acknowledgments of nutrition
Answers
Answer:
My interest in nutrition began in the summer of 1977 when I came to India on a short-term consulting assignment to the Central Soil and Water Research Conservation and Training Institute, Dehra Dun. The assignment, I thought, was quite simple: to do economic evaluations of various projects of the Institute in rather remote and isolated areas of India, particularly in the "hill areas" of the Himalayas.
The specific problem I encountered was that in the highly under-employed and poverty stricken area of the hills - and, I later found, generally throughout India - people would not work for less than about Rs 5 (or about $0.60) per day. l thought it peculiar that people appeared to be willing to starve rather than work for this, under Indian conditions, not inconsiderable wage. The fact of this wage floor was of course of considerable importance to my evaluations because while it is conventionally assumed that the shadow price of labour under conditions of unemployment is zero, or near zero, this fact seemed to me to indicate that there was a real cost of labour in keeping this wage floor in place. Let me say at the outset that I do not believe that "culture" or "work-leisure" preferences are very relevant in this domain of abject poverty. Something more fundamental, l suspected, was going on.
It is clear that the physical energy expended in physical work must be provided by the physical energy provided by food. Thus there must be a fundamental connection between earnings, which are used mainly to purchase food, and the energy requirements of the work required to obtain earnings. l thought I would spend a few days working out this little problem and here I am, three years later, still in this most fascinating field of nutrition.
I estimated (see Seckler 1980) that a representative household of Indian agricultural labourers consisting of 5.33 people would generate about 776 days of work per year under full employment. In order to meet their energy requirements at this level of work they would require about 4,245,000 kcal per year - or, at 3,150 kcal per kg of wheat, about 1,350 kg of wheat per year. The poor indian household spends about 60 per cent of its income on food grains, 20 per cent on other food items, and 20 per cent on non-food necessities such as clothing, shelter and fuel. Thus to meet all necessities it must earn about 2,000 kg of wheat or its equivalent per year. At full employment, the daily minimum food-grain wage would be 2.6 kg. Assuming that men earn 20 per cent more than women, the minimum male wage rate would be 2.9 kg of food grain. l later found that this estimate corresponds remarkably close to Clarke and Haswell's survey (1970) of agriculture wage rates in subsistence economies. They observed . . . "the strange fact that . . . throughout all times and places for which we have information, the rural labourer, however poor, will not do a day's work for less than three kilograms grain equivalent."
It is difficult to convert this minimum food-grain wage into monetary terms without detailed knowledge of local diets and costs of food grains and other necessities. However, following the estimates of Dandekar and Rath (1971) for rural India in 1969/70, and adjusting for inflation to 1977,1 found that the Rs 5 figure was perhaps as close as one could conceivably arrive at. l concluded that the energy-work connection is indeed decisive in setting such wage floors as I had observed.