Food Access and Livelihoods: The Interconnected Challenge

When we talk about hunger, the first image that comes to mind is often empty granaries or failed harvests. But the harder truth is that hunger usually has less to do with how much food exists and more to do with who can afford to buy it. A household with a steady income can put nutritious meals on the table even when prices rise. A household with an uncertain job often cannot, no matter how full the local market looks. This is why food access and livelihood access are best understood together. The job you hold, the wages you earn, and the security of that work decide what you eat, how healthy you stay, and how easily you bounce back from a crisis.

Why food access depends on more than production 🔗

For decades, food policy focused on producing enough grain. The thinking was simple: grow more, and hunger will fall. But that logic breaks down at the household level. As the Food and Agriculture Organization explains, food security is increasingly seen as a problem of effective demand rather than mere supply. A country can be a food surplus nation and still have millions who go hungry, simply because they lack the purchasing power to buy what is available.

This is exactly the situation that has played out here. Despite record grain stocks, undernutrition remains widespread because a large share of the population cannot consistently afford a balanced diet. Every household needs either the ability to grow its own food or the income to purchase it. When income is the missing link, food access collapses even in the middle of plenty.

The link between livelihoods and the food on your plate 🔗

Livelihood is the bridge between the economy and the dinner plate. The kind of work a person does, and how much it pays, directly shapes their family’s diet, housing, and overall well-being. This connection is not abstract. It can be measured in the variety of food a household consumes.

Income, purchasing power and dietary diversity 🔗

Higher and more stable incomes do more than fill stomachs. They diversify diets. Research drawing on a nationally representative survey of rural households found that moving into non-farm work raised overall food spending, particularly on items beyond cereals, which improved dietary diversity. In other words, a better livelihood does not just mean more rice and wheat. It means pulses, vegetables, dairy, and the kind of varied nutrition that prevents hidden hunger and micronutrient deficiencies.

This matters because cereals alone do not make a healthy diet. A family stuck on subsistence wages may eat enough calories to survive but still suffer from anaemia, stunting, or weak immunity. The gap between merely eating and eating well is largely an income gap.

How the type of job shapes living conditions 🔗

Not all work offers the same security. A regular salaried job tends to come with predictable income, which lets a family plan its food budget, pay rent, and set aside savings. Casual or daily-wage work offers none of that certainty. Earnings fluctuate week to week, and a single bad spell can wipe out the household’s ability to buy food.

The scale of this problem is striking. The informal sector accounts for the overwhelming majority of the workforce, with studies based on official survey data noting that informal employment covers roughly 85 to 90 percent of the labour force, much of it without written contracts or social security. The type of job, then, is not a minor detail. It is the foundation on which living standards, health, and food security rest.

The cycle of income, food security and health 🔗

Income, food, and health move in a loop, and that loop can spin in either direction. A person with a decent income eats a nutritious diet, stays healthier, misses fewer workdays, and can afford medical care when needed. Good health then protects their earning capacity, which protects their food access. This is the virtuous cycle.

The vicious cycle runs the opposite way. Low income leads to a poor diet. A poor diet leads to weaker health and more frequent illness. Illness drains savings on treatment and causes lost workdays, which cuts income further. With less income, the family eats even less well. Each turn of the wheel pushes the household deeper into insecurity.

Health expenses are an especially cruel trigger here. For families without insurance, a single hospitalisation can force them to sell assets, borrow at high interest, or cut back on meals. The link between a stable livelihood and the capacity to access medical care is direct, and breaking it can undo years of slow progress.

Who is most at risk 🔗

The income-food-health cycle does not treat everyone equally. Some groups sit much closer to the edge, where a small shock can tip them into outright food insecurity.

Casual labourers and informal workers 🔗

Casual labourers face the sharpest risk. Their work is irregular, their wages are low, and they rarely have a safety cushion. A large share of informal workers operate without access to any social security benefit, leaving them exposed during illness, old age, or sudden job loss. Without unemployment support or a pension to fall back on, a lost job often means a lost meal within days.

Migrant workers in construction, street vending, and domestic work are particularly vulnerable. They typically lack formal contracts, which exposes them to arbitrary hiring and firing and to wages that arrive late or fall below the legal minimum. This precarity makes long-term planning, including planning a stable food budget, nearly impossible.

When a shock hits 🔗

The COVID-19 lockdowns offered a painful illustration of how quickly livelihood loss becomes food insecurity. Studies tracking informal workers through the pandemic found that the majority came from low-income households and that casual wage earners were among the hardest hit, with many forced to reduce or skip meals as their incomes vanished. When the source of daily earnings disappeared, the buffer between work and hunger turned out to be almost nonexistent.

This is the core vulnerability of insecure work. It is not only that wages are low. It is that there is nothing to absorb a shock. A salaried employee with savings and benefits can weather a few rough months. A daily-wage worker often cannot weather a few rough days.

How education breaks the cycle 🔗

If insecure livelihoods trap families in the cycle, education is one of the strongest tools for breaking out of it. Education works on several fronts at once. It opens the door to better-paying and more stable jobs, moving a worker away from precarious casual labour toward regular employment. That shift alone improves income, living conditions, and food access.

Education also changes the balance of power in the labour market. Workers who can read a contract, understand their wage entitlements, and know their rights are far harder to exploit. They are better placed to negotiate fair pay and to refuse the worst conditions. An illiterate labourer, by contrast, may not even know when they are being underpaid or cheated. Awareness is itself a form of protection.

There is a longer-term payoff too. When a household earns enough to keep its children in school rather than sending them to work, those children grow into adults with stronger earning prospects. This is how a family climbs out of the food-insecurity trap across a generation. Education converts a one-time income gain into a durable improvement in well-being.

Safety nets that link livelihood and food 🔗

Recognising that income and food are inseparable, policy has built programmes that target both at once. The National Food Security Act of 2013 created a rights-based entitlement to subsidised grain through the Public Distribution System, treating food access as a legal right rather than charity.

On the livelihood side, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act guarantees up to 100 days of wage employment to rural households, providing predictable income during lean agricultural seasons. The United Nations notes that programmes like MGNREGA and the National Rural Livelihoods Mission strengthen the livelihood foundation of anti-poverty efforts. Evidence suggests these employment guarantees have improved consumption and asset accumulation, especially for households that depend on casual work and for marginalised communities.

The deeper logic is that food schemes and work schemes reinforce each other. A guaranteed wage raises purchasing power, while subsidised grain lowers the cost of the food basket. Together they ease the squeeze on poor households, though gaps in coverage and implementation mean many of the most vulnerable still slip through the cracks.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? If a stable livelihood is the real foundation of food security, should the state focus more on guaranteeing decent work than on distributing subsidised food? And how much of the cycle of poor income, poor nutrition, and poor health can education realistically break on its own, without parallel improvements in jobs and wages?

References

1. https://www.fao.org/4/x0172e/x0172e01.htm
2. https://tci.cornell.edu/?p=2688
3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44282-025-00239-9
4. https://www.theigc.org/blogs/responding-impacts-covid-19-informal-workers-south-asia
5. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9984124/
6. https://india.un.org/index.php/en/171969-nutrition-and-food-security