Food Assistance Programs In Bangladesh

1 Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Unit, South Asia Region, The World Bank. Contact information: rmurgai@worldbank.org, szaidi5@worldbank.org. This paper was prepared as a background paper for the Bangladesh Poverty Assessment. We would like to thank Sharmila Haq for excellent research assistance. Kalanidhi Subbarao, Robert Hynderik, Nasir Farid, Carlo del Ninno, Paul Dorosh, Ahmed Akhter, and participants of the Bangladesh Poverty Assessment workshops and the World Bank Rural Policy Thematic Group provided useful comments and suggestions.

2 The remaining 20 percent passes through the so-called “monetized” channels of the PFDS: Essential Priorities (EP: subsidized food grain sales to members of the armed and paramilitary forces, hospital and jail inmates), Other Priorities (OP: subsidized sales to workers of government institutions, fire and civil defense departments), and Open Market Sales (OMS: sales in the open market to stabilize domestic prices). For details on the various PFDS monetized channels, see del Ninno and Dorosh (1998).

3 This is in line with the one of the main recommendations of the 1988 joint task force of the Government and aid donors on strengthening institutions for food-assisted development (SIFAD).

4 Since July 2002, FFE has been changed to a cash stipend program.

5 The Institutional Feeding component was phased out in 1988.

6 The number of women selected varies from union to union, but in general a minimum number of cards is allocated to areas in which development package services are provided to ensure that such operations are economically viable.

7 While the program received substantial assistance from WFP for the flood relief effort in 1998, in other years it has been funded mainly by the Government.

8 In the months following the 1998 flood, the number of cards allocated to different thanas was decided using the classification by the Water Board. Thanas that were severely affected by the flood received 1,000 cards per union, those moderately affected 700 cards, those normally affected 500 cards, and those not affected at all 300 cards (del Ninno and Roy, June 1999).

9 Excluded unions are in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, swamp lowlands (no roads to maintain), as well as a few unions where other similar programs already exist.

10 Since 1999, the training component has been expanded. RMP women now work on road maintenance and receive training for all 4 years (on aspects of group dynamics, gender awareness, numeracy, basic business management), and for the 5th year (after graduation) receive support, if needed, from CARE.

11 Based on an interview with a program administrator.

12 Other studies report similarly high estimates of leakage (e.g., 26 percent in a 1997 survey by BIDS and more recently, 21 percent in Ahmed and del Ninno, 2001).

13 The main underlying reason is that while land provides a good proxy for living standards of rural households, it remains an imperfect indicator (see also, Ravallion and Sen, 1994).

14 For FFE, transfers may differ on account of the number of children within the household that are enrolled in the program; the HIES survey only records the total FFE transfers received by a household, but does not provide information on the number of children for whom households are receiving transfers.

15 The method we use is slightly different from the approach proposed in Lanjouw and Ravallion (1999). Because of the limited coverage of the three programs, rather than estimating marginal odds of participation by relating changes in district-level participation rates to overall participation rates, we relate the probability of participation at the household level to overall participation rates.

16 As the HIES questionnaire did not collect information on the number of households participating in the FFW scheme in each covered village, the total number of beneficiaries of this program could not be estimated.

17 Participation rates reported in this section differ from those reported earlier since these are calculated at the household-level, while the estimates discussed in Section 4.1 were calculated at the individual-level.

18 Why, given that the program entitles each participant to 30 kg per month, or 360 kg per annum, do we expect each participant to report only 180 kg? A technical discussion of this is beyond the scope of this paper. However, roughly speaking, the reason is that each beneficiary household is as likely to be interviewed 10, 11, 12 months respectively into the VGD cycle as another household that has been part of the VGD cycle for 2, 1, or 0 months respectively. Thus, on average, each beneficiary household would be expected to report receiving 6 months equivalent of transfers during the 12 month preceding the interview date.

19 Assuming respectively 12 kg of rice or 15 kg of wheat per household for a 10 month period.

20 For instance, rather than due to misappropriation of resources, this could also be due to errors related to respondent misreporting, recall difficulties, and sampling errors.

21 Carrying out a similar exercise with the 1995-96 HES data for the FFE (the only program for which data were collected in the household questionnaire), we find more than three times the number of beneficiaries (1.73 million children) and total food grain receipts (150,000 metric tons) as compared to the 2000 survey. Part of the reason why the estimates from the 2000 HIES are lower than those from the 1995-96 HES could be that, unlike the earlier survey where this information was collected at the child-level, the 2000 HIES only solicited this information at the household level. However, it is unlikely that this difference in the way the questions were administered could explain why there is such a large discrepancy between the two sets of estimates.

22 We plan to carry out this analysis with earlier HIES data sets to investigate the extent to which these findings are true for earlier years.

23 In comparison, the VGD and FFW had cost-effectiveness ratios of 1.4-1.5 and 1.8-2.4 respectively.

24 Indeed, this is the rationale behind the GOB Female Secondary School Stipend program, which provides a scholarship in cash to all girls in rural areas that attend secondary school.

25 Working Group on Targeted Food Interventions. 1994. Options for Targeting Food Interventions in Bangladesh. IFPRI, APD, BRAC, CARE, FPMU, INFS, and USAID.

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