Caloric Nonsense

The Indian blogosphere has caught fire by this article published in the Hindu by economist Utsa Patnaik that claims that there is a crisis in the rural community in India. There may be problems there, I don’t know, but the evidence used by Utsa Patnaik to support her claim is really suspicious. Her main evidence that there is a problem on the farm is base on looking at the consumption of grains and the caloric intake of the people. Here is a quote:

Forty years of successful effort to raise foodgrains absorption through the Green Revolution and planned expansionary policies has been wiped out in a single decade of deflationary economic reforms and India is back to the foodgrains availability level of 50 years ago. The farmers of Punjab and Haryana are in crisis for they have lost internal markets to the tune of 26 million tonnes of foodgrains — for if grain absorption had been maintained at least at the 1991 level of 178 kg per head instead of falling, the internal demand would have been 26 million tonnes higher than it actually is today.

Food grain “absorption” takes in consideration both grain consumed directly and indirectly via feeding animals. But basically, absorption is very closely related to caloric intake.

Now several commentators have criticized her methods (Aadisht Khanna, Amit, Vinod) But they aren’t saying the obvious: maybe this whole idea of using diet as a proxy for income is pure nonsense. Actually that isn’t completely true: Amit did link to this old article by Swaminathan Aiyar that makes the same point I am going to make. This is nonsense, folks. There is absolutely no way you can infer anything about how well off a person is by just looking at his or her diet over time.

Let me illustrate the problem with the diet method with a simple example. Suppose Amitabh is a rickshaw driver. Ten years ago he consumed 2400 calories a day, but today he only consumes 1800 calories. He must be starving to death, poor fellow. But oddly, he is gaining weight. How could this be? Let us ask Amitabh: “ Well, I used to have to eat a lot because I had an old cycle rickshaw and I needed the strength. Today, I have a nice auto rickshaw and life is easier.”

Don’t you think that possibly the same thing is happening in rural India? Isn’t at least possible that some of the donkeywork that ordinary Indians performed in the past is now being replaced by machines? Wouldn’t an obvious result of industrialization be that people’s caloric intake would either decrease or people would gain weight or both? I cannot know for sure that this is what is happening in rural India but neither could Utsa Patnaik know by just looking at “absorption” of food grains.

If you measure the weight of people in India, you might get some idea about their well-being but it is much better to measure income. If the farmer sells some of his grain on the market, then you can easily infer his income by multiplying the total production (including the portion saved for his family) by the market price. This is a much better indicator of well-being than caloric intake.

Here is the money quote from Swaminathan Aiyer:

What explains this? [That the poorest 20 percent only consume 1600 calories per day and this has stayed constant despite technological progress.] One reason is that nutritionists have exaggerated calorie needs to grab headlines and importance. A second and perhaps more important reason is that lifestyles have evolved so as to reduce calorie requirements. Mechanisation of every sort has penetrated rural India , substituting mechanical energy for manual energy. In Haryana and Punjab tractors are so widespread that it is getting difficult to find people who can plough with oxen.

Isn’t it an odd coincidence that the two states that Swaminathan points out as examples of states that have seen the most mechanization on the farm are exactly the two states that Utsa points out as the ones that have seen the greatest drop in “foodgrain absorption”. The really odd thing is that Swaminathan whote his excellent rebuttal to Utsa’s piece two years before she wrote her article. That’s impressive.