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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Food security not by food alone


Politics runs the risk of being reduced to the art of the passable — it has to be approved by the legislature, by the omniscient television anchors, by sulking editorial writers forced to cede ground to the TV anchors, and, most crucially , by Sonia Gandhi. The food security Bill was drafted for Ms Gandhi’s favour and has been shafted by her displeasure.

Food security, hostage, in any case, to the attention deficit of our minister for food and sugar and cricket and Maharashtra politicking, is now all gummed up in a wrangle over how many people should be covered, how many should be left out and how many times the empowered group of ministers should defer their meeting on the subject.

What all this bustle over the bill misses out is the simple fact that food security is not achieved primarily by distribution of food. The rural employment guarantee scheme is about food security — it offers 100 days of employment so that people do not go hungry in those spells when regular work, primarily related to raising crops, is not available. The entire Bharat Nirman programme, the rural roads programme, the urban renewal mission, the skills mission , the grand national highway building schemes, all generate jobs and incomes and thus enhance food security.

Does this mean that there is no need to focus specifically on access to food, that official energy should be expended on growth? Not quite. In a country like India where millions of people live on the margins of subsistence , guaranteed access to food is vital. However, any programme to do this must not assume it to be its solitary burden to feed the poor of the land, it must take into account the many government programmes that concurrently work for the same goal.

Let’s take, say, Kumti Majhi, a Kondh tribal, who leads a precarious existence collecting forest produce. He can afford food if his income is supplemented, say, through an employment guarantee scheme. Equally , he can afford food if the food itself is made available at a subsidised price. Should he be given both an income supplement and subsidised food?

Or should that extra money going to him be used to build an all-weather road from his hamlet to the nearest road? Suppose a bauxite mining project comes along and takes away the land off which Kumti lives, and the colour of his water source turns an angry red, the shade of the sores that now erupt on his body. Where will he turn for food security?

The point is that food security does not, cannot exist in isolation. It is a function of a person’s location in the overall economic and political structure of society. Unless that environment turns benign, piecemeal efforts at easing the pressure on some part of the life of the poor will fail to particularly benefit the poor. Turning that environment benign is a function of politics, not of any particular law.

Enhancing incomes of the rural poor and cheapening the supply of food come together in raising farm output, essential to meet the rising demand for food across the world, not just for conversion into fuel but also to feed the changed food preference of people with improving living standards.

Increasing farm output is a huge challenge that will call for enormous resources, both financial and policy. Paucity of political will to forge and implement reasonable compensation/rehabilitation policies for people displaced by projects has, in combination with steady scaling back of outlays on major irrigation, created a looming water crisis, with groundwater near exhaustion in most places. For farm output to go up, there has to be sizeable investment in surface water management, meaning dams, reservoirs, canals and displacement.

The YSR government of Andhra Pradesh was effective because it stepped up irrigation investment significantly. Raising food output will call for not only augmented water supply but also better know-how , embodied in hybrid or genetically modified plant varieties and high-tech inputs, and in improved crop husbandry practices.

These cannot be absorbed by the current scattered structure of farming in India : farmers would need to pool their resources to form farmer companies or cooperatives to secure the organisational form required to carry out modern agriculture . Modern farming is capital intensive . And would not be able to accommodate large-scale underemployment as traditional farming does. A lot of the surplus labour would be absorbed by fastgrowing urbanisation.

If the rest are not to become polarised into a handful of rich peasants whose landholdings steadily grow and a disgruntled landless, jobless mass, a great deal of organisational innovation is called for. That too is part of food security. In fact, of internal security. The only way to overcome the bureaucrat’s tendency to compartmentalise, and hold on to the holistic picture, is for politics to always be in command. Will someone please approve?