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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

The imminent food crisis by AV Rajwade

The current food inflation is a result of food output growth not keeping pace with population growth

Few recall that, just last month, there was a food security summit in Rome. In sharp contrast to the almost overwhelming coverage of the Copenhagen climate summit, it attracted far lesser attention from the heads of governments, as also from the media. This is somewhat strange as a food (and water) crisis can hit the world, and particularly many developing countries, much sooner than the effects of global warming. In many ways, of course, the two issues are interconnected.

But let me start on a personal note. When I lived in the UK in the 1970s, I became a vegetarian (I have been a vegetarian since then). This had nothing to do with any religious prescription: It was that, in the developed countries, at that time they were feeding animals something like 8 kg of cereals to produce 1 kg of meat. I thought this was a colossal waste at a time when hundreds of millions were not getting enough to eat, and it reduced at least my personal contribution to the waste. The United Nations Environment Program has recently come out with a 100-page report titled The environmental food crisis. The report estimates that if agricultural residues and other food waste are used as animal feed, instead of cereals, this would release enough food for an extra 3 billion people, which is expected to be the addition to the world population by 2050.

At present, the global output and consumption of food are in rough balance. For most of history, the main driver of increased output was the quantity of land under cultivation, which matched the five-time increase in global population between 1700 and 1961. Since then, the world population has gone up a further 80 per cent but the area under crops has gone up only by 8 per cent. The difference has been met through higher per acre output, thanks significantly to the Green Revolution. Lately, however, the output growth has not been keeping pace with the population growth and, unless some urgent steps are taken, food shortages and inflation would gather pace. The present 20 per cent inflation rate for primary products in India may not be easy to cure. And, as this paper has reported, Mumbai could face riots about water!

To be sure, the inflation rate is perhaps a reflection of the successive increases in the minimum support prices, and the increase in rural purchasing power, thanks to National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and otherwise. This apart, if rural income is to go up, as it needs to, the urban population may well need to live with rising food prices. There are, however, many areas where our political leadership seems to be sitting on the fence:

* Since late Sanjay Gandhi’s forced sterilisation measures, population control has remained a hot potato. And yet, this remains a key issue not only for food security but equally for global warming. After centuries of being scorned, Malthus may well have his revenge in the 21st century.
 
* Also, we do not seem to be doing enough for reducing wastages, particularly of perishables, through improvement in infrastructure like rural roads and cold storages. Organised retail could well help mitigate the problem — and also reduce the pain of the urban consumer by narrowing the huge gap between what the producer gets, and what he pays.
 
* Our attitude towards technology is another factor. On October 23, The Indian Express carried two reports: One on how the Philippines’ mountain slopes were converted into rich Bt corn fields; and the other on how Orissa has banned Bt brinjal, citing small farmers’ interests and biosafety concerns. Any comment is superfluous.
Perhaps the rest of India needs to learn from Gujarat. A recent International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) paper highlights that agricultural value added since 2000 grew at 9.6 per cent per annum, more than double India’s growth rate, and faster even then Punjab’s during the heyday of the Green Revolution. Some underlying measures include building of thousands of check dams, propagating drip irrigation, and a huge increase in the network of rural roads. The irrigated area has expanded at 4.4 per cent per annum, and contract farming has helped improve marketing. The cotton farmer in Gujarat is prosperous, even as his Vidarbha counterpart is forced to take recourse to suicide. The Amul milk revolution, originating in Gujarat of course, precedes the 21 century.

Samuelson and Keynes

I read three obituaries on Paul Samuelson — all of them also referred to Keynes. An editorial in Business Standard (“The great synthesiser”, December 15) contrasted the economics of the two, arguing that, “While Keynes provided the intellectual foundation for state intervention in a market economy, especially in the context of an economy in crisis, Samuelson created the intellectual environment for free market economics in an era of growth.” The New York Times referred to Samuelson’s “synthesis”: “The notion that economists use the neoclassical apparatus to analyse economies operating near-full employment, but switch over to Keynesian analysis when the economy turned sour.” Financial Times contented itself by merely saying that Samuelson’s move to Harvard coincided with the publication of Keynes’ General Theory. And, a letter in Financial Times (December 17) quoted economist Joan Robinson as describing Samuelson as a “bastard Keynesian”. Take your pick! Happy New Year!