Project Details
Projekt
Patterns and determinants of nutrition and food security in the rural-urban interface
Subject Area
Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Policy, Agricultural Sociology
Term
from 2016 to 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 279374797
India poses a puzzle of decline or slow improvement in nutrition and food security despite rapid economic growth. This puzzle is poorly understood and is clouded by inadequate data. There is a need for comprehensive household survey work that covers both consumption and anthropometric indicators to provide a sound basis for the measurement of food insecurity and undernutrition, and to provide a basis for robust analysis of their determinants and implications. The proposed work will directly address this need. The Indian income economic growth/undernutrition puzzle has not been studied explicitly in the urban-rural interface, where changes in incomes and lifestyles, and thus both consumptions needs and opportunities, are taking place at a particularly rapid pace. This project will study the prevalence of undernutrition and food insecurity in the rural-urban interface of Bangalore using a detailed, spatially explicit household survey of consumption and anthropometric data combined with other social and demographic indicators.While generating insights into the patterns and determinants of food security and undernutrition in the rural-urban interface of Bangalore, we will focus three specific and interrelated topics. First, we will study the nutrition of women and the influence of mothers on nutritional outcomes. Second, we will study how disruptions in lifestyles and diets affect nutrition and food security. Third, we will explore how the specialization and commercialization of household food production varies over space and time in the rural-urban interface, and address the hypothesis that specialisation and commercialisation can lead to improvements in nutritional status by increasing incomes. Our work will be based on standard micro-econometric techniques for the analysis of cross-sectional (and later panel) household data. We will also draw on recent developments in non-parametric estimation and inference and in the estimation of threshold models. In addition, we will employ spatial econometric methods to analyse spatial patterns and spillovers in nutrition and food security and the factors that affect them.
DFG Programme
Research Units
Subproject of
FOR 2432:
Social-Ecological Systems in the Indian Rural-Urban Interface: Functions, Scales, and Dynamics of Transition
International Connection
India
Cooperation Partners
Professor Dr. Chinnappa B.V. Reddy; Professor Dr. K.B. Umesh
