Food Deprivation and Undernutrition in Rural Bangladesh

Abstract

Since the devastating famine of 1974, Bangladesh has successfully avoided any major disaster of this kind, in spite of serious crises in 1979 and 1984 and a succession of floods in recent years. It is nevertheless open to question whether the rural poor of Bangladesh have, over time, gained a more secure entitlement to food with which to survive temporary shocks. We have argued elsewhere (Osmani, 1991) that the non-famines of 1979 and 1984 owed much to certain fortuitous circumstances rather than to a steady improvement in food entitlement. However, using more recent information, some analysts including the World Bank (1987), Rahman and Haque (1988) and Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) (1988a), have suggested that there has been an appreciable improvement in rural poverty since Independence, especially in the 1980s. In the light of these recent contributions, this paper re-examines the issue of long-term changes in food deprivation and undernutrition in rural Bangladesh, in order to understand the processes underlying these changes, and suggests a few lessons for public policy.

The author is deeply grateful to Amiya Bagchi, Amartya Sen and other participants in the conference session on Food and Nutrition for their helpful comments.