Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty & the Ways to End it

by Abhijit V. Banerjee

In contrast, the social returns of directly investing in children and pregnant mother nutrition are tremendous. This can be done by giving away fortified foods to pregnant mothers and parents of small children, by treating children for worms in preschool or at school, by providing them with meals rich in micronutrients, or even by giving parents incentives to consume nutritional supplements. All of this is already being done in some countries. The government of Kenya is now systematically deworming children in school. In Colombia, micronutrient packets are sprinkled on kids’ meals in preschool. In Mexico, social welfare payments come with free nutritional supplements for the family. Developing ways to pack foods that people like to eat with additional nutrients, and coming up with new strains of nutritious and tasty crops that can be grown in a wider range of environments, need to become priorities for food technology, on an equal footing with raising productivity. We do see some instances of this across the world, pushed by organizations such as the Micronutrient Initiative and HarvestPlus: A variety of orange sweet potatoes (richer in beta carotene than the native yam) suitable for Africa was recently introduced in Uganda and Mozambique.35 A new salt, fortified both with iron and iodine, is now approved for use in several countries, including India. But there are all too many instances where food policy remains hung up on the idea that all the poor need is cheap grain.