Kindly update us on the research on India centric agriculture-nutrition at Tata Cornell Institute? What is the primary objective behind organizing this event at Delhi in India?
The Tata Cornell Institute based at Ithaca( New York) is an institute very focused on looking at problem of rural poverty and trying to understand the role of agriculture in addressing malnutrition. The TCI-Technical Assistance and Research for Indian Nutrition and Agriculture( TARINA) is a new initiative focused on India. Right now we have 12 PhD students who
“ are focused research on Indian agriculture and nutrition issues. They come to India for one year to stay in India and travel to Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar and other states. This programme is a long term one and last year we received the grant from Gates Foundation. It is to essentially to scale this work up to create impact at research and policy level plan. This grant has both on ground work involving our partners to look in how do you bring the nutrition and mal-nutrition perspectives into the policy making and then to build capacity of NGOs, civil society.
As part of our efforts on increasing awareness on malnutrition under the same programme, we plan to organize the series of events at national level. The focus of first forum at New Delhi is that how to create more diverse food systems. When we think about food, we think about rice and wheat. Obviously these are important but we need to broaden the basket and include the milk, eggs, fruits and other foods. Even today the food security means rice and wheat security. I want to open up the discussion dialogue on its definition. Food security means diversity of basket.
There has been varying perspectives on the nutrition indices. Even the Food Agriculture Organization( FAO) and Indian experts seem to be taking extreme positions. How do you look at these differences?
I have in past written few papers on some of the issues with FAO indices. The problem with FAO food hunger index is that its main focus is calories and not the balanced nutritious diet. So as a result you are measuring whether somebody has taken enough calories but not really the nutrition or the malnutrition.
When we think about food, we think about rice and wheat. Obviously these are important but we need to broaden the basket and include the milk, eggs, fruits and other foods. Even today the food security means rice and wheat security. I want to open up the discussion dialogue on its definition. Food security means diversity of basket.
Many of us are arguing for a broader indices including many factors. Many countries like India are good at measuring staple diets but not good at measuring diversity. For example, if someone asks you about the rice consumed last month, you might roughly guess it. But if you are asked about the tomatoes, it will be difficult. So this is the problem that we have with the surveys.
Many of us believe that the surveys are not taking overall food consumption into consideration. And not taking these into account creates problem with measurement of nutrition etc. So these are the issues FAO should consider. Overall I think they have come a long way of highlighting the hunger but we are arguing that they must include many other factors such as malnutrition.
There are many reports that suggest that agriculture in India is shrinking. But at the same time we continue to call ourselves agrieconomy yet doing little to correct our basics?
If you look at any country’ s overall economic history and the share of agriculture GDP, the latter always witnessed decrease with the overall growth of the
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