Political economy of the ‘welfare’ state in lower- and middle-income countries: A comparative study of food-security programmes in India and Ethiopia

India and Ethiopia are amongst the most populous countries on their respective continents – Asia and Africa – and, as many lower and middle-income countries (LMICs), have for a long time struggled with food insecurity. Prior to the pandemic, in both countries about 15% of the population lacked access to sufficient daily calories and more than 30% of children under five were stunted, an indicator of chronic undernourishment. The situation was exacerbated further by the pandemic but arguably, in both countries this was to some extent cushioned by temporary expansion of the countries’ flagship welfare schemes – the Public Distribution System in India and the Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia. This article examines the political economy of welfare provision, specifically related to food security, in India and Ethiopia during the pandemic and beyond in closer detail. The research questions motivating this article are the following – what political forces have underlaid the expansion of the welfare schemes, how effective the programmes and their expansion have been in addressing acute and chronic food insecurity challenges, and what implications, if any, the specific food-security programmes have for welfare provision more generally. Whilst the two countries are similar in their approach to food security in some ways – both have enacted the right to food security in their constitutions and put in place comprehensive public food-security programmes, they also display important differences. India’s government has under the Prime Minister Narendra Modi engaged in ‘central welfarism’, where most welfare schemes have been re-branded to bear the Prime Minister’s name and deployed as a political tool to boost his personal and his party’s (the BJP) popularity. Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s PSNP has been funded predominantly by donors (with bulk donated by the US) and its effectiveness and approach widely lauded before the pandemic although the picture has become now tainted by the civil war that the government waged in the Tigray region (2020-2022), which led to an extreme deterioration of the food security situation in northern Ethiopia. Both the PDS and PSNP have been relatively successful in cushioning pandemic-driven food insecurity amongst their recipients though less successful with respect to nutrition security. Based on the findings, in the concluding section the article asks whether these programmes then constitute an example for other countries to emulate as good, easily scalable response mechanisms to crises (that are only expected to multiply with increasing climate breakdown). Or are such programmes merely appeasement mechanisms used by the governments so that their populations ignore growing domestic economic inequality and deterioration of the domestic political environments?