The food paradox

SURPLUS PRODUCTION AND HUNGER

The year 1943 was one of the darkest periods of Indian history when more than 15 lakh people in pre-partition Bengal died of hunger-related causes.

In his seminal study on hunger and poverty, Amartya Sen showed that the so-called Great Bengal Famine in 1943 was caused not by a shortage of food but by the sharp decline in rural incomes in Bengal even as staple cereal prices rose steeply. Little was done to check the inflation by increasing market supplies or to help the rural destitute with food-for-work schemes.

Post-independent India has tried to ensure food security by boosting farm production, subsidising the purchase and sale of food grains to the poor and using food-for-work social safety nets.

The strategy has created overflowing foodgrain buffer stocks, but has not been as effective in reducing hunger. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that more than one-fourth of India’s over one billion people are undernourished, their number increasing to 230.5 million in 2003-05 from 199.9 million in 1995-97.

In a study published in the Economic and Political Weekly, Angus Deaton and Jean Dreze estimate that presently, more than 75 per cent of the Indian population has a per capita daily calorie consumption which is below the minimum norm of 2,100 kilocalories for urban areas and 2,400 kilocalories for rural areas.

Growing hunger

The finance ministry’s Expert Group on Agricultural Indebtedness, in its July 2007 report noted that agriculture, which provides a livelihood to the majority of Indians, is increasingly unable to do so, resulting in growing hunger in rural areas. Even farm households with up to 4 hectares cannot earn enough from farming to meet the basic consumption needs. More than 80 per cent of India’s farmers own less than 2 hectares.
As India’s new government, which is said to have been elected on a mandate for ‘good governance,’ takes office, it can be said this good governance should primarily be measured by success in enabling the majority of Indians to meet their most basic needs.

According to the expert group’s report, India’s liberalisation-powered economic growth has not spread to the agricultural sector. Farm output in the 1990s grew at 1.16 per cent annually, slower than the yearly population growth of 1.9 per cent, marking return to the situation of the 1970s when food production growth was slower than the rate of population increase. This is reflected in FAO estimates showing per capita food availability in India stagnating at about 2,400 kilocalories per day since the 1990s.

Reduced public investment in agriculture is a factor in the slowing growth in rice and wheat productivity despite greater fertilizer use. Profits from farming the two cereals are declining in Haryana and stagnant in Punjab.

The inescapable fact is that farming alone cannot provide a viable livelihood to most rural people. Farm employment grew twice as fast in the decade before the launch of economic liberalisation as it has since.

While the land available for farming is shrinking, farmers are earning less with prices of their produce declining since the late 1990s, relative not only to the cost of farm inputs but also to those of non-food consumer goods.

The number of farm holdings in the country has doubled to over 100 million since 1960 and these are spread over 108 million hectares compared to 133 million in the early sixties. Revitalising agriculture by boosting farm productivity and incomes, especially of small and marginal farmers in unfavourable agro-climatic regions is important, but, as the expert group report indicates, this alone will not help the country’s majority small and marginal farmers.

Indeed, like the 1943 mass hunger in Bengal, the present day paradox of overflowing buffer foodgrain stocks and large-scale undernutrition shows that it is more important to boost incomes of the rural poor so they can buy their food needs. And for this, they need work away from the fields but not away from the village.

Can the thousands of crores of rupees being spent annually on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGP), which is said to have played a key role in returning the ruling coalition to office, help generate a non-farm rural livelihood revolution and stem the continuing mass rural-urban migrations?

To guarantee sustained rural employment, works of the type being organised under the flagship village jobs scheme require a level of transparency and accountability in implementation. Hopes of this have, however, been belied by NREGP audits unearthing evidence of large-scale leakage of funds and fraudulent recruitments on paper.

   Giving more teeth to the Panchayati Raj institutions is vital for ensuring that the rural jobs schemes function effectively. It is also pertinent to ask if the rural poor should continue to be treated as mere beneficiaries of state largesse instead of being enabled to stand on their feet through large-scale promotion of rural enterprises linked to local markets.

(The writer is a consultant with the FAO, based in Bangkok)