Agricultural development through crop diversification, irrigation,
high yielding crop varieties, and public investments in infrastructure
has improved food security and its seasonal dimension worldwide in
recent years. Consequently, the severity of seasonal hunger caused by
agricultural crop cycles has lessened substantially. Yet in
agricultural pockets scattered throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia,
seasonal hunger persists, especially among the rural poor, owing
primarily to idiosyncratic shocks caused by agricultural
seasonality.
More than four-fifths of the world's poor live in rural areas
and depend on agriculture for livelihoods. Because of seasonal income
shocks, the poor who are generally poor are likely to be even poorer
during a particular agricultural season, while those who are not poor
year-round may also be so during that season. Also, seasonal hunger may
lead to endemic poverty if its adverse effects on income and
consumption are irreversible. Policies aimed at reducing overall
poverty often disregard its seasonal dimension, because standard
poverty statistics do not consider seasonal hunger in the official data
collection and analysis, there is no direct way to determine how many
of the 'bottom billion,' as economist Paul Collier refers to
the world's poorest people, suffer from seasonal hunger. Even
worse, regions prone to severe seasonal hunger are unlikely to attract
the public investments required to raise the local economy’s
resilience through income diversification and thus break the
seasonal-poverty cycle.
The book provides an exhaustive inquiry of Bangladesh's seasonal
hunger with special reference to the North West region. The seasonality
of poverty and food deprivation is a common feature of rural livelihood
but it is more marked in the north-west region of Bangladesh. The book
also presents an evaluation of several policy interventions launched
recently in mitigating seasonality, which provide a test case of what
works and what does not in combating seasonal hunger. The major
findings of the book are the following: (a) Policies to improve food
security should explicitly take into account the seasonal dimension of
food deprivation. (b) Gains from initiatives to combat seasonal hunger
should be monitored and consolidated to ensure sustainable impacts. (c)
Policies should also focus on areas that, owing to environmental
degradation and climate change, are increasingly vulnerable to seasonal
hunger and food insecurity in general.
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