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UWA Business School
The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has this month warned that ‘the number of undernourished people in the world remains unacceptably high.' With 925 million people around the world still undernourished, the organisation has called an emergency meeting for late September, where it will discuss the possibility of another potential food crisis.

Associate Professor Anu Rammohan, from The University of Western Australia Business School, emphasises the need to learn more about the causes of hunger and food insecurity on both micro and macro levels. To that end, the Economics professor and her research team will be embarking on a four-year study examining food security in six Indian states.

The project, entitled ‘Institutions for Food Security: Global Lessons from Rural India,' has been awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project grant. It will investigate the various ways in which higher food prices impact on levels of food security amongst different rural populations. The study will then examine the ways in which institutional environments combine with various livelihood strategies to influence food security levels, and finally make recommendations as to what policies and institutional arrangements should be implemented in order to best combat food insecurity.

India is the perfect case study because of its wide diversity of policies and outcomes, explains Professor Rammohan. ‘The country achieved self-sufficiency in the 1970s and is now a net exporter of food,' she says. ‘Despite this, 29.9% (2005 figures) of the population live in poverty, and 39% of the population suffers from malnutrition. India has 28% of the world's hungry. Within India, however, the levels of food insecurity vary widely from state to state.'

The researchers will work with India's Tata Institute of Social Sciences to survey households and conduct interviews with representatives from relevant agencies and organisations. India's Public Distribution System (PDS) has ended mass starvation, but failed to stop malnutrition and hunger. The government scheme distributes ration cards to below-poverty-line households, giving the poor access to subsidies food from "fair price shops." However, explains Professor Rammohan, the scheme is jointly administered by the national and state governments. The result is misadministration and corruption that means just 27% of payments reach India's poor.

The consequences of such ineffective programmes include seeing India placed in the "alarming" category the 2009 Global Hunger Index. The country had worse rates of malnutrition than sub-Saharan Africa, with 43.5% of the country's children under five categorised as underweight.

Access to government assistance is just one of the factors that the researchers expect to influence the study participants' risk and resilience to food security. Other factors include location, education, employment, and livelihood strategies - that is, whether the villagers engage in their own agricultural production, have access to other incomes, or utilise government assistance.

The study will provide crucial information on long-term solutions. The Director-General of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has recognised that the global food equation has been rewritten, saying, ‘Given poor people's diverse sources of income, the same poor people are not necessarily hit by each blow.'

The new study will expand on the Sustainable Livelihoods (SL) Approach, which has previously been used to investigate individual households' relationships with food security. ‘By focusing on the lived experiences of individuals, households and communities, SL takes as its starting point the fact that people are embedded within complex social-economic-political worlds,' explains Professor Rammohan. ‘However, we want to go further; what our study will be doing is tracking the volatility of these individual case studies over space and time. The results will create a fuller picture and allow us to better evaluate the impact of institutional policies on food security.'

It's an evaluation that is sorely needed. Part of the UN's first Millennium Development Goal is to: ‘Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.' It's a goal that is now unlikely to be met, with the 2008 global food crisis causing a 71.4% increase in world food prices and leading to the number of undernourished people peaking at over one billion in 2009.

Non-government organisations have criticised what they perceive to be political inaction and ineffectual government policy. ‘On the eve of the most important development summit for five years [the UN summit on the Millennium Development Goals], a billion people will be going to bed hungry,' said Meredith Alexander, the policy head of charity ActionAid. ‘Despite promises to the contrary, one-sixth of humanity doesn't get enough to eat. But we grow enough food to feed every man, woman and child on the planet. The real cause of hunger isn't lack of food, it is lack of political will.'

But with a growing wealth of research into the area, governments have no excuse for continuing to exercise ineffective policy. One child dies every six seconds from malnutrition, according to the FAO. That's why, believes Professor Rammohan, we have to put in place sustainable, effective policies that will make a real difference to the lives of the poor in India and around the world.

Media Reference

Heather Merritt
Director, External Relations
UWA Business School
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Verity Chia
Communications Officer
UWA Business School
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