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Nutrition and poverty are two very closely related themes. Many elementary aspects of being poor, such as hunger, inadequate health-care, unhygienic living conditions, and the stress and strain of precarious living, tend to impair a person's nutritional status. In consequence, being poor almost always means being deprived of full nutritional capabilities, i.e. the capabilities to avoid premature mortality, to live a life free of avoidable morbidity, and to have the energy for work and leisure. The study of poverty is, therefore, very much a study of people's state of nutrition.

There are two related ways in which the study of nutrition can illuminate the study of poverty. The first has to do with the processes of poverty, and the second with the assessment of the extent of its prevalence.

An understanding of the processes through which chronic malnutrition comes to afflict a household or a community--e.g. the processes leading to inadequate entitlement to food and health care and those perpetuating unhygienic environment--can reveal a good deal about the processes leading to endemic poverty. Such analyses may also yield useful guides for policy. For example, by delineating the relative roles of food, health care, and environment in the genesis of malnutrition, such analyses may help policy-makers to rationalize priorities among different components of anti-poverty programmes.

The assessment aspect is no less important, although there is at times a tendency to play it down. It is not unusual to encounter the argument that assessing the magnitude of poverty is superfluous because we all know that massive poverty exists, say, in Asia or Africa--it is there for all to see! Eminently commonsensical though it may seem, this argument really misses the point. The objective of measuring poverty is usually not to show the existence of poverty, or even to prove its massiveness, but to compare the magnitude of poverty across time and space. In this comparative context, what is there 'for all to see' may depend a great deal on the eyes of the beholder. There may not exist any basis for agreement among different observers without an agreed framework of measurement. Economists, therefore, have been rightly concerned with the framework of measuring poverty; and in pursuit of this concern they have long been drawing upon the science of nutrition. Since absolute poverty and the loss of nutritional capabilities tend to go hand in hand, it has seemed natural to measure poverty by the extent of a population's failure to achieve desirable nutritional status.

However, as economists delved into the question of nutrition, they soon discovered that there were no ready-made answers waiting for them. Whether the problem was one of understanding the processes of poverty or assessing its magnitude, the relevant nutritional issues were found to be matters of ongoing, and sometimes very contentious, debate among the nutritionists themselves. Economists soon joined this debate, and nutritionists in turn brought their own perspectives to bear on the questions being asked by the economists. . .

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