Volume 4, Number 1
April 1998
Time Allocation and Child Nutrition
Bill Kinsey raised a question based on his 15-year panel study in Zimbabwe: why should households benefitting from land reform persistently show levels of child nutrition lower than those for households not benefitting from reform? Furthermore, why should income, positively correlated with agroecological zones and hence cash-cropping, be inversely correlated with nutrition? According to Kinsey, these results, which fly in the face of both intuition and many findings else-where, have something to do with the quality/nature of child care. The land reform experience has placed stress on house-holds in many ways. For example, by at least doubling the amount of land small families have--without an accompanying change in technology--and then exhorting these families to use the land productively, families have felt pressure to use all labor resources for fieldwork. Putting families in clustered villages means the fields are now far from home; travel times are long, and meal and "care" breaks impractical. Land reform has also weakened social networks so that co-caregivers may be hard to find. Child care has suffered as a consequence.
In the next three years, Kinsey intends to follow the same panel and explore the child care issue in some detail. An important part of the study would be an examination of the time allocated to different activities by adults/older children in the family. Kinsey asked if anyone had used or seen studies that do a good job of capturing this type of information. He was aware of one: Collette Suda's study of changes in gender roles in Kenya.
Barbara Nowak responded that Kinsey's findings did not surprise her. The indigenous community she lived with in Malaysia showed decreased nutrition levels with cash-cropping (even though income went up), because people were not growing their own food; they needed to buy their rice and all their vegetables. Women stopped bothering with their small house gardens because their relatives and friends would ask for vegetables from the gardens and the women growing the food felt exploited. This occurred in a community of people in which sharing and reciprocity is critical and highly valued. Not growing their vegetables nor their staples meant that people had to use their income from cash crops, from wage labor, and from selling other produce (fish, crabs, etc.) to purchase the foods they would have traditionally eaten. To Nowak this suggested that nutrition typically fails with cash cropping.
Bola Akanji also felt that lowered nutrition of households in countries with economic reforms should not be surprising, but for different reasons. Typically in these economies, Nigeria, for example, the decrease in the real rather than nominal value of farm income, occasioned endogenously by input price deregulation policies and exogenously by exchange rate changes, has dampened the gains from cash-crop expansion. Therefore, the demand for cash income (apparent in shifts from subsistence to commercial production) arises from the need to meet the rapidly rising cost of farm and nonfarm goods and services, including foods not grown. As Akanji's study in Nigeria in 1991 showed, even though production and output as well as income increased, by as much as 250 percent over the prestructural adjustment period, farm households sold more of all types of food crops grown, because farm prices gen-erally increased. Data showed that there was systematic decrease in the consumption of all protein foods, such as livestock products, legumes, and most cereals, while there was an increase in the consumption of cassava, cocoyam, and vege-table crops. The cash-crop expansion in a market-led policy en-vironment resulted in food-crop expansion, but as a buffer for the rising cost profile of all types of production. In peasant households in most of Africa, when food rationing becomes en-demic due to reasons ranging from seasonal hunger, famine, or a 'vent' for (market) surplus, children and women bear the brunt of shortages due to the cultural entitlement system. Also, because "workers" are rated above "nonworkers," children and women, for whom the perceived labor value is low, are entitled to less food, with implied lower nutritional standards when food rationing occurs.
Kris Merschrod pointed out that for Latin America, shifting good food, such as eggs and milk, to the marketplace had been observed for many years. This shift occurs even when women control the production and marketing in the family. When men take over the finances, the situation may be aggravated, but in some areas the problem of women drinking the income is just as bad.
Patrice Engle suggested that increases in income may have unexpected negative effects on the nutritional status of children if child care is being undermined by time-inflexible, income-earning opportunities. Engle referred list members to her literature review that IFPRI has published as an Occasional Paper entitled Care and Nutrition: Concepts and Measurements. Engle also noted that UNICEF has made a huge effort to understand child care, and has put out a paper called the Care Initiative, which discusses measures of and ideas about care. The paper can be ordered through Wdemas@UNICEF.org.
Finally, list members may want to compare these results with the findings of IFPRI's studies on commercialization and nutrition, in a volume titled Agricultural Commercialization, Eco-nomic Development, and Nutrition, edited by Joachim von Braun and Eileen Kennedy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). In a range of study settings, rising income from commercial crops led to increased absolute spending for food consumption, even if, at the margin, increased income may have been spent on nonfood items. A common feature in most study settings, however, was the decreased control of women over income earned from commercial crops. Moreover, the link between in-creased incomes and better health for children was weak. Poor household and community health and sanitation effects over-shadowed the potential positive effects of income on health. The net nutritional effect (in terms of anthropometric indi-cators) of increased incomes was modest, since increased in-come did not decrease morbidity. The editors concluded that increased income and increased food availability contribute to solving the hunger problem, but not the problem of preschool children's malnutrition, which results from a complex inter-action between lack of food and morbidity" (pp. 374-375).
