Food is the primary and immediate concern, and by far the major expense, for poor households. Studies show that the poorer the household, the greater the percentage of income spent on food. This is in spite of the fact that the poor often grow some of their own food. In Tanzania, the average rural household survived on just 32 cents a day in 2001, with 21 cents—65 percent—going for food (National Bureau of Statistics of Tanzania 2002:68-70). Food spending among the poor shows similar patterns in other regions: food purchases account for 60 percent of household spending in rural Morocco ($0.37/day) (World Bank 2001:4, Table 5) and 75 percent ($0.50/day) in Georgia (Yemtsov 1999:15, Table 5, 42). By comparison, a family in the United States spends an average of 14 percent of the household budget on food (U.S. Dept. of Labor 2004:4).
With food accounting for so large a share of daily finances, other critical necessities must receive proportionately less— often only pennies a day. Housing and the fuel or electricity to heat and cook with, for example, account for only 12 percent of spending among Argentina’s poor (Lee 2000:8, Table 2). Health care, another priority for low-income families, receives only three cents of every dollar spent by Morocco’s rural poor, the same amount spent in rural Georgia (World Bank 2001:9, Table 17; Yemtsov 1999:15, Table 5). Clothing and transportation costs account for a similarly small share of the daily dollar.
