Food in Nepal

Food Security

The issue of food security can be seen by looking at this country’s food deficit. The World Bank uses the term food deficit to describe the number of kilocalories that would be needed to have the undernourished become properly nourished (“Nepal,” 2015c). This is measured in kilocalories per person per day. In Nepal, the overall trend has been the food deficit decreasing, but the current value in 2014 was 87.0 kilocalories per person per day (“Nepal,” 2015c). This is shown by the graph in Figure 6. This graph shows a decreasing trend overall in food deficit. Furthermore, 29.1% of children in this country are underweight, according to 2011 statistics (“Nepal,” 2015c). These statistics show that this country has a need to produce more food for its citizens, or alternatively reduces losses of foods.

Brief Overview of Grain in Nepal

Grains are important commodities in Nepal. Rice (paddy), maize, wheat and millet are all in the top ten crops in Nepal in terms of production by weight (“Nepal,” 2015b). The production of these grains in metric tons in 2013 is shown in Figure 2 . These grains are staple food crops to many citizens in this country (“Nepal at A Glance,” 2015). In fact, it is estimated that rice accounts for 40% of an average Nepalese person’s daily calorie intake (Joshi & Bauer, 2006)

Figure 1: Food Decifit in Nepal ("Nepal", 2015c)

Figure 2: Grain Production in Nepal (in million tonnes) ("Nepal", 2015b)

References:

Ganesh, K. C. (1992). Farm Level Grain Storage Pest Management in Nepal. In Towards Integreated Commodity and Pest Management in Grain Storage. Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5048e/x5048e12.htm

Nepal. (2015b). Retrieved October 18, 2015, from http://faostat3.fao.org/browse/area/149/E

Nepal. (2015c). Retrieved from http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SN.ITK.DFCT

Nepal at A Glance. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/nepal/fao-in-nepal/nepal-at-a-glance/en/