transformation is not enough either. For LMICs, broad development interventions are more important to progress food systems

Migration and household decision on occupational choice and investment: Evidence from Bangladesh

We study the roles of migration and remittances along with other income sources on investment decisions in rural Bangladesh. We estimate households’ investment equations conditional on their participation in and income from alternative (farm and non-farm) activities in the context of household’s current endowments and existing market structures. Using a true household-level panel data from rural Bangladesh covering 2000, 2004, and 2008 with 1223 sample points, we estimate the effects of migration and remittances on household’s investment in own cultivated land, land rent out to other households, livestock and non-farm business capital. Results show that remittances decrease household own cultivated land and also decrease land rent out to other households. We explain this result by controlling households labor endowments, education status and existing market imperfections. Our results also show that female headed households overall invest less in self-employment activities when they receive remittances. We find that remittances have little investment effects in general which is expected result given the overall low productive investment rate of remittance receiving households in Bangladesh

Research Series 69: Structural and rural transformation and food systems: a quantitative synthesis for LMICs

Structural and rural transformation are intricately linked to food systems. Structural transformation captures a country’s level of dependence on agriculture, while rural transformation captures productivity in the agricultural sector. In particular, agri-food system and employment transitions influence structural and rural transformation and shape the spatial distribution of populations by influencing where people live, work and eat, all of which closely relate to food system transitions. Using country-level data from 85 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), this paper outlines a food systems index (FSI) and analyses the linkages between food systems and structural and rural transformation, as well as population distributions. It also selects a number of policy-relevant variables from World Development Indicators and uses machine learning methodology to shed light on patterns related to institutions, female empowerment, infrastructure, and health. The paper finds that countries in the lowest FSI group will see their youth populations more than double in the next 30 years, indicating that the food system investments of today will affect one third of global youth in the future. It also finds that structural transformation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for desirable food system outcomes. Rural transformation by itself without structural transformation is not enough either. For LMICs, broad development interventions are more important to progress food systems

Agricultural and Rural Development Interventions and Poverty Reduction: Global Evidence from 16 Impact Assessment Studies

Agricultural and rural development interventions significantly reduce global poverty by providing growth-oriented tools, including but not limited to access to finance, training, and markets. While such interventions effectively reduce monetary poverty (e.g., $1 a day poverty line), there is increasing interest in incorporating non-monetary poverty indicators, such as education, health, and living standards, to capture inherent multidimensionality in poverty. This study analyzes data from 16 impact evaluation studies conducted between 2019 and 2023 to examine whether and to what extent agricultural and rural development interventions affect the multidimensional poverty of small-scale producers. Our analysis reveals a 4 percent reduction in multidimensional poverty for treatment households compared to comparison households. Our findings suggest that agricultural and rural development interventions play a positive role in reducing poverty and have the potential to improve the long-term well-being of poor households

Rising Food Price, Asset Transfers, and Household Food Security

We study the role of food price rising and income generating assets as determinants of household food insecurity among the extreme poor in rural Bangladesh for the period 2002-2011. We do so in the context of an anti-poverty program, targeting the ultra-poor (TUP), which transferred productive livestock assets to the very poor. We find a positive significant impact of the asset transfers on household’s food security irrespective of whether we use subjective or objective measures of food security. Most importantly we find that the long-term impact of the program (estimated over 2002-2011) is smaller compared to mid-term (2002-2008) and short-term (2002-2005) impacts for all the indicators. We test whether this declining program impact is driven by the steep rise in food prices in the post-2007 period. We find that in the pre-crisis period participant households benefited while in the post crisis period they affected negatively by the price shock. This result explains the declining effect of TUP program. Our analysis therefore illustrates how the external shocks can undermine the effectiveness of an otherwise well-functioning anti-poverty program

Measuring household food security in a low income country: A comparative analysis of self-reported and objective indicators

Measuring food security in an accurate and cost effective way is important for targeted food relief and for designing anti-poverty programs. A number of studies have established different food security indicators as alternatives to calorie intake but none has conducted a comparative study of multiple indicators. We present a comparative analysis of 3 alternative indicators, (a) dietary diversity score (DDS) (b) self-reported food security and (c) land holding, as alternatives to calorie intake for prediction of household food security. We assess the reliability of the 3 indicators through their relation with household calorie intake, food and non-food expenditure, and nutritional status. We use a nationally representative cross sectional data consisting of 4,423 households from Bangladesh. We find no systematic difference in association with access to food (as measured by household food and non-food expenditure) among the alternative indicators. We also find that the land indicator predicts nutritional status better than DDS and self-reported indicator. We compare the ability of different indicators to predict calorie intake using a Vuong closeness test and find that DDS or any indexes of multiple indicators consisting of DDS can predict calorie intake better than others and more closely resemble the true model of calorie intake. We find the similar conclusion from out-of-sample prediction ability, lowest mean square error and mean absolute error, of alternative indicator. Finally, we try to find a discontinuous break point in DDS at different calorie intake threshold points which we can use as a cut-off points to identify food insecure household. We find no such structural points in DDS distribution