In the rural global South, it is increasingly the case that the relationship between landholding status and household nutrition is intermediated by complex associations between intervening variables. These include changes to agricultural practices, the dynamics of how decisions about food are prioritised within household budgets, the gendering of household power relations, the breadth of non-farm livelihood portfolios, and the effect of landholding status on access to social welfare schemes. This article demonstrates this complexity using a mixed-methods assessment of livelihoods and nutritional status in two north Indian villages. The study finds that in these villages the role of land for household nutrition is expressed through significantly greater milk consumption by landholding households, but insignificant differences in the consumption of most other major food items. Landholding households' greater consumption of milk is hinged to an ability to grow fodder in between cropping cycles, and manage these activities via prevailing agricultural gender norms in which women and girls are charged with responsibilities for livestock husbandry. In the context where milk provides a crucial source of protein for the mainly vegetarian diets in these villages, landholder households' greater access to milk represents a vital aspect of the local patterning of food and nutrition security. This finding underscores how greater complexity and diversity in the rural social landscapes of the global South are creating increasingly intricate, locally distinctive configurations of food and nutrition (in)security. Such local nuance cannot be readily observed within research traditions that rely on large-scale national datasets. Mixed-methods geographical research in the tradition of livelihoods analysis gives important voice to these considerations.
India's poor performance on critical food and nutrition security indicators despite substantial economic prosperity has been widely documented. These failings not only hamper national progress, but also contribute significantly to the global undernourished population, particularly children. While the recently passed National Food Security Act 2013 adopts a life-cycle approach to expand coverage of subsidized food grains to the most vulnerable households and address food security, there remains much to be desired in the legislation. Access to adequate food for 1·24 billion people is a multifaceted problem requiring an interconnected set of policy measures to tackle the various factors affecting food and nutrition security in India. In the present opinion paper, we discuss a fivefold strategy that incorporates a life-cycle approach, spanning reproductive health, bolstering citizen participation in existing national programmes, empowering women, advancing agriculture and better monitoring the Public Distribution System in order to fill the gaps in both access and adequacy of food and nutrition.
Contemporary India possesses a food security paradox-progress in combating food insecurity is occurring at a slower pace than might be expected, given the nation's rapid economic growth. This paper provides a conceptual framework to explain this phenomenon. Drawing on the work of Amartya Sen, it uses a broadly framed analysis to conceptualise the problem in terms of the interactivity between three types of entitlement failure. Firstly, pure exchange system entitlement (abilities to obtain food from welfare programmes) has been curtailed by institutional shortcomings in pivotal programmes. Secondly, opportunities for wage-labour entitlement (abilities to obtain food from monetary incomes) have been restricted for vulnerable households because of the sequencing and geographical patterning of recent economic growth in India. Thirdly, opportunities for vulnerable households to address their needs through own-production entitlement (abilities to grow one's own food) have been curbed by land fragmentation and environmental degradation. These interactions have created vicious cycles of food insecurity for vulnerable households. Through this approach, the deeper causal roots of India's food security paradox are articulated, thus underscoring the importance of multi-pronged, holistically constructed policy agendas.
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