Nutrition , Poverty and Calorie Fundamentalism : Response to Utsa Patnaik

Utsa Patnaik’s critique (“A Critical Look at Some Propositions on Consumption and Poverty”, 6 February 2010) of the authors’ earlier paper on food and nutrition (“Food and Nutrition in India: Facts and Interpretations”, 14 February 2009) does not stand up to scrutiny. She claims that the observed decline in calorie intake at given levels of real per capita expenditure is an illusion due to faulty price indexes, but does not offer any evidence that the consumer price index actually underestimates cost of living increases. Patnaik’s “alternative deflator” and “direct poverty lines” are devoid of any convincing rationale. The charge of miscalculations in the original paper is incorrect, and reflects a misunderstanding of what was done. In an earlier paper (Deaton and Drèze 2009), we examined recent evidence on food and nutrition in India, and discussed various puzzles arising from it. Among these puzzles is an apparent downward “drift” in the relation between calorie intake and per capita expenditure (in real terms, i e, at constant prices): calorie intake at a given level of real per capita expenditure is declining over time. The drift is sufficiently pronounced to drive down average calorie consumption, especially in rural India, in spite of some increase in real per capita expenditures. We discussed a number of possible reasons for this drift, including changes in relative prices, demographic patterns, food habits, and calorie requirements. We also acknowledged the possibility that the decline in average calorie consumption might actually be driven by rising poverty, hidden in the National Sample Survey (NSS) data by faulty price indexes, but did not pursue this hypothesis because there appeared to be little support for it. In a spirited rejoinder, Utsa Patnaik (2010) revives this hypothesis and argues that faulty price indexes are also responsible for the puzzling drift, which is actually an “illusion”. She further argues that we made mistakes in our calculations of the population below given calorie norms; as we shall show, this is wrong, but we start with her refutation of the puzzle itself.