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Determining the Beneficiaries of Cheap-food Policies in Trinidad and Tobago

Solving the problem of undernutrition is one of the foremost challenges continuing to face developing countries. Difficulties of quantifying undernutrition precisely have resulted in widely varying estimates of the number of undernourished persons, ranging from fewer than half a billion to almost two billion [1]. Regardless of the differences in the figures, it is clear that hundreds of millions of people are nutritionally deficient. Moreover, the vast majority of the undernourished are in developing countries. Nutrition strategies that have been devised over the years have had one principal aim: to increase the food intake of undernourished persons. These strategies have generally proved inadequate to the task, however, and therefore the theories of the nature and causes of undernutrition have been revised and new approaches are being suggested. Undernutrition was once seen as wholly a problem of food scarcity. Consequently, the solutions presented were increases in food production and productivity. The valuable lesson gained from the experiences of countries that actually made progress in the Green Revolution was that increasing food supplies alone was not enough. Efforts must also be directed to giving the undernourished access to the food supplies. The consensus now being expressed is: “Rather than as a race between food and population, the food equation is to be viewed as a dynamic balance in the individual countries between food supply and demand that depends on complex relationships among a number of interacting variables” [2]. Current approaches to combating undernutrition fall into two main categories food policy and nutrition policy. Food policy is the more comprehensive approach, which seeks to address the problems of the food system as a whole. The rationale is that the imbalances of food production, marketing, and demand are closely linked and require an integrated attack on all three fronts. Nutrition policy is limited to the concerns of directly increasing food consumption. Among the experts, there is a preference for the broader rather than the narrower approach. Given that undernutrition is intrinsically tied to poverty, it is felt that a sustained solution of nutritional deprivation hinges on the elimination of poverty itself. As postwar development strategies have proved very slow in overcoming both poverty and undernutrition, some advocate an alternative development thrust that emphasizes the role of the food sector and agriculture as a whole [2]. An explicit incorporation of nutrition goals into overall development plans is also considered desirable. It is advisable that this path should be taken in order to achieve both rapid national development and the sustained solution of undernutrition. So far, developing countries have more readily adopted direct nutrition interventions such as cheapfood policies, food stamps, and food-supplementation programmes. One reason for the preference for such policies is that they are more visible than nutrition schemes hidden in agricultural projects or development strategies. The rationale is two-sided. in that the recipients of such welfare-oriented policies may be more gratified at the visible concern for their wellbeing, and policy makers benefit in their efforts to mobilize financial and political support [3]. The Egyptian food riots of January 1977, which followed a reduction in consumer subsidies, showed clearly the political importance of these policies [4]. This paper focuses on means of determining who are the beneficiaries of cheap-food policies. The approach is applied to the case of Trinidad and Tobago, to identify the beneficiaries of the cheap-food policies implemented in this country from 1973 to 1985.