BANGLADESH: PATHWAYS AND IMPACTS OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC SHOCKS
•
83
“tiffin” or the school feeding program for rural children, to be valuable support. Allocations to safety nets increased by 26 percent, mainly through expanded programs, particularly the Open Market Sales of subsidized rice (Rahman et al. 2010). One study found that subsidized rice and later other sales of food items in 2007–08 were considered most valuable during the peak of the food crisis (PPRC 2009), and it seems that this remains an important visible element of the official response. Subsidized food sales were valued more by the Notun Bazaar residents than by their rural counterparts, for whom the costs and time involved in traveling to the distribution center and queuing would outweigh the small amounts one was allowed to buy. In addition, as women in both communities noted, the controler chal (as the subsidized rice is called), smelled bad once cooked. Notun Bazaar women complained that the cheap rice was a mixed blessing, as it would spoil unless eaten immediately, creating additional work for women because meals had to be cooked fresh rather than once daily and requiring more fuel, which women were responsible for collecting. Nevertheless, as rice prices rose, the subsidy could mean a considerable saving—although at greater costs to women’s time and labor. Despite what is generally understood to have been a timely and wide range of responses, it is clear that the overall goals of social protection were not met. The amount of assistance was too small relative to people’s needs: households were limited in the amount of subsidized rice they were permitted to buy, and recipients of old age and widow’s allowances complained that monthly payments of Tk 200–300 (about $3) were insufficient to cover their food expenditures. Another important concern was that coverage of social protection schemes was inadequate to protect all of those seriously affected. Social protection coverage has increased (25 percent of the population had received some kind of safety net benefit, according to the 2010 household income and expenditure survey), but a high proportion of poor people continue to be excluded from such benefits in some of the poorest regions of the country (BBS 2011). Furthermore, action to regulate food prices plainly failed to keep them within bounds that poor people considered to be affordable. To some extent, this problem reflects the size of the poor and extremely poor population in Bangladesh. With 13.5 percent of the population of 160 million living below the poverty line, it is safe to assume that more than 50 million people will have been struggling to maintain basic standards of living when the basic costs of living—in particular, the price of rice and other staple foods—have increased by more than half since 2005.7 Although