How important is improving food availability for reducing child malnutrition in developing countries
TL;DR: Evidence is given in support of a statistically significant and strong positive impact of national food availability on child nutrition, finding that increased food supplies have resulted in significant reductions in malnutrition since the 1970s despite population increases over the period.
About: This article is published in Agricultural Economics.The article was published on 2001-12-01 and is currently open access. It has received 48 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Malnutrition & Developing country.
Summary (2 min read)
Jump to: [1. Introduction] – [2. Variables, data and estimation procedure] – [3. Empirical results] – [Explanatory variable Specification] – [4. Implications for policy: past contributions, future priorities] and [5. Conclusion]
1. Introduction
- Yet, for a number of reasons, estimates of the impact of national food availability on child malnutrition are critical for effective policy formulation and implementation with the goal of improving food security and nutritional status in developing countries.
- Sustainable increases in agricultural productivity is one of the goals of a number of international institutions such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the 16 research institutes under the umbrella of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, and the World Bank.
- With these aims in mind, this paper investigates the relationship between countries' per-capita DES and child underweight prevalences using country fixed-effects regression and data from 1970 to 1996 for 63 developing countries.
2. Variables, data and estimation procedure
- A number of conceptual issues arise in the choice of empirical specification for analysis of child nutrition using national data.
- National food availability lies at an intermediate level of causality between these two, among child nutrition's "underlying determinants".
- The measure employed for food availabilities, daily per-capita DES, is derived from food balance sheets compiled by FAO using country-level data on the production and trade of food commodities.
- The f.Li are unobservable country-specific, time-invariant effects, and vu is a stochastic error term.
3. Empirical results
- All coefficients are negative and statistically significant.
- No significant interactions between the independent variables were found.
- The coefficient on a quadratic term for DES is significant and positive, indicating that while food availability works to reduce child malnutrition it has a declining marginal effect (column (2)).
- An extensive grid search was undertaken to locate.
Explanatory variable Specification
- Linear (1) the knot combinations yielding the smallest sum of squared residuals.
- The dependent variable is the prevalence of children underweight.
- The coefficient on the third segment remains positive and statistically insignificant even when the cut-off point is lowered considerably (making the number of data points sufficient for the estimation of a significant coefficient).
- The first and second segments of the spline have negative and significant slopes, with the second having a much smaller slope than the first.
- Variable ranges, based on the minimum and maximum values observed among developing countries over 1970-1995, are in column (3) .
4. Implications for policy: past contributions, future priorities
- The authors further draw out the implications of the empirical results by asking ( 1) how much of the total reduction in the developing country child underweight rate from 1970 to 1995 can be attributed to Health Environment (19.27%).
- Using their regression estimates, Table 5 classifies the developing countries into three groups based on the strength of impact of food availability on child malnutrition (in 1995): a "high impact" group (with DES below 2300 kcal), a "medium impact" group (between 2300 and 3120 kcal), and a "low impact" group (above 3120 kcal).
- Most of the countries in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) fall into the high impact group.
- Column (2) of Table 6 gives calculations of the absolute increase in each region's 1995 DES needed to bring about a reduction in the child malnutrition rate of 1 percentage point.
- In prioritizing food availability across all four of the underlying determinants, two criteria must be taken into account.
5. Conclusion
- Using a panel data set comprising 63 developing countries, this paper gives evidence in support of a statistically significant and strong positive impact of national per-capita food availability on child nutritional status.
- The effect is very strong for countries with per-capita DES below 2300kcal.
- Above 3120 kcal, further increases in per-capita food availability are likely to have little impact.
- In any particular country, these factors may take priority in strategies to reduce child malnutrition either because they have a stronger impact or they are far from desirable levels.
- Given land constraints, improvements in food availability must come from sustainable improvements in productivity.
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Figures (9)
Table 3 Country fixed-effects estimation results" 
Table 2 Variable definitions and sample summary statistics 
Table 5 Classification of 109 developing countries by strength of impact of food availability on child malnutrition• 
Fig. 1. Plot of underweight prevalence by per-capita DES. 
Fig. 2. Plot of child underweight prevalence with per-capita DES: linear, quadratic and spline curves. 
Fig. 4. Estimated contributions of food availability and other determinants to reductions in child malnutrition for 5 year periods, 1970-1995. 
Table 4 The absolute and relative strength of impact of food availability on child underweight rates 
Table 6 Priority setting for the future: regional comparison of the strengths and potential impacts of food availability on child malnutrition (1995)0 
Fig. 3. Estimated contributions of food availability and other determinants to reductions in child malnutrition, 1970-1995.
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...Future food security will be determined largely by the interplay of a number of factors such as political and socioeconomic stability, technological progress, agricultural policies, growth of per capita and national incomes, poverty reduction, women’s education, drinking-water quality (Smith and Haddad, 2001), and increased climate variation....
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References
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"How important is improving food ava..." refers background in this paper
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