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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Politics of Food -Gayatri Jayaraman

Politics of Food -Gayatri Jayaraman

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published Published on Sep 11, 2015   modified Modified on Sep 11, 2015
-India Today

Agriculture powerhouse Madhya Pradesh still suffers from high levels of malnutrition, a contrast that exposes our flawed food policies

Madhya Pradesh in mid-March is heavy with the scent of the Mahua blossom. Heaped at village bazaars, and now restricted largely to brewing liquor, its pungent smell is fast disappearing from indigenous tribal stews and curries. On the road to Petlawad and Alirajpur on the western edge of the state, farmers carry double-barrelled rifles as they ride between endless golden fields. Wheat is an aspiration that is gradually replacing corn, a local staple for rotis here, and there are cotton, tomatoes and plump green chickpeas growing sporadically. Soybean, maize, potato, onion, cabbage and cauliflower have begun to dominate the state's 308 lakh hectares of sown land. With 875.6 mm of average rainfall in the South-West monsoons, the state seems lush and blessed, growing at a healthy 8-9 per cent. Since Madhya Pradesh was picked for the Green Revolution in the 1960s, wheat production has increased by 83 per cent, contributing a quarter of India's surplus production in the last decade. It also produces 22 per cent of the nation's pulses, 54 per cent of the country's soybeans, and 38 per cent of the nation's grams.

In short, Madhya Pradesh has no business having one of the highest rates of malnutrition and anaemia in the country. Yet, the Rapid Survey on Children (RSoC) 2013-14, released by the Ministry of Women and Child Development in mid-August, told a different story, making it clear that food production has little correlation to nutrition. One in three children in the state is underweight and over 40 per cent are stunted, far higher than the national average of 29.4 per cent underweight children. Tribal children in the state are worst hit at 46 per cent underweight and 49.7 per cent stunted. Adam Roberts, who first leaked the details of this report in The Economist in July, wrote that only Africa throws up the kind of numbers seen in India.

The state is a stark example of how the combination of a push towards market-driven monocropping and arbitrary interventions by the administration tear apart the food-health dynamic, caught as it is in the middle of a soft Hindutva push towards vegetarianism and a public distribution system (PDS) that fails to deliver the right ingredients to its people. The first state to ban beef consumption in 1959, Madhya Pradesh has doggedly refused to adopt eggs in the mid-day meals for anganwadis-as opposed to Maharashtra, another BJP-ruled state that serves 'vegetarian' unfertilised eggs. Add to this a falling dairy consumption despite cow protection, and a soybean crop grown more for export than local consumption. As Dipa Sinha, a Right to Food campaigner, says about the thrust to convert tribal people in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh to vegetarianism: "It is nutrition sacrificed at the altar of religion."

The problem is a simple one, really. A farmer who once grew a rain-hardy millet among rows of pulses, onions, tubers and greens, today grows one market-driven crop, like the others around him do. They all end up competing with each other on price. When unseasonal rains come, as they did this year destroying 20 per cent rabi crops in the state, the pressure increases. In contrast, he would have at least had enough nutritious food to eat if he grew multiple crops. Pioneering scientist R.H. Richharia had identified over 19,000 varieties of rice at the now defunct Madhya Pradesh Rice Research Institute, and R.S. Rana, former director of the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, identified 166 crops and 320 wild varieties growing in the state at one time. Ashish Kothari, founder of environmental action group Kalpavriksh, says farming today pushes just three or four varieties. "There is no overall figure for loss of crop diversity in India but high-yield varietals now replace crop on almost 75 per cent of rice land and 90 per cent of wheat land in the country," he says.

With the burden of vegetarianism moving the tribal people off native meats such as the foraged wild boar or smaller forest animals, now banned by the Forest Act-let alone the growing clampdown on cheap beef-the diversity of food options become even more regimented.

Disappearing vegetables

In Bhopal, Vikas Samvad's Sachin Jain is an activist who pushed for the introduction of eggs in the mid-day meal programme. His insistence caused Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan to famously say, "Ande ka funda nahin chalega (literally 'the egg theory will not work', but also an allusion to a Bollywood song from the late '90s)." Jain says that the only way to combat malnutrition, anaemia and stunting is to include micrograins, micronutrients, green vegetables, iron and calcium-rich foods, and animal proteins ranging from eggs to fish to meat into the daily diet. But these are exactly the food items the lush new Madhya Pradesh has spent the last decade replacing. "If a state concertedly moves away from the solution, can the problem ever be solved?" he asks.

The ruling BJP's spokesperson for Madhya Pradesh, Hitesh Bajpai, says that the state government has indeed realised that crucial micronutrients are being lost due to the erosion of indigenous eating patterns and crop varieties. One way they have been trying to counter it is to offer a Minimum Support Price to farmers in the tribal belt to start growing millets such as kodo and kutki. Even so, the output has been low as farmers prefer crops with greater demand. The second is to boost consumption through anganwadis, and village-to-village awareness programmes.

But modern consumption is an irreversible process, research finds, and it's a tough task to restore micronutrients this way. "The egg is a western answer to the loss of micronutrients, but it is not the only answer," Bajpai insists. "As for the push to vegetarianism, the government is only providing a supplemental nutrition and does not replace a family's primary nutrition. A lot of the Hindu population in MP is non-vegetarian, and remains so. Long-term reversals can be brought about by replacing eating and farming techniques. It's a slow process but we are working on it."

But what is being lost in the process is invaluable. At Petlawad, Nilesh Desai runs a small school for 200 tribal children. His organisation, Samparkgram, is desperately trying to push indigenous cropping techniques. Small plastic bottles in his storehouse stock disappearing cereals such as kudra, kangni, ragi. In his backyard, organically planted corn grows among rows of toor dal, onion and garlic. The pests that feed on corn are fed on by the pests of toor, and so the cycle is self-perpetuating and does not need pesticides at all. The school's meals run on these supplies.

Desai's work includes the documenting and categorising of disappearing vegetables. This region once had innumerable local varieties-fang, lamda, chandloi, khati bhaji, cheel, chhota karela, kachnar, tindori, kachri, chana pala, to name just a few. Greens such as kachnar were once crucial in the fight against anaemia, and tindori has large amounts of vitamin B. These crops have all but disappeared from local knowledge and cultivation, indicative of the mono-crop culture that now rules the region. Discarded as weeds, or replaced by more 'fashionable' crops-local bazaars now contain heaps of tomato, potato, aubergines and cauliflower. Corn rotis are being replaced by the wheat rotis-a symbol of the poor man's meal being replaced by the double-doorrefrigerator and LED TV-purchasing upwardly mobile tribal.

Wrong kinds of food

While the number of cattle has increased in the area due to protection, the dependence on the cattle for milk has gone down locally. There are over six million cattle in the Madhya Pradesh. But locals in Jhabua district have taken to milk powder sold by Nova, sold loose, at Rs 20 a packet. "Malnutrition here is not due to poverty. Malnutrition is due to unsustainable food practices," Desai says.

M.S. Swaminathan, one of the architects of the Green Revolution, points to the diversity he tried to restore to India's PDS through the reintroduction of millets and multicrop farming as head of the National Commission on Farmers between 2004 and 2006. "India is at a crossroads and the problem is not the availability of food in general, but the access to the right kinds of foods," he says. Peter Hazell of International Food Policy Research Institute also points to falling rural and urban cereal consumption with increases in consumption of milk, meat, vegetables and fruit.

While the Indian Council of Medical Research weighs ideal lab measures for optimal nutrition, former National Institute of Nutrition chief Veena Shatrugna explains that these become impossible to translate to the ground for those who typically consume a single roti, an onion and a chilli, and a thin, watery dal. "Lab values work for a wealthy vegetarian who consumes his quota of animal protein from curds, paneer and milk, as well as thick dal," she says.

Aspirational eating

When the Green Revolution policies were framed, analysts say, they leaned upon the knowledge of the elite policymakers, who pushed the nation towards meals the upper classes ate. This not just left traditional agrarian methods behind but also made growing certain crops aspirational. Prabhu Pingali and Yasmeen Khwaja, who have documented the impact of globalisation on food patterns post-1980s, say "aspirational eating" has pushed diets to less nutritional but more globally diverse foods. Swaminathan pushed for an amendment to the food security bill to include millets in the PDS in 2012, but the move never took off. Due to increasing health awareness, millets have anyway become popular among the gym-going upper classes but as Dalit activist Chandrabhan Prasad explains, they were once used equally as horse fodder and as pay for Dalit farm hands and "no Dalit would return to eating millets". Food politics thus leaves the wealthy healthy, and the poor more determined to move away from nourishment than before.

The politics of food functions at various levels, say those working in the area. In the village of Ajkand, some 60 km from Dindori in Madhya Pradesh, live the Baiga tribespeople. They instinctively lean to the forest, now severely curtailed by the Forest Act, for their resources. From varieties of onions and tubers to leaves, greens and meats, the villagers know what to eat when. Kheda, or the hunt for sport, is a communal activity that is sparked by the season when the wild boar ravage their fields. It is beneath their dignity for Baigas to purchase what tradition tells them they should hunt and grow.

The Baigas do not drink milk as they believe human beings should not feed off food of another mammal's child. They want to retain their way of life-their food, their hunting grounds, their beliefs. Their point: one who does not eat wheat rotis and rice with vegetables isn't eating uncivilised meals. And anyone who is, isn't healthy. As Bhopal-based food and environmental activist Rakesh Dewan puts it: "When we celebrate our food diversity, stability will come."

India Today, 9 September, 2015, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/politics-of-food/1/469388.html


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