Poverty In Nepal

Home to almost 30 million people and eight of the highest mountains in the world, Nepal also happens to be one of the world’s most economically deprived nations. While tourism contributes greatly to Nepal’s economy, they continue to struggle with constantly shifting governmental leadership and frequent natural disasters that have had catastrophic impacts on the population as a whole. In addition, food insecurity has proven itself to be a prevalent issue throughout modern Nepali history, despite 68% of the country’s population being employed in agriculture. Farmers’ lack of access to modern seeds and farming technologies along with inadequate governance have led to an overall decline in Nepal’s agricultural production. The damaging impact of

While there are not many extreme outliers in our data collection, the minor fluctuations in food production and population can likely be attributed to Nepal’s tumultuous weather conditions-- the mountainous terrain of the country leads to a wide variety of weather patterns, and their location along a major fault line has historically led to severe earthquakes. In 2015, a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal, triggering avalanches and resulting in the death of almost 9,000 individuals and the destruction of countless homes. This earthquake also had a negative impact on the agricultural production of the country, which explains the minor decline in people fed and population growth around 2015 displayed on the

The lack of an intersection between the food production (people fed) and population is present because of the country’s aforementioned high rates of undernourishment. The lower number of “people fed” on our graph coincides with statistics revealing that 25.2% of Nepal’s population is currently living below the poverty line. Even though 68% of the country’s population is actively involved in agriculture, their food production still does not meet the needs of their growing population, and for this reason, the models used accurately depict the data at hand. This juxtaposition of the exponential and linear models displays the recent situation of food insecurity in Nepal: the population is continuing to grow at an exponential rate, and the rate of agricultural production has no way to sustain this increase in population. This explains why the trend lines are growing further apart and a point of intersection (where food production surpasses the needs of the population) does not seem likely to occur given the projected values.

While the cereal production in Nepal was used to find the values of “people fed”, if given the opportunity to further research the topic I would take into consideration the production of non-cereal crops that might be more commonly grown in Nepal. In addition, I think that including the GDP and comparing it to the people fed would lead to the amalgamation