Never mind wishful thinking by the government and RBI. Food will never be cheaper than what it is today. Not this year. Or in future. The reason is simple. Growing food in India has become extremely expensive. Crops are pricier even before they reach the market and face the pulls and tugs of rising local demand and exports. The farmer’s single biggest cost now is labour. Farm labour wages have doubled...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Total Matching Records found : 577
Food Security Sans PDS: Universalization Through Targeting? by Smita Gupta
The case of the Food Security Bill gets curiouser and curiouser. What started off as a fight between universalization and targeting has ended (or so it would seem) in a complete victory in the National Advisory Council, Government of India (NAC) for targeting through universalization (if such a thing was possible), with the honourable exception of Prof Jean Dreze, who has to be commended for his ‘note of disagreement’. On...
More »A single solution
After months of public and internal debate, the National Advisory Council (NAC) — an organisation whose clout and significance derive from the fact that Sonia Gandhi chairs it — has put forth a set of recommendations for the National Food Security Act. The core recommendations are to provide legal entitlements to cereals for 75 per cent of India's population, that is, 90 per cent of the rural population and the...
More »Number of hungry people in the world “unacceptably high” by Gargi Parsai
Global hunger is rising rapidly due to sharp spikes in food commodity prices. The combination of global food crisis and economic recession pushed the number of hungry people beyond the one billion mark, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation's Director-General Jacques Diouf told the 36th session of the Inter-governmental Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in Rome on Wednesday. The session has been timed with the World Food Day on Saturday. Agricultural scientist...
More »NAC plan fails to pass muster with ministry by Liz Mathew
The department of food and public distribution has rejected both proposals of the National Advisory Council (NAC) to provide food security, saying the government risked running up against supply constraints and taking on an unsustainable fiscal burden. The rejection by the ministry of consumer affairs, food and public distribution means that both NAC, headed by Congress party president Sonia Gandhi, and the government will have to go back to the drawing board...
More »
