The Hindu Business Line : A failure on the farm?

The country is precariously close to peril on the food front. Last June, the Chairman of the National Commission on Farmers had claimed that India is "self-sufficient in wheat." The reality is that India is slipping back to a "ship-to-mouth" situation of the late-1950s/early-1960s. And the mandarins in New Delhi don't seem very concerned.

In the just-concluded Parliament session, there was a starred question about the hoarding of foodgrains by traders to create artificial scarcity. The Government's reaction to this was, to say the least, evasive.

According to the Agriculture Minister, the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) has gone up only by 5.1 per cent for pulses and 6 per cent for wheat. If there was nothing unusual about this price rise, why has the Government or, more specifically the Agriculture Minister, decided to allow wheat imports, even by private trade, at zero duty, a possibility that was unthinkable only a few weeks ago?

Everyone, including those in the Agriculture Ministry, was taken by surprise. Export has been banned and import freed. Even the export obligation of raw sugar importers has been postponed. White sugar import has been permitted duty free.

As of now, the Minister is scouting for more than five million plus tonnes of wheat to keep the public distribution system going.

On August 30, the State Trading Corporation of India (STC) floated a fresh tender to import 16.7 lakh tonnes of wheat, which is in addition to the 30-lakh-tonne tender already floated. The latest tender, which is the fifth in the series since February, would take the total wheat imports for the public distribution system to five million tonnes.

Why the shortage

There is now a controversy over whether it is the lower production or low inventory that has led to the wheat crisis. It is easy to blame either or both, the former supposedly caused by aberrant weather of the last two years and the latter by the shoddy handling of the Agriculture Ministry in grain procurement.

However, the fact remains that there simply is not enough wheat and pulses to go round to meet the internal needs. And the Government is importing wheat at a much higher price than what it paid our farmers. Production projections could be off the mark, as clear from this year's forecasts, where the figure had to be substantially scaled down from the original 74 million tonnes to the 69.5 million harvested. One could blame this on the inaccurate techniques adopted. India still bases its crop forecasts on the crop cutting estimates made by State governments at the block level.

The proposed FASAL technique, based on space, agro-meteorology and land-based observations might lead to better estimates, but the ground reality is that India is simply lagging in production. In the last 15 years, cereal production increased only by about 29 million tonnes, which is less than two million per annum. The production level simply failed to keep pace with the population growth rate.

Growing rural poverty

Consider the data from the National Sample Surveys. In Rural India, the average per capita calorie intake per day fell from 2,266 Kcal in 1972-73 to 2,183 Kcal in 1993-94; it further dipped to 2,149 Kcal by the close of the last century.

Among the lowest 30 per cent of rural households in respect of consumer expenditure, the per capita calorie intake fell from 1,830 Kcal in 1989 to 1,600 in 1998. By the close of the last century, almost 77 per cent of the rural population consumed less than the poverty line calorie requirement of 2,400 Kcal.

The data clearly show a decline in cereal intake, a phenomenon so clearly driven by distress, since it has occurred in a situation of declining overall calorie intake and persistence of high levels of malnutrition.

The oft-repeated argument by agricultural experts , that it is the "lack of purchasing" power and not the "availability" of foodgrains that is at the root of much hunger in India simply does not wash any more.

Falling production

The country has failed to produce enough to meet its requirements. Had the country been producing enough, food would not be as expensive as it is today. In the open market, wheat is selling at Rs 11,000 plus a quintal, which is close to Rs 20 a kilogram of aatta. How will a migrant labourer from rural India in a Delhi slum, with wife and children, make do with a daily wage of Rs 100 plus?

The mandarins in New Delhi will be making a big mistake if they allow themselves to be swept away from a farm model that is not grain centric. India needs to urgently take into consideration the world food scenario to prepare itself. The world grain harvest has been falling since 2004, when it was 2.68 billion tonnes to 2.38 billion tonnes in 2005, and for 2006 the Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates a harvest barely exceeding two billion tonnes. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimate is more conservative at 1.984 billions.

The world will have to face a shortfall of more than 58 million tonnes of what it consumes. Harvest has failed in both the US and Australia, the main wheat producers. Poor people will find food more expensive, as we are already seeing in India. Compounding the situation is that coarse grain such as maize that is being used for ethanol production.

A "corn rush" is on in the US, where the crop is used to produce bio-fuel — ethanol, strongly supported by subsidies by the Bush administration to divert world criticism for its failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Developed nations, as also rapidly developing countries such as China and India are eating more meat than grains and vegetables, and it is important to remember that it takes 14 kg of grains to produce two kg of beef and eight kg of grains to produce two kg of pork. More than six decades after Independence, India has more persons suffering from endemic or chronic hunger, measured in terms of either calorie intake or anthropometric indicators of malnutrition, than any other country in the world. This is a shame when we have been trumpeting from our rooftops, ad nauseam, about the so-called Green Revolution.

Learning from China

We might draw a leaf from the Chinese strategy here. That country has 69 per cent of the total arable land under grain crops and does not permit, on any account, the shrinkage from this size. In India, we have prime agricultural land being gobbled up by land sharks for "development" — the IT parks, theme parks, five-star hotels, high-rise apartments and, more importantly, the "highways" to "accommodate" more cars on the road.

Never mind the poor Indian in the village who rides a bullock-cart or a donkey in the bone-dry desert of Rajasthan, we "need" more land to develop our highways!

In the rice-starved Kerala, prime paddy land in Palakkad district is being taken over by the cash-rich NRIs . Last year, Mr Sharad Pawar, allocated Rs 11,000 crore for a horticulture mission. Fruits and vegetables are not our priority, rice and wheat are. Most disappointingly, the Eleventh Plan ignores the importance of food and nutrition security.

(The author, a former National Science Foundation Professor, Royal Society, Belgium, can be contacted at nair_kpp@yahoo.com)