Understanding the Linkage Between Household Poverty and Food Security: Insights From the Indian State of Odisha

Abstract

In India, more than 21.9% of the total population is below the poverty line, which compelled the government to initiate several policies for alleviating poverty and food insecurity. It can be argued that often non-poor households may become food insecure due to their irrational expenditure behaviour. The widespread consumerism and commercialism in rural India as a result of globalization often drive rural households to spend more on non-food items than food items. As a result, it is frequently observed that non-poor farmers excluded from the social security programs are highly malnourished as a result of food insecurity, which pushes them back into the poverty trap. This study reviews critically the methodologies applied to measure household poverty and food insecurity and examine the relationship between the two using primary data collected from two villages of the Balasore district of Odisha whose major livelihood relies on agriculture using the m-logit model for data analysis. Results show even households living above the poverty line suffer from the problem of food insecurity. About 20.5% of the non-poor are food insecure in the study villages. The study also finds a location-specific spatial autocorrelation of Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and headcount ratio among the districts of the state using Moran's I. Hence, there is a need for properly targeted policy interventions and to revise the methodologies applied to measure household poverty and identify beneficiaries so that non-poor households are not deprived of food security programmes.

Citation

Das, A. and Paria, B. (2024), "Understanding the Linkage Between Household Poverty and Food Security: Insights From the Indian State of Odisha", Das, R.C. (Ed.) Growth, Poverty and Developmental Aspects of Agriculture, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 225-247. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83608-076-320241015