Access, adoption, and diffusion : the long-term impacts of improved vegetable and fish technologies in Bangladesh.
Abstract
Although Bangladesh experienced impressive reductions in poverty from the mid-1990s until the onset of the food price crisis in 2007—with the percentage of the population living in poverty falling from 51 percent in 1995 to 40 percent in 2005—50 million of the country’s people still live in extreme poverty, and 36 million people cannot afford an adequate diet. Women and children are particularly vulnerable to micronutrient deficien-cies because of their relatively higher requirements for reproduction and growth, respectively, and because a pro-male bias prevalent in Bangla-desh and other parts of South Asia limits women’s bargaining power, which in turn inhibits their ability to meet their own and their children’s micronutrient requirements. Child malnutrition rates remain among the highest in the world, wasting rates have risen alarmingly in recent years, and rice-based diets such as those consumed by the poor in rural Bangladesh may not provide all the micronutrients necessary for a healthy life.
This study focused on determining (1) the long-term impacts of the adoption of new vegetable varieties and polyculture fishpond manage-ment technologies on per capita consumption and gender-disaggregated measures of monetary and nonmonetary well-being; (2) the impact of the new technologies on physical and human capital accumulation; and (3) the underlying processes—at household, community, and national levels—that contributed to the success or failure of the adoption of the technologies.
Citation
IFPRI and CPRC
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