Poverty, Nutrition and Work Capacity

Poverty and under-nutrition are intimately connected in low-income countries, as it may be difficult for individuals to acquire adequate levels of food and nutrient consumption for themselves and their families. Adequacy may fundamentally depend on the kinds of activities that the person is engaged in and the nutritional history of that person.

 Under-nutrition has many adverse consequences which are particularly visible in children in the form of muscle wastage, stunning, increased susceptibility to illness and infection and can also affect cognitive skills. In adults, it can diminish muscular strength, immunity to disease and the capacity to do productive work.

 In many countries the concept of poverty line is defined to reflect the nutritional aspect of consumption as in India.

Thus poverty and under-nutrition are supposed to be ordinarily correlated, in the sense that a poor person is more likely to be under-nourished than a rich person.

 Based on empirical findings it could be stated that though poor are undernourished, direct nutrition supplements may have a greater impact on undernutrition than an increase in income. There are two effects that are related to this phenomenon:

 First, individuals attach higher significance to nutrition, because it means greater stamina, physical and mental health and higher resistance to illness. In a functional sense as well nutrition is important as it increases work capacity thereby raising the earnings ability. For these reasons an increase in income or purchasing power tends to raise nutritional status, especially if nutritional levels were already low.

 The second effect has to do with the individual preferences for foods that taste good or well packaged and advertised or even recognized as indicators of social and economic status. In societies where great value is attached to consumption of different food items much importance may not attached to nutrition. The desire for nutrition and the desire for variety or just to signal social status combine to create an intermediate reaction of nutrition to income.

Under-nutrition and Labour market

Under-nutrition plays a functional role, which arises from the relationship between a persons nutritional status and his capacity to do sustained work. Because under-nutrition affects the capacity to work, it affects the functioning of the labour market in a central way.

 This relationship can be better realized if we understand the system of energy balance within the body. There are four main components of this: 1. Energy input. The periodic consumption of food is the main source of energy input to the human body. Access to food, in most situations, is the same as access to income.

 2. Resting metabolism. This is a significant portion of bodys requirement. It represents the energy required to maintain the body temperature, sustain heart and respiratory action, supply the minimum energy requirements of resting tissues and support ionic gradients across cell membranes.

 3. Energy required for work. This component is the energy required to carry out physical work.

4. Storage and borrowing. Over a longer period of time, it may be possible to see some form of balance between item 1 and the sum of items 2 and 3.
In the short or medium run, however, the excess or deficits in energy can be cushioned by the human body. A deficit is bet by running down stores from the body and, surplus is partly dissipated and partly stored.

 The labour markets not only do create income and therefore create the principal potential source of nutrition and good health, but good nutrition in turn affects the capacity of the body to perform tasks that generate income. This is a cycle of relationship which warns us of the possibility that in developing countries a significant proportion of the population may be caught in a poverty trap

 The relationship between nutrition and the capacity to perform productive work is illustrated by the concept called capacity curve.

Capacity curve
Y Work capacity

income

Construction of Capacity Curve

The X axis has been labeled as income instead of nutrition since the former implies that all income is spent on nutrition. The Y axis represents work capacity measured as the number of tasks that an individual performs during a given period of time. The capacity curve obtained by linking different nutrition or income points to the corresponding levels of work capacity that are generated by the individual.