Seasonality Induced Marginality: Vulnerability of Wage Earners’ Food and Nutrition Security in Southern Bangladesh

The paper examines the impact of wage-earning occupation in the food and nutrition security of the rural households’ which is partly rooted in the process of marginalization due to seasonality. Seasonality is obvious in the nature but it becomes a problem for those individuals who are heavily dependent on it and they don’t have any other buffering system to mitigate this shock such as savings, credit and social security. The result depicts that for being a wage-earner in agriculture, the vulnerability of food and nutrition security increases by 9% to 12.4% which are statistically significant at 5% level of significance. Marginalized households face seasonality every year and they lose their valuable assets to mitigate the adverse effect of natural calamities and idiosyncratic shocks. As a result the instrument to mitigate this seasonality becomes scarce and ineffective which results malnutrition and food insecurity. Because whenever the households do not have any other coping strategy, they just skip meals and start starving for the extended periods