Footnote:
In: IFPRI Discussion Paper 01423
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments March 23, 2015 erstellt
Description:
Although agriculture is widely thought to be an important sector for influencing nutrition outcomes, there is a remarkable dearth of rigorous evidence on the role of large scale agricultural programs, such as Asia's Green Revolution. This paper therefore analyzes agriculture and nutrition linkages in Bangladesh, a country that achieved rapid growth in rice productivity at a relatively late stage in Asia's Green Revolution, as well as unheralded progress against undernutrition. To do so the authors create a synthetic panel that aggregates nutritional data from five rounds of the Demographic Health Surveys (1997 to 2011) with district-level estimates of rice yields. Using various panel estimators, they find rice yields significantly explain weight gain in young children but not linear growth. The authors further show that rice yields have large and positive effects on the timely introduction of complementary foods for young children but not on dietary diversity indicators and that this complementary feeding indicator is positively associated with child weight gain but not with linear growth. The reverse holds for dietary diversity indicators, which influence linear growth but not weight gain. The results therefore suggest that Bangladesh's Green Revolution has made a large contribution to improvements in weight gain but has had little effect on postnatal linear growth. Achieving the latter would appear to require greater efforts to diversify diets out of cereals and into more micronutrient-rich foods