First the Central government allowed global food giants and private companies to buy wheat directly from farmers, thereby deliberately initiating a shortfall in procurement for the Public Distribution System (PDS). It has now directed four states – Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and West Bengal – to import wheat directly from the global market. 

The underlying message is loud and clear: India has given up on wheat self-sufficiency. 
“Given the low procurement of wheat for the central pool during 2007 and high demand for wheat received, the governments of the four states were directed to import wheat from international market as per their choice from March to May 2008,” Minister of State for Agriculture Akhilesh Prasad Singh informed the Lok Sabha. Interestingly, this directive came from the minister when the Centre itself had dropped the idea of importing wheat considering the galloping international prices. 

Amidst an unprecedented hike in food prices, and food riots erupting across the globe, India is busy tinkering with food self-sufficiency so assiduously built over the past four decades. For a country, which emerged from the throes of a “ship-to-moth” existence barely 40 years back, it is shocking to see how short the public memory is. We have forgotten how humiliating it was to live on food doles, how precariously the national sovereignty was linked to food dependency.

For the record, there is no supply constraint when it comes to wheat production. The crisis that we see is the outcome of an unwanted policy framework that actually aims at dismantling the existing food procurement and management system. Allowing four states to import wheat directly from abroad is the first step towards dismantling the food procurement and distribution system. This is exactly what the World Bank/IMF have been advocating for ages, and this is what the food retail chains are now lobbying for.
Sometimes back, during the tenure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) had tried unsuccessfully to dismantle the procurement system. It had actually summoned a meeting of the chief ministers to look into the possibility of entrusting the monumental task of procuring foodgrains to the respective state governments.

For instance, it wanted Punjab, the food bowl of the country, to procure and distribute the food that it buys every year for the central pool. By abandoning its own responsibility for procuring and providing grains for the PDS, the NDA government was very cleverly trying to shift the responsibility to the state governments. 

Unexpectedly, the then chief ministers, including Parkash Singh Badal of Punjab and Chandrababu Naidu from Andhra Pradesh, had vehemently opposed this policy change. And rightly so. After all, how could Punjab, which supplies nearly 50 per cent of the country’s food surplus be made responsible for the massive procurement operations? And why shouldn’t the nation share the cost of procuring and distributing food from Punjab? Why should Punjab, which happens to be the annadata in this case, be made to incur the costs of being the food provider? 

Dismantling the food procurement and distribution system remains on the agenda. More recently, the Economic Survey 2006 had pointed to the government’s intention of phasing out the PDS based on crop procurement system. The latest directive by the Ministry of Agriculture allowing the states to import directly from the global markets is therefore merely a disguised effort to re-launch the effort to dismantle the food distribution system.     
Although Andhra Pradesh and Kerala were also asked to buy wheat directly from the international market, the government says that all it can do is to shift the subsidy that it provides to the Food Corporation of India (FCI) to these states. But since this will not translate into any reduction in the mounting food subsidy bill, there seems to be no plausible explanation for this directive. In turn, allowing the states to directly purchase from the global market will bring along a plethora of problems. 

First of all, allowing the states to directly import wheat will mean that the southern states will prefer to buy from abroad thereby creating a situation of unwanted surplus in the northern wheat growing states. This will directly impact wheat production. With less demand for its wheat, the area and production of wheat will fall in the years to come. Once the wheat producing states diversify from wheat to other cash crops, it will be practically difficult to bring them back into wheat production. Moreover, to expect the perpetually cash-starved states to import agricultural commodities from the international market directly makes a mockery of the scheme.  

Wheat imports is only the beginning. The same policy will then be applied for rice. Already some states are getting ready to import edible oil directly. Asking Kerala to import rice from abroad to meets its domestic shortfall in production, or for that matter the rice deficit states of the northeast to depend upon imports to feed its population, is like sowing the seeds of separatism. What is therefore needed is a policy that treats the entire nation as one single food zone. Unless the entire country is taken as a single unit, national food security cannot be ensured.