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EXPLORING THE AGRICULTURE–NUTRITION DISCONNECT IN INDIA 175 In addition to stagnation in undernutrition rates, India is facing a rising tide


of obesity and related metabolic disorders. This double burden raises important challenges with regard to fine-tuning agricultural policies to deal simultaneously with issues of deficit, excess, and dietary imbalance.


Trends in Agricultural Development Large-scale government investments in agriculture in the 1960s sparked India’s Green Revolution. These investments resulted in improved seeds (primarily wheat and rice), subsidized inputs, infrastructure developments, increased research and extension, and new marketing policies, accompanied by relatively favorable agri- cultural price regimes and well-coordinated government leadership. Irrigated area doubled, fertilizer use increased sixfold, and cereal production nearly doubled. National food stocks grew, large-scale famine was all but eliminated, and rural poverty fell from 64 percent in 1967 to 50 percent in 1977, and then to 34 percent by 1986. Since the economic reforms of the 1990s, India has seen unprecedented


economic growth rates, although agriculture and allied sectors have grown much more slowly than the manufacturing and service sectors. While a falling share of agriculture in the GDP is not uncommon in a rapidly growing economy, the agriculture sector shows several disturbing trends (Bhalla and Singh 2009). The average rate of growth of agricultural yield per year has been falling steadily (at 4.4 percent between 1980 and 1990, 2.8 percent between 1991 and 1998, and 0.6 percent between 1999 and 2009). Although India ranks second worldwide in farm output, per capita daily foodgrain availability in 2006 was the same as dur- ing the drought years of the 1970s. (Concomitantly, there were rising net exports and additions to government buffer stocks.) The annual growth rate of public investment in agriculture declined from 4 percent in the 1980s to 1.9 percent in the 1990s. The parallel slowing of the poverty-reduction rate, epidemic of farmer suicides (indicative of deep agrarian distress), and virtual stagnation in nutrition outcomes nationwide highlight deep-rooted systemic problems.


Pathways between Agriculture and Nutrition The pioneering UNICEF conceptual framework for nutrition has proved extremely useful in showing the relevance of the “food, health, and care” triad of preconditions that underpin nutritional well-being. The framework’s simplicity aids communica- tion between multiple stakeholders, but it is not necessarily optimal for highlighting specific pathways and generating testable hypotheses. Figure 1 shows a framework,


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