Link between Agri-growth and malnutrition?

In their Economic Times article, ‘Agri-growth and malnutrition’, Gulati, Kumar and Shreedhar put forth an interesting hypothesis: agricultural growth is necessary for a decline in child malnutrition in India. The authors proxy agricultural growth (which is quite volatile) with land productivity and estimate a strong negative correlation between agri-growth and malnutrition. They argue that this implies agri-growth is a necessary condition for combating malnutrition. However, their reasoning is notoriously flawed. First, it is highly contentious if land productivity can be taken as a good proxy for agri-growth. Agri-growth may depend on a state’s institutions – for instance, trading opportunities, law and order, the banking system, quality of governance, access to technological innovation and so on. A state’s institutions are very likely to be correlated with land productivity. Richer countries also tend to have more favourable climates and more fertile lands. This may be driven historically, by higher population growth in fertile areas which fuels more innovation or by the government having better fiscal capacity. In any case, better geographic and soil conditions do seem to lead to a more “developed” state on average. This means that some states are born “lucky” and others are not. If this is the case, it is no surprise we find a negative correlation between land productivity and malnutrition. The real result may be that some states that have better soil conditions tend to have better institutions and also lower malnutrition. It is quite another question, then, to ask what makes better institutions apart from luck.

It is not easy to find determinants of malnutrition. However, the only way to try to unbundle the causes is not to take a state-level approach but a micro-level study. At the level of a city or a village, it may be possible to see what is truly correlated with malnutrition, given the same access to technology, trading and credit opportunities, etc. I study malnutrition among five thousand children (aged 3-6) enrolled in Anganwadis in slums and find that diet, family income, mother’s expenditure on food, mother’s nutritional knowledge, education and other fixed local environmental factors (like prices of products, local water quality, quality of Anganwadi, etc.) all together contribute in explaining only 8% of the variation in child malnutrition this year. This means that child malnutrition among 3-6 year olds may be difficult to predict even given detailed information about their local environment let alone land productivities at the state-level.

There are at least two possibilities: it could be driven through genetic factors – underweight mothers on average have underweight babies and so on. It could also be the knowledge of the mother at the time of child-birth. Several medical studies point to moderate and severe malnutrition being linked to malnutrition within the first two years of birth. It could be dietary habits or the history of immunization and disease during the formative years. If this is the case, it would be futile to improve agricultural growth as it is likely to fail to lead to better outcomes for health. In order to make policy implications, one must make statements that are micro-founded at the level of the family and not the state. It is a common blunder to adhere to state-correlations without digging deeper. Child malnutrition is a complex and difficult problem. It demands a more rigorous solution.