Food Security and Poverty: Searching for a Linkage in the Poverty Prone Areas in Bangladesh

The public and private level cross-sectional shreds of evidence on poverty are available at the national and sub-national levels in Bangladesh. Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics provides us a cross-sectional measure of poverty almost after 5 years. While food poverty has been analyzed at various levels but the discussion on food security got scanty importance. Since poverty and food security is not static and mostly dynamic, an in-depth analysis of those two issues in the Rangpur regions (poverty-prone areas) gives us insights into the understanding of long-root causes of poverty and food security. The samples of the study have been drawn from the lower segment of the population. The FGT measures show that the consumption based poverty headcount is about 73 with a poverty gap of 22.5 and a squared poverty gap of 9.0. The income based measures (USD 1.90) also show that over fifty per cent of the households have less than USD 1.90 earning a day, and nearly two-thirds of the households have less than USD 2.15 earning a day. The poverty gap and squared poverty gap are relatively large compared to the national level statistics. The near around half of the households have occasional moderate food insecurity. The study shows that regional heterogeneity, and household attributes determine the state of food security and poverty. The poverty and food insecurity are found interlinked – the low food security is associated with extreme poverty.