Prabhu L. Pingali

Prabhu L. Pingali
Cornell University | CU · Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management

PhD

About

274
Publications
230,610
Reads
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16,086
Citations
Additional affiliations
June 2013 - present
Cornell University
Position
  • Professor (Full)
Description
  • Prabhu Pingali is the founding director of the Tata-Cornell Agriculture and Nutrition Initiative (TCi), a long-term research initiative focused on the agriculture-nutrition nexus in India. Learn more at http://tci.cals.cornell.edu.
June 2008 - May 2013
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Position
  • Managing Director
Description
  • Lead the Agricultural Policy and Statistics portfolio of the Agricultural Development Department.
May 1996 - April 2002
International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center
Position
  • Managing Director

Publications

Publications (274)
Article
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Using endogenous switching regressions to calculate transitional heterogeneity, we built counterfactual scenarios to identify the treatment effects for sellers to supermarkets and sellers to traditional markets. The results support neither a story of strong inclusion of small farmers' participation in the supermarket channel nor a story of sharp ex...
Article
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Public procurement of food plays a pivotal role in determining the production and consumption of various food items. This is particularly true for staple grains in countries such as India, where the government procures over 40% of rice and wheat. This grain is redistributed to approximately 60% of India’s population through the public distribution...
Chapter
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Beginning as a war-time food ration in the colonial era and going on to become India’s principal instrument to fight against hunger, PDS has emerged as India’s largest and arguably the most contentious social welfare program in the country. Having undergone multiple reforms in program delivery and design, the ‘new style’ PDS is finally beginning to...
Chapter
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Social protection policies have traditionally provided band-aid policy responses to daily risks and vulnerabilities. In this chapter, we argue that the overall welfare objective of social protection policies should be to promote and build resilience. Historical experience of social welfare policies suggests that as countries develop and reduce pove...
Chapter
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Investing in early childhood development is paramount to building development resilience. Children born to poor parents are less likely to be well nourished, finish school, earn less, and live in poverty, and give birth to malnourished children. Early life interventions—in utero, and in childhood—therefore provide a suitable window of opportunity t...
Chapter
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Should cash transfers replace targeted in-kind food transfers and public works program? Can making welfare provisions universally applicable make the program more effective? Would technological innovations help overcome implementational deficits in the welfare delivery systems? Why not introduce a singular program of universal basic income (UBI) as...
Chapter
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Indian social welfare policy has traditionally considered poverty to be synonymous with hunger and famines in rural areas. Ongoing changes in the demographic and economic structure of the country, however, require a reorientation of anti-poverty policies toward the various emerging sources of poverty and vulnerability to foster a resilient developm...
Chapter
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The introductory chapter of this book highlights the importance of social protection policies against the background of India’s socio-economic transformation and why it ought to be an important part of the development policy. After succinctly putting forward our fundamental argument—the need for a systems approach to social protection and developme...
Chapter
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This chapter synthesizes our arguments with a discussion on how to re-organize the ideas and praxis of social welfare policy in India with a perspective into the future. We argue that fostering development resilience—as the scope of social welfare programs—requires a stronger citizen-state social contract, a pact which recognizes human deprivation...
Chapter
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Despite the presence of various social safety net programs, Indian households are not resilient to daily risks and exogenous shocks. To understand the incommensurate success of Indian social welfare programs in improving resilience, we focus on key elements of the policymaking process— ideas , interests , and institutions —in this chapter. We delib...
Chapter
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Tax-financed public health insurance programs are a newer, but increasingly important form of social policy across developing countries, including India. With the scope of stemming the flow of people into poverty, public health insurance focuses on the vulnerable and provides them an avenue to seek quality health care without incurring exorbitant c...
Chapter
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Food transfers, employment generation through public works programs, supplemental nutritional assistance to pregnant mother and infant children, old age pensions, and school meals are among the major social safety nets that constitute India’s social welfare architecture. In this chapter, we review these schemes along with some of the newer programs...
Article
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To address the missing link that goes beyond the changes in dietary consumption and food expenditures to assess the impact of the pandemic on child undernutrition, specifically anthropometric outcomes, this paper uses primary panel data (pre-and post-COVID-19) from rural India within a child-fixed effects framework. We find that the pandemic is ass...
Article
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The Indian government's decision to move ahead on the much-delayed genetically modified mustard developed by the University of Delhi signifies a turnaround and bodes well for the country's food system. Numerous tests over the last 20 years prove its safety for food, feed, and the environment in the Indian context. The resultant hybrid DMH-11 gives...
Chapter
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The Green Revolution had profound positive impacts on human welfare and economic development across the developing world. However, its global reach was limited by agroclimatic, infrastructural, social, and political constraints. Regional disparities in poverty reduction, intra-societal inequities, and gender differences in the distribution of benef...
Article
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The realization that economic growth is a necessary but insufficient condition for improving the nutritional status has led to a paradigm shift in addressing malnutrition through nutrition-sensitive development. Biofortification is one such nutrition-sensitive food system intervention designed to supply crucial micronutrients through staple diets t...
Article
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Aggregation models where small farms jointly access credit, inputs, information, and product markets are not new to global agricultural systems. For over a century, agricultural cooperatives worldwide have tried rectifying small farm disadvantages in market access. In the last two decades, newer aggregation models such as farmer producer organizati...
Article
Asia's food systems have undergone rapid economic and socio‐cultural transformations in the past 60 years. During the period, almost all the countries in the region eradicated famines and achieved food self‐sufficiency and heterogeneous levels of poverty reduction. Food system transformation in Asian countries has had similarities and differences a...
Article
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Background Reducing food loss and waste (FLW) may narrow gaps between fruit and vegetable production and recommended intake. However, FLW estimates are inconsistent due to varying estimation methods. Objectives Using multiple estimation approaches, we examined the extent and determinants of FLW along tomato supply chains in South India, from farm...
Article
Rapid progress in hunger reduction in Asia has come at the cost of environmental degradation, while pursuing environmental conservation goals risk slowing further progress on hunger. Operationalizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) shows us the complexity of achieving multiple societal goals simultaneously. The lack of coordination across...
Article
The United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) is an important moment to garner political and financial attention to the challenges that food systems face. It is a difficult moment with many competing national and global priorities including massive inequities, rapid climate change and a global pandemic. It will be important for the UNFSS to build...
Article
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Childhood stunting remains a public health concern in India. In Karnataka, the districts vary substantially in stunting prevalence. Using the NFHS-4 and AidData GEO datasets, we tested the hypothesis that ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ districts in Karnataka show different contribu-tions to stunting. We found that for 30 environmental and health factors, Bengalur...
Article
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Childhood stunting remains a prominent metric in the health and development of modern India. In Karnataka, India, districts vary substantially in stunting prevalence. Here we take a close look at the nature of childhood stunting in the state: its epidemiology, genetics, biology, nutritional basis, environmental contribution, policy and field-based...
Article
CONTEXT Mycotoxins and other food safety and preservation challenges are prevalent in smallholder food systems, and communities often lack the knowledge and capacity required to effectively diagnose and address these concerns. Participatory research can facilitate innovation in resource-poor settings by fostering collective identity and leveraging...
Article
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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, India implemented a stringent nationwide lockdown. Although food value chains and allied activities were exempted from the lockdown, there were widespread disruptions in food access and availability. Using two panel-datasets, we distinguish the pandemic's impact on non-staples versus staples in relation to hous...
Article
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India, which has long suffered from undernutrition, has seen a rapid rise in overweight incidence in the last decade and a half. These changes are characterized by significant within-country differences in overweight incidence that vary by gender and regional development levels. In this paper, we provide an integrative framework, linking the income...
Article
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In this paper, we quantify the divergence in the cost of current diets as compared to EAT Lancet recommendations at the subnational-level in India. We use primary data on food prices and household food purchases, and secondary data on food expenditures for a period of 12 months in 2018–19. The cost of the EAT Lancet dietary recommendations for rura...
Article
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The spatiotemporal trends in aflatoxin B1 (AFB1), fumonisin B1 (FB1), and deoxynivalenol (DON) accumulation were analyzed in a range of food commodities (maize, groundnut, pearl millet, rice, and wheat) in village settings in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, India. Samples (n=1,549) were collected across six communities and six time points spanning a calendar...
Article
Women in agriculture are involved in agricultural activities and are solely responsible for household-level unpaid work. They face severe time trade-offs between agricultural and household activities across crop seasons. Recent literature suggests that these time trade-offs may negatively impact their nutrition. However, there is no quantitative ev...
Article
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Significance The question of whether firstborn children have a height advantage over later-born children is important, given the persistently poor height outcomes in developing countries. Using data on young Indian children, we show that later-born children lag behind firstborns in stunting outcomes. This is only true, though, if higher birth-order...
Article
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Purpose This paper aims to understand the significant farm and market-level factors that incentivize the adoption and marketing of pulses influencing its supply response to changing demand. Design/methodology/approach The authors first use a modified Nerlovian supply response model using secondary data to identify the major price and non-price fac...
Article
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India has the largest area of rainfed dryland agriculture globally, with a variety of distinct types of farming systems producing most of its coarse cereals, food legumes, minor millets, and large amounts of livestock. All these are vital for national and regional food and nutritional security. Yet, the rainfed drylands have been relatively neglect...
Article
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While obesity across rural India has doubled in the last decade, research explaining such an unprecedented change is sparse. This paper shows that the rise in the incidence of rural obesity is associated with the process of structural transformation, especially within rural spaces. As the distance to nearby towns from the villages has reduced, urba...
Article
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The present study sought to identify household risk factors associated with aflatoxin contamination within and across diverse Indian food systems and to evaluate their utility in risk modeling. Samples (n = 595) of cereals, pulses, and oil seeds were collected from 160 households across four diverse districts of India and analyzed for aflatoxin B1...
Article
•Research and science should not only inform food and environmental policy but should be adopted and mainstreamed into actions at all levels.•Food systems are faced with grander and interconnected challenges and constraints that bring about new research questions.•Research has a vital role in charting a positive and sustainable direction for global...
Article
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Background It is widely considered that women have less diverse diets than other household members. However, it has been challenging to establish this empirically since women’s diet diversity is measured differently from that of other household members. Objective In this article, we compare women’s dietary diversity with that of their respective h...
Technical Report
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The COVID-19 pandemic has had massive economic impacts throughout the world, and especially in India, where a strict lockdown was put in place to curb the spread of the virus, bringing unprecedented disruption to the Indian economy. While the exact extent of this disruption will remain unknown in the short run, many attempts are being made by schol...
Article
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Recent large-scale pandemics such as the covid19, H1N1, Swine flu, Ebola and the Nipah virus, which impacted human health and livelihoods, have come about due to inadequate food systems safeguards to detect, trace and eliminate threats arising from zoonotic diseases. Such diseases are transmitted to humans through their interaction with animals in...
Article
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Background Recent literature, largely from Africa, shows mixed effects of own-production on diet diversity. However, the role of own-production, relative to markets, in influencing food consumption becomes more pronounced as market integration increases. Objective This paper investigates the relative importance of two factors - production diversit...
Chapter
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There is overwhelming historical evidence from the developed world and from the newly emerging economies of the developing world that indicates that agricultural growth has been the primary engine of overall economic growth. The transformation of economies around the world, from predominantly agricultural to industrial, was kick-started by rapid ag...
Article
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The objective of this paper is to understand individual nutritional outcomes through an examination of gendered time use patterns. The analysis of the data from eight villages in the Semi-Arid Tropics (SAT), India confirm previous conclusions about the gendered influence of agricultural interventions, especially time demands on the rural poor. Agri...
Article
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The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a direct, multi-dimensional measure of women's access to resources and decision-making in various domains of agriculture. However, several challenges characterize its use: adaptation of questionnaires to local agricultural contexts, modifications to index construction once underlying activities...
Article
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Over half of all women of reproductive age are affected by anaemia in India. In this paper we study the role that both household market integration and women’s empowerment in agriculture can play in determining women’s dietary diversity. Our analysis is based on primary data from 3600 households across India on agriculture, nutrition and anthropome...
Article
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In this paper we study the relationship between women’s empowerment in agriculture and their iron deficiency status in Maharashtra, India. This is the first time the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) has been used in association with explicit measurement of medical biomarkers for women’s iron deficiency status. Using primary data for...
Chapter
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Agricultural technology plays a vital role in building viable and sustainable food systems. The green revolution (GR) is a landmark example of how scale-neutral technology transformed agricultural production. However, one of the limitations of GR technologies was that it was concentrated to a few crops and to high potential regions where irrigation...
Chapter
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Existing safety net programs in India provide income and nutritional assistance during different stages of an individual’s life. Critics have pointed out to inefficiencies in the design and delivery mechanisms which reduce the effectiveness of these programs in benefiting the targeted population. In this chapter, we argue that safety nets should ac...
Chapter
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In this chapter, we deliberate upon the role of the non-farm sector in the food systems. We argue that livelihood diversification in rural India would lead to an overall economy-wide increase in productivity, and facilitate swifter structural transformation and poverty reduction. We highlight the role of the non-farm sector for job creation in rura...
Chapter
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Over the last three decades, policy interventions have resulted in a decrease in undernourishment by at least ten percentage points. However, undernutrition and micronutrient deficiency remain a critical public health challenge, especially in less developed states, while the number of overweight individuals has increased drastically in more develop...
Chapter
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Market access determines the income of agricultural households and incentivizes the cultivation of diverse crops. Markets in India are mostly unorganized with limited infrastructure limiting their ability to cater to quality requirements and specifications demanded by urban consumers. Therefore, parallel to traditional markets, direct linkages with...
Chapter
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Despite India’s per capita GDP doubling over the last decade, states like Goa compare to countries in Latin America, while states like Uttar Pradesh compare to low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of their development outcomes. In this chapter, we identify that comparative advantages that arise due to resource availability, agro-clim...
Chapter
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As India becomes the world’s most populous nation, the two central concerns for food security is how to increase and diversify food production. Although this is an opportunity for income growth for small farms, rectifying disadvantages owing to low economies of scale and poor access to capital, technology, and mechanization is critical to leverage...
Chapter
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Understanding the pathways through which climate change will impact food security is essential to creating robust food systems. First, we present scientific evidence to show that climate change will decrease crop and livestock productivity in India. Second, we show that climate change will impact health and labor productivity by increasing suscepti...
Chapter
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Despite India’s economic progress over the past two decades, regional inequality, food insecurity and malnutrition problems persist. Simultaneously, trends in overweight and obesity, along with micronutrient deficiency, portend a future public health crisis. In this book, we examine the interactions between India’s economic development, agricultura...
Chapter
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In this chapter, we sum up policy recommendations required for creating robust food systems and for moving the country towards a nutrition secure future. In our food systems approach, policy recommendations made are multi-sectoral with an emphasis on (a) improving agricultural productivity with a view to increasing viability of smallholder agricult...
Chapter
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Changing diets poses critical demand-side challenges for food systems. Increase in income, urban growth, processes of globalization and demographic changes have led to a reduction in the relative importance of cereals, while consumption of animal-based protein, processed and purchased foods have increased. We argue that such dietary transitions sho...
Article
Soil health (SH) of managed lands in India is affected by anthropogenic activities such as nutrient mining, excessive tillage, and monocropping, which reduce the productive capacity of soils. A comprehensive SH characterization was conducted in 27 catchments in six districts of Jharkhand, India. Each was stratified into four landscape positions: (i...
Book
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This book features a comprehensive foresight assessment, exploring the pressures — threats as well as opportunities — on the global agriculture & food systems between now and 2050. The overarching aim is to help readers understand the context, by analyzing global trends and anticipating change for better planning and constructing pathways from the...
Book
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‘This book… brings together high quality research, real world pragmatism and an understanding of the politics of Indian food systems.’ – Lawrence Haddad, Executive Director, GAIN and 2018 World Food Prize Laureate ‘[The authors] have done a masterful job of [demonstrating] paradoxes of India's rapid economic growth concurrently with… persistent pov...
Chapter
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In this chapter, we make the case for India to shift to a nutrition-focused agricultural sector that goes beyond staple grain productivity to emphasize the production and consumption of micronutrient-rich foods. The chapter first reviews the nutrition trends in India, characterized by slow progress in addressing high and variable rates of malnutrit...
Article
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In this paper, we establish a statistically important relationship between household agricultural income and women’s BMI using a five-year panel dataset of rural households drawn from 18 villages across five Indian states. Using within household variation over time, we estimate both the extent to which short-term changes in agricultural income are...
Data
Relationship between agricultural income and women’s BMI with income quartiles as controls. (PDF)
Data
Relationship between agricultural income and women’s BMI- by Age. (PDF)
Data
Relationship between child’s weight-for-height & mother’s BMI. (PDF)
Data
Household-level food group expenditure share by year. (TIF)