To Feed a Billion Mouths
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Image: Amit Verma
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Himanshu
Profile: Assistant Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Visiting Fellow, Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.
Interests: In his spare time he enjoys tracking political developments; loves to follow cricket.
Can we feed a billion? If this is just a matter of whether we have enough food grains in the country to feed our population then the answer is an emphatic ‘yes’. But if the issue is whether we can ensure that everybody has access to enough food grains as is required to keep them above malnutrition levels, the answer is ‘no’. The ‘no’ at this point of time is based on the current version of the National Food Security Bill (NFSB) that has been placed in the Parliament.
But just to put the record straight, food grain production has never been a problem as far as food security is concerned.
There are many estimates of food grain demand in the country by national as well as international institutions ranging from 212 million tonnes to 235 million tonnes. The current production at 240 million tonnes in the current year is above all of them. In fact, this has been the situation for the last two decades with India turning into net exporter of food grains by the late 1990s.
While this may suggest a rather comfortable situation by current demand, it is also clear that this may turn into the biggest stumbling block if agricultural production does not keep pace with the growth rate of population. This happened for some years in the beginning of the last decade, but has now recovered. But even with the revival, we produce less than half of what China produces for roughly the same population.
However, these numbers may only be of some comfort unless we make our agriculture sustainable to keep pace with the growing demand for food. That will require reviving the agrarian sector which may be staring at a crisis. And herein lies the problem as well as the solution. There is widespread consensus that the revival of the agrarian sector is key to economic growth as well as food security.
But for all practical purposes, the revival of agriculture has meant increasing production with no mention of improving the condition of the Indian farmer who happens to be the backbone of this revival. Unfortunately, this is consistent with our obsession about output growth ignoring the people who produce these outputs.
Agriculture today may contribute less than 15 percent of national GDP, but it still employs two-thirds of rural workers and more than half of all workers in the country. It is this livelihood issue which misses out from most of the discussions on agrarian revival. But the livelihood issue is key to not only agricultural production, but also to what happens to incomes to the bottom half of the population. It is well known that majority of the poor are either cultivators or worse, agricultural labourers dependent on agriculture, but with no other means of sustenance.
It is here that one has to start looking at Indian agriculture not as a means of producing food and other raw material for industry, but also as an integral component of the Indian population which has remained outside the growth spurt seen in the last decade.
While agricultural growth has picked up in the last seven years, the reality is also that farm business income of farmers has started declining. That is, the farmer is suffering even when farming is shining. The decline which has started in the last two years does not show any signs of reversing the course. This has not happened because our productivity has gone down, but has happened because fertiliser prices have gone up, labour costs have gone up, agricultural credit is stagnant and above all, the terms of trade have started moving against agricultural products.
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