Abstract
Today, the 4,000-foot runway in Tumlingtar, in eastern Nepal, is paved. But when I arrived there from Kathmandu in 1985 aboard a Twin Engine Otter, the runway was nothing more than a grass strip. With only 20 passengers onboard the tiny plane it didn’t take us long to disembark and collect our luggage. Among the cargo was what we, in the developed world, might consider unusual: a 100-pound sack of rice. My friend Nemat was planning to haul it up the Arun Valley to his home village of Kuwapani. Rice, although a basic staple throughout much of Nepal and the world, was hard to get in Kuwapani, high in the Himalayas.
Ensuring that everyone, everywhere, has enough to eat
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Notes
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Andrew Muhammad et al., International Evidence of Food Consumption Patterns: An Update Using 2005 International Comparison Program Data, USDA-ERS Technical Bulletin 1929 (Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 2011). Note that, for low-income countries, where many people are farming to feed their families, the shares are computed in such a way that income includes the value of production, and consumption reflects the value of what is produced and eaten on the farm. A hypothetical family that worked only on their own farm, produced nothing but food, ate only what they produced, and sold nothing would have a food budget share of 1.0.
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Barry M. Popkin “The Nutrition Transition and Obesity in the Developing World,” Journal of Nutrition 131 (2001): 871S–73S.
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My graph updates an earlier figure produced by Will Masters and his colleagues at Tufts University. See William A. Masters et al., “The Nutrition Transition and Agricultural Transformation: A Preston Curve Approach,” Agricultural Economics 47 (2016): 97–114, doi: 10.1111/agec.12303.
- 9.
You can find the most recent one at http://www.restaurant-relae.dk/wp-content/uploads/Sustainability-Report-2016_4.pdf.
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World Health Organization, European Food and Nutrition Action Plan 2015–2020 (Copenhagen: World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, 2014).
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You can learn more about Aqua at https://aqua.nasa.gov.
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Gerald Shively, Celeste Sununtnasuk, and Molly Brown, “Environmental Variability and Child Growth in Nepal,” Health and Place 35 (2015): 37–51.
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Gerald Shively, “Infrastructure Mitigates the Sensitivity of Child Growth to Local Agriculture and Rainfall in Nepal and Uganda,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 14 (2017), doi: 10.1073/pnas.1524482114.
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The Famine Early Warning Systems Network was created by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1985 to help decision makers plan for humanitarian crises. Learn more at https://www.fews.net.
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© 2018 Jessica Eise and Ken Foster
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Shively, G. (2018). Achieving Equal Access. In: Eise, J., Foster, K.A. (eds) How to Feed the World. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-885-5_13
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