Designing strategies and policies that will alleviate poverty and improve household food security and nutritional well being is one of the most important challenges facing government policymakers in ...developing countries. The choice of strategies and policies depends in large part on understanding the dynamics of poverty, especially the mechanisms by which households acquire and spend income and cope with cries such as poor harvest or loss of employment. This work by Harold Alderman and Marito Gracia represents IFPRI's first comprehensive analysis of the longitudinal data on 800 households collected between 1986 and 1989 in Pakistan. This unique data set enables researchers to examine the temporal dimensions of food security, income and labor dynamics, consumption and saving dynamics, nutrition and health progress, and many other issues that cannot be adequately addressed using cross-sectional data. The report of a wide-ranging series of studies focuses on Pakistan. It is the rural component of a Food Security Management Project jointly undertaken by IFPRI, the government of Pakistan, and the U.S Agency for international Development (USAID) Mission in Pakistan. An IFPRI field office, based at the Ministry of Agriculture in Islamabad since 1986, indicates IFPRI's long-term commitment to this program. This report represents the microanalysis part program, while earlier IFPRI studies, including Effects of Exchange Rate and Trade Policies on Agriculture in Parkistan, Research Report 84, and The Demand for Public Storage of Wheat in Pakistan, Research Report 77, have tackled macroeconomic issues facing food security. Other studies in human capital accumulation, agricultural credit, water management, agricultural production, and nonfarm linkage are under way. The research was carried out in collaboration with the major economic research institutes in Pakistan: the Punjab Economic Research Institute in Labore, the Applied Economic Research Centre of the University Of Peshawar, the Department of Social Welfare at the University of Baluchistan, and the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics in Islambad. The USAID Mission in Pakistan had provided sustained support to this research program.
The pathways from economic and social policies to improved food security and nutrition for the poor often are not well understood. Yet each day governments decide on policies that ultimately affect ...their well-being. How households increase their incomes, acquire food, improve health, or cope with insecurity are important concerns that need to be examined in order to devise policies to help eradicate poverty. Nearly all attempts to study these issues have used snapshot approaches those that look at one point in time. These approaches are limited in that they do not reveal anything about the actual dynamics of poverty, food security, and their consequences for nutrition and health. In this report Harold Alderman and Marito Garcia address these concerns by looking at longitudinal data for a three-year period, 1986-89, and analyzing fluctuations in incomes, consumption, savings, nutrition and health-seeking behavior of 800 households in five districts in rural Pakistan (Faisalabad and Attock in Punjab province, Badin in Sind, Dir in North-West Frontier Province, and Mastung/Kalat in Baluchistan). The report examines income sources and wage formation in rural Pakistan and investigates the level and distribution of income in poor households. It contributes to analysis of the temporal dimensions of poverty and thus adds to the literature on coping strategies of households. Although the three-year panel of data analyzed is too short to model fully the dynamics of poverty, it is sufficient to indicate the fluidity of the economic environment that households in Pakistan face. The report also traces the efficiency by which household incomes are converted to better nutritional well-being and the influence of other intervening factors such as health and education.
Most influential studies of malnutrition and public policy have focused on energy availability and consumption, tending to equate hunger with malnutrition. But recent studies have explored how other ...factors - notably infection and levels of maternal education - affect nutrition. Alderman and Garcia's study of nutrition levels in Pakistan shows that raising household food consumption, for example, has less impact on nutritional levels than raising a mother's education does. They found that educating mothers to at least the primary level tends to reduce the level of child stunting 16.5 percent, or roughly 10 times the impact achieved by increasing per capita income 10 percent. (The impact of education is not immediately realized; the diffusion of knowledge about good hygiene and child care associated with learning has a cumulative effect.) Alderman and Garcia found that in Pakistan, food security alone is not enough to improve children's nutritional status. There may be welfare justifications for various food policies, but in rural Pakistan, especially, it is equally important to improve health and reduce infection.
