EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Recommendations

Paul Streeten

Chapter 21 in What Price Food?, 1987, pp 100-102 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Certain conclusions have emerged from the previous discussion, though much remains inconclusive and in need of further work. (Some of these areas are indicated in the next chapter.) The first point to bear firmly in mind is that adequate supply of food is not enough to ensure the eradication of hunger, malnutrition, undernutrition and starvation. Policies must also ensure that people have the purchasing power or other forms of ‘entitlements’ (such as access to subsidized or free food rations). Indeed, an integrated nutrition policy must embrace much more than ensuring supply of, demand for, and access to food. It must aim at adequate health standards, particularly the elimination and prevention of intestinal and parasitic diseases, so that the food is properly absorbed by the body; at adequate education, particularly of women, so that people know what food to eat, how to prepare it, and how to keep themselves healthy through hygienic practices; and at ways to improve the distribution of food within the household, so that vulnerable groups, such as pre-school age children or pregnant and lactating mothers, get enough to eat. These changes often depend on changes in the political power structure. The contribution of price policy is to combine incentives to producers with ensuring access to food by consumers. Once the problem of hunger is understood as in need of a multipronged attack, the danger is seen to be, as Amartya Sen has pointed out,1 not Malthusian pessimism, but Malthusian optimism, i.e. the view that all that is needed is to make the land more fertile and women less fertile: higher prices for food and lower benefits for children.

Keywords: Producer Price; Price Policy; Hygienic Practice; Lactate Mother; World Prex (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1987
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-18921-2_21

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349189212

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-18921-2_21

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-01
Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-18921-2_21