POVERTY REDUCTION

According to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) information, in 1999 there were 1,151,000 people in the world living on less than $1 per day, 2,777,000 on less than $2 per day. (This was out of a global population of about 6 billion.) It is hard to imagine living on less than $1/day, and it is quite appropriate to prioritize humanitarian assistance for these people.

If one-sixth of the worlds poverty is living in extreme poverty (<$1/person/day), about one-third is living in severe poverty ($1/person/day to $2/person/day). I suggest that any reasonably person would see alleviating their poverty as also worthy of high priority. And indeed, there may be more possibility of doing so. The lower income is really subsistence; at $2 per person per day, there may be some resources to invest.

I would point out, however, that any development strategy that leaves out half the population, and the most affluent, educated, informed and influential part at that, seems to have a pretty dim likelihood of success. While concessionary “development assistance” may be based on eleemosynary motives, and focused on the very poor, development must be a more inclusive.

END MALNUTRITION AND HUNGER

This is part of the first of the MDGs. I want to think for a bit how information and communication technologies can be used to achieve this goal. I have read several discussions recently on ICT and the MDGs, and I fear that they were not very good. Perhaps this discussion might serve to help improve such discussions.

First, nutrition levels differ from place to place, and the causes of malnutrition in one place or in one group of people may be quite different than in another. If one wants to develop a program to reduce malnutrition and hunger, one really ought to start with an understanding of the nature and magnitude of the problem. ICTs have a very important role in the survey work to obtain and analyze the data on which such an understanding can be based, in modeling the situation, and in planning the approach to reducing hunger and malnutrition.

Malnutrition is most common in young children. For infants, if there is a serious problem, one might look first at maternal nutrition, fertility rates, and breast feeding practices. ICTs could be useful in managing pre-natal nutrition and family planning programs, and in changing knowledge, attitudes and practices of pregnant women and mothers with regard to nutrition, family planning, breast feeding, and hygiene.

For children in the one to five age bracket, the situation is somewhat different. One often sees a cycle in which kids have frequent respiratory and diarrheal disease episodes, each of which depresses appetite. Kids don’t thrive under these circumstances, failing to gain weight while they are sick, and becoming malnourished (or more malnourished) over time. It is believed that the poor nutritional status also leads to impaired immune response, and thus to more frequent episodes of infectious diseases, and longer lasting episodes. These kids especially need high nutrient density foods (e.g. milk, eggs, meat), and in poor families are less likely to obtain them. Add in lack of primary health care, lack of medications, increased exposure to disease due to crowding and large family size, poor hygiene and housing that lacks hygienic facilities (e.g. piped, potable water; insect proofing; flooring), and the cycle becomes even more vicious.

How does one break this cycle? One seeks to educate mothers, generally and specifically about child care. Increasing family income leads to improvements in food availability, water supplies, housing quality, and access to medicines. Primary health care services focusing on children seem helpful. Of course, improving the average education for mothers, improving family incomes, and improving housing and the utilities infrastructure are not “quick fixes”, but they are probably the best long run solution to the problem of pre-school child malnutrition. As I have discussed earlier in this blog, there are many ways that ICT can contribute to improving average family incomes. So too, there are many ways that ICT can help in increasing the productivity and availability of educational services, and indeed in convincing parents to send girls to school. There are also ways in which ICT can help improving the efficiency and quality of primary health care services and the availability of medications to the poor.

It seems to me that the problem of hunger for the poor must be subdivided also. In rural areas, it is often a problem of lack of agricultural productivity of small farms. Subsistence farmers will eat more when they produce more; market farmers will eat more when their farm earnings will buy more.

For non-farm families, the root problem is not being able to buy enough food, which is solved by getting more money or lowering the price of food. Again, increasing family income involves a complex, multi-sectoral effort, and again, this blog has discussed how ICT can be used in many ways in such an effort.

How does one make food cheaper? One can increase the productivity of agriculture and/or one can improve the efficiency of food storage and distribution. A lot of food is lost post harvest, and these losses can be reduced by better food storage and processing – lots of ICT applications here. Similarly, food distribution can be improved by improving market information and efficiency, improving the efficiency of the transportation system, and improving the distribution system (wholesaling and retailing) – again, lots of ICT applications spring to mind.

There is a whole field of development devoted to improving agricultural productivity, and I can’t begin to do justice to it here. Efforts include:
· Improving agricultural and food policy;
· Improving markets for farm inputs, such as fertilizer and pesticides;
· Building irrigation infrastructure, and operating it efficiently;
· Better Educating Farmers;
· Improving on-farm technology – better crop varieties and improved breeds of livestock through research, development, and dissemination efforts;
· Improving soil fertility, including efforts to provide fertilizer of types and in amounts specific to the needs of the specific area of application;
· Maintaining soil fertility, avoiding problems of salination, disease infestation, etc,;
· Improving control of crop and livestock diseases;
· Improving pest control;
· Cadastral system improvements, allowing people to own land, and ideally to capitalize the land they do possess;
· Improving agricultural finance, including micro-credit, farm loan financing, crop insurance, crop futures markets, etc.
· Improving markets for farm outputs;
· Improving farm mechanization and machinery;
· Improving the infrastructure serving farm communities (roads, electrification, communications);
· Improving weather forecasting (and in the face of global warming, climate forecasting);
· Improving local institutions serving farmers, such as cooperatives, community institutions, etc.;
· Improving farm extension services.
ICT can be used in multiple ways in each of these efforts.

It has been suggested that hunger is often misperceived as a failure of food production, when in fact the world always has enough food to feed all its people. It seems surely true that a part of the problem is that food is available but not where the hungry people need it. One of my favorite applications of ICT is in warning systems that monitor food production shortfalls, and provide advance notice enabling timely importation of food. The rich seldom go hungry; when food is scarce, prices go up. By timely intervention to prevent scarcity from developing, food prices can be held down.

It has been recognized that lack of specific micro-nutrients (vitamins and minerals) can cause significant health problems, even when protein-calorie supplies are adequate. The problem can be approached by recognizing vulnerable groups, educating them, and assuring that adequate foods are available and affordable. Again, such efforts are complex, and offer many, varied points for the application of ICT.

In the past I was involved in programs which explored the use of biotechnology in improving farm productivity. I should probably address this topic more fully in another blog, since it is so infuriating that the fear of some unknown consequence from eating food produced with recombinant crop plants outweighs the very real risks of hunger, malnutrition, starvation and their consequences from lack of food production. But suffice it to say, I am convinced that biotechnology offers great opportunities to improve agriculture and food production. Yet in a seminar I helped organize at the National Academy of Sciences some years ago, it was concluded that great as the potential is in biotech, that from the appropriate application of information technology is even greater.