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Food crisis depicts marginalisation of the poor by Vikram Doctor
Everyone agrees that there is a food crisis. As ordinary members of the public we know there’s one every time we go out shopping for vegetables. My mother knows there’s a crisis because, after recently sacking her cook, she discovered the lady had left with all the onions in the house. 

The media agrees there’s one, and sends more TV crews to talk to onion farmers, even though the TV reporters have evidently run out of ways of saying anything new about onions, while the farmers are evidently tired of pointing out that they aren’t the ones making money. (Meanwhile the traders, who are making money, mysteriously never get interviewed though there are questions worth asking them about their links with local politicians that let them off the hook). 

The international media knows there’s a crisis, and mentions Indian onions, but is quickly diverted by the other food crisis stories emerging around the world, from flood damaged crops in Australia to cold damaged crops in Canada. The usual campaigners on food issues know there’s a crisis, though they are presumably somewhat at a loss to figure out how to attach it to their usual concerns, such genetically modified (GM) foods. 

The big food companies know there is a crisis, as they wonder if the short-term gains they are making from higher retail prices will sustain the long-term costs of dealing with diminished supply. And politicians agree there is a crisis which they respond to in ways varying from posing for the cameras as they sell onions at Rs 5 to about five ladies, or passing the buck to the bureaucrats. Even Mr Sharad Pawar will agree there is a crisis, as long as it is clear he is in no way to blame for it, despite the small detail of him being agriculture minister and the crisis involving agricultural products. 

Mr Pawar’s interesting explanation for this is that vegetables are not his business. Speaking to a group of journalists recently he claimed that, “as agriculture minister, I am responsible for five commodities—wheat, rice, pulses, oil seeds and sugar—stocks of which are ample in the country. My ministry does not decide anything about vegetables.” His ministry supports the Department of Agricultural Research and Education (DARE), which supports the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR), which is responsible for the Indian Institute of Vegetable Research (IIVR) in Varanasi, and the Directorate of Onion and Garlic Research (DOGR) in Pune. 

One might imagine that last institution might have seen the crisis coming and issued an alert. Others certainly did—the president of the All India Vegetable Growers’ Association has been quoted saying that as far back as last October the government was alerted about crop damage due to prolonged rains. But one can see that how delays might have been possible as any such communication worked its leisurely way up through ICAR and DARE and through the ministry of agriculture until finally reaching a minister who has, after all, many other pressing matters on his plate like the fortunes of Indian cricket and a certain hill station. 

Perhaps, though, one should be grateful to Mr Pawar because his answer inadvertently points to a few important points. The first, as noted, is the hierarchies and complexities of the organisations dealing with agriculture which can simultaneously allow the government to be responsible and not. The second is the government’s fixation that food only consists of a few commodities, regardless of what the public might actually be eating. Further proof of this can be seen in how the discussion in Delhi on food now seems to have washed its hands of vegetables and is only focusing on a dispute between the National Advisory Council and the expert committee headed by C Rangarajan, which essentially only concerns wheat and rice. 

Of course, wheat and rice are vital, but they are far from being the only foods that people eat (they aren’t even the only foodgrains—as always, the government overlooks millets, despite their far greater suitability for most Indian climatic conditions and their higher nutritive value). This foodgrain fixation is all the more mystifying because the data has been available for quite a while now to show that per capita foodgrain consumption has been falling in India. The causes for this are bitterly disputed, with some arguing that this shows the increasing marginalisation of the poor, denied even staples, while others argue that it’s a sign of prosperity, as people diversify their diets. 

Both explanations can, in fact, coexist, but the one clear inference from it, that a more holistic view of food is needed, seems to be the one point that the government doesn’t want to take. 

But then this is a failing hardly limited to the government. Food issues seem to have a remarkable ability to attract people who are both intensely passionate about one aspect of them, and quite blind to everything else. A good example is the GM debate. GM opponents will paint horror stories about vegetables being made somehow non-vegetarian due to the implantation of animal genes, or about how GM involves handing over the future of Indian agriculture to multinationals like Monsanto, or that it means that farmers will never be able to replant their own seeds. 

In fact, these are just aspects of GM which could be guarded against: some promising GM crops involve only genes from other plants, there’s no reason why GM can’t be carried out by Indian research agencies and the sterility of some early GM crops was not intrinsic, but a device to ensure royalties were received by the developer. If the patent issue was side-stepped entirely, for example, by insisting on patent-free products, as the government can do with critical pharmaceutical drugs, then presumably the sterility would not be needed. 

I am not necessarily making a case for GM produce here, but for the need for rounded and fair discussions, rather than the quasi religious sort of debate that has taken place so far. Another example of how passionate sentiments confuse food debates involves eating meat, the one aspect of the food crisis that has strangely hardly been discussed, other than in jokes about how it’s cheaper to be non-vegetarian these days. But the government doesn’t like discussing meat eating because such discussions are apt to stray into sensitive areas like the cruelties involved in raising and slaughtering animals, an issue likely to raise passions both religious and secular, the latter from groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). 

The problem with having this discussion is that it involves acknowledging one point made by anti-meat campaigners—the treatment of animals is terrible. But equally, the anti-meat campaigners need to acknowledge that they are partly responsible. When animals are transported in cramped conditions, in covered trucks, across state boundaries, it is because of the insanely complex and restrictive rules on slaughter that are in place. If abattoirs are horrible and unhygienic places, its partly because abattoir workers are constantly being harried and penalised—humane abattoirs, on the lines of what are now being created in the West, may well find customers, but given the problems involved, no one in India is going to bother creating them. And in all this, meat consumption in India continues to rise. 

The problem of passionate, but partial views of food doesn’t just affect the production end; consumers are as guilty of it, and in ways that are linked to the rise in food prices. One aspect that everyone agrees on is that food inflation is caused by lots of money chasing limited food—but is it really limited food, or limited varieties of food? Some foods are skyrocketing in price, but others are still available quite cheap, as can be seen by any market visit, or all those articles in the media about how to substitute vegetables like cabbage for onions. The problem with considering food only in terms of substitutions is that it implicitly puts down the substitute. 

But should it? Rather than seeing cabbage only as an onion substitute, a role it hardly performs well, shouldn’t it be considered on its own terms? Indian ways of cooking cabbage can be really delicious, since it marries well with our spices, and provides an interesting textural contrast. Millets don’t have to be seen as poor cousins to rice and wheat, but as delicious and important grains in their own rights. There are any number of traditional Indian vegetables, like all the huge varieties of leafy saags or keezhais, which are still abundantly available and cheap. Fish provides another example: why must we obsess about just a few varieties, like pomfret, surmai and rawas, driving up their price and leading to their overfishing, when our immensely long coastline provides us with a huge and tasty variety? 

There’s one obvious reason why, which someone recently pointed out to me – the fish most in demand are those that can easily be bought and consumed by people who aren’t used to buying fish. The same holds true for those who demand palak at any price, but shy away from the unfamiliar dark green leaves of Malabar spinach (basale or pui shaak), or who avoid cooking millets because they don’t know how to cook them well. 

As an older generation who was used to these traditional foods passes away, the memory of buying and cooking them is fading, and so we are left chasing fewer foods, at higher prices. There are very many people in positions of authority who are responsible for the crisis in food prices, but we are too, if we shut our eyes to all the abundance of food that India offers.