Essay On Poverty Alleviation In Nepal

Even during the food surplus period, most of the Hilly and Mountainous districts suffers food deficit situation.At present 17 percent of the population is suffering from malnourishment.Therefore, this review paper analyzes the poverty and food insecurity in Nepal.

Therefore, expansion of government programs focusing on targeted population is very critical in dealing with the problems of poverty and food insecurity.

The perception of poverty has evolved and varies tremendously from one culture to another culture (World Bank, 1990).

Monetary poverty is a quantitative measure of poverty using information on income or consumption, whereas non-monetary poverty is associated with the insufficient outcomes with respect to health, nutrition, and literacy, with deficient social relations, and with insecurity, and low self-confidence and powerlessness.

Nepal remains one of the poorest countries in the world in terms of monetary as well as non-monetary dimension of poverty.

Imbalanced growth in rural and urban areas could be the reason for increase in gini coefficient.

Reduction of poverty in urban areas remains always high compared to that of rural areas.However, such decline in incidence of poverty was achieved at the cost of increased inequality.The gini coefficient increased from 0.24 in the year 1984/85 to 0.41 in 2003/04.Therefore, poverty incidence remains always the highest in Mid-western and Far-western rural hills.Also, poverty and food insecurity is highest among female headed household, dalit and ethnic communities, small landholding households, households engaged in laboring and agriculture.It was only in 2003/04, some progress in reducing the poverty was reported, which was mainly due to the significantly higher inflow of remittance compared to earlier years, rapid urbanization, and an increase in non-farm incomes.This resulted not only in the decline in proportion of population suffering from poverty but also decline in the absolute number of population suffering from poverty.Therefore, macroeconomic indicators are not in favorable condition to tackle the overarching problem of poverty incidence in the country.Since, 1976/77, poverty incidence is in increasing trend in the country.The poverty being cause as well as consequence of food insecurity, similar is the situation of food insecurity as well.Indicators of food insecurity became worse once the country shifted from being food self-sufficient even net food exporter till late 1970s to food deficit country since the early 1980s.