Agriculture and malnutrition in India

Despite the high and relatively stable overall growth of the economy, India’s agriculture sector is underperforming and a vast section of the population remains undernourished. Indicators of the level of agricultural perfor¬mance or income have a strong and significant negative relationship with indices of undernutrition among adults and children, a result suggesting that improvement of agricultural productivity can be a powerful tool to reduce undernutrition across the vast majority of the population. In addition to agriculture, access to sanita¬tion facilities and women’s literacy were also found to be strong factors affecting malnutrition. Access to healthcare for women and child-care practices, in particular breast¬feeding within 1 hour after birth, are other important determinants of malnutrition among adults and children. Malnutrition is a multidimensional problem that requires multisectoral interventions. The findings show that improving agricultural performance can have a positive impact on nutritional outcomes. However, improvements in agriculture alone cannot be effective in combating malnutrition if several other mediating factors are not in place. Interventions to improve education, health, sanitation and household infrastructure, and care and feeding practices are criti¬cal. Innovative strategies that integrate agriculture and nutrition programs stand a better chance of combating the malnutrition problem.