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On Measuring Undernutrition

DESPITE a steady rise in the average per capita production of food in the world, the problem of hunger and undernutrition still exists. This paper is concerned with problems of quantifying undernutrition which results from inadequate intake of calories. A major problem involved in estimating the extent of undernutrition in a population is the identification of undernourished persons. The FAO has been concerned with the issue of determining the dietary energy requirement of individuals in different age and sex groups that will allow them to maintain the specified physical efficiency. It periodically publishes the average calorie requirement norms for a reference man or woman for different countries. Some attempts have been made to measure undernutrition using these norms. This approach which classifies a person as undernourished if his or her calorie intake is below the required norm, was first followed by Ojha (1970) and Dandekar and Rath (1971) for India, and later by Reutilinger and Selowsky (1976) and FAO (1977) at a global level. These studies led to a heated debate among economists and statisticians, the important among them being Dandekar (1981, 1982), Sukhatme (1981, 1981a, 1982) and Srinivasan (1981). The most severe criticism of the average calorie norm approach was put forward by Sukhatme (1978, 1981, 1982) who argues that it leads to considerable overestimation of the degree of undernutrition in the population. The main justification of his criticism is based on the empirical studies conducted by Widdowson (1947) and Edholm et al. (1970) which report considerable variation in calorie intake of apparently similar individuals maintaining constant body weight and having the same activity level. On the basis of an analysis of variance of the data provided by these studies, Sukhatme concluded that the variation in the requirement of intraindividuals over time is considerably larger than the variation in the requirement between people. Further, Sukhatme and Margan (1978), analysing the model of protein deficiency, concluded that the variation in energy balance (i.e. intake minus expenditure) of a healthy individual maintaining body weight and performing the same activity follows a first-order auto-regressive process with zero mean and stationary variance. * This paper was written while I was a Senior Fellow at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki, Finland. I am grateful to Dr. Siddiqur Rahman Osmani and Professor Amartya Sen for their comments on an earlier draft which led to considerable improvement in the paper. The referees of this journal made many useful comments which proved extremely helpful in revising the paper. Juhani Holm provided me with expert computational assistance for which I am indebted to him.