This strange paradox of plenty remains unexplained. At a time when grain silos are bursting at the seams, the 2019 Global Hunger Index (GHI) has ranked India at 102 among 117 countries, placing it in a category with ‘serious’ levels of hunger. As if this is not enough, the latest UNICEF report on the State of World’s Children lists India with the highest burden of death among children below 5 years age, accounting for 8.82 lakh children dying last year.
While the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution has reportedly written to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help reduce the burden of carrying overflowing food stocks with the Food Corporation of India (FCI) by looking into the possibility of providing surplus food as ‘humanitarian aid’ to deserving countries, ironically as many as 90 per cent children in the age bracket of 6 to 23 months do not get enough to eat. While acute hunger stalks the impoverished, a silent tragedy affecting our most precious resource -- children -- has been quietly unfolding. Every second child is stunted, wasted or underweight.
Reports say that against the requirement of buffer stocking norms of 307.70 lakh tonnes of foodgrains required on Oct 1, the FCI was already saddled with more than double the quantity -- 669.15 lakh tonnes of wheat and rice – a month earlier, on Sept 1. With paddy harvest now in full swing, food stocks in the central pool can be easily expected to further swell in the weeks to come. Add to it the bumper harvest of fruits and vegetables at 3.14.5 million tonnes in 2018-19; and a record milk production of 176 million tonnes, there appears to be no shortage of available nutritious food. With abundant food supplies, I see no reason why India should be harbouring the largest population of hungry in the world.
To make it simple, as someone had said, if every bag of surplus food grain was to be stacked one over the other, it will be possible to walk to the moon and come back. The surplus stock has in fact grown ever since.
Despite the huge food surplus, India’s hunger ranking is in fact much worse than the neighbouring countries. While China records an impressive standing at 25th position globally, India lags behind all the BRICS countries and its performance leaves much to be desired when compared with neighbouring countries -- Sri Lanka (66), Nepal (73), Bangladesh (88) and Pakistan (94). Even Venezuela (65), North Korea (92) and Ethiopia (93) perform much better. In fact, ever since the GHI report was first released in 2006, and 14 reports later, nothing seems to have changed in India as far as hunger and malnutrition is concerned.
It’s all a question of priorities. Over the years while the emphasis has remained on achieving a higher growth trajectory, appalling hunger and malnutrition has been simply brushed under the glare and glitter of economic growth. But hunger as well as hidden hunger continued to strongly defy the predominant economic prescription which believes that a higher economic growth will help reduce the population living in hunger. On the contrary, as economic growth grew so did hunger and malnutrition. And this, despite former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh calling malnutrition ‘a national shame’. Earlier too, successive Prime Ministers had vowed to fight hunger but somehow hunger and malnutrition remained robustly sustainable
While I understand that removing hunger is quite a complex and challenging task, and quite a lot has been achieved over the years in addressing child malnutrition, stunting and wasting, the monumental task to make hunger history is certainly not impossible. Besides the enactment of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013 which provides subsidised grains to two-third of the population, and a number of programmes and schemes to fight child malnutrition, eradicating hunger and malnutrition does not seem to be a stated objective of the macro-economic policies. Even when the NFSA was being deliberated and discussed, mainline economists had voiced concern saying any move to enhance food subsidy will increase the fiscal deficit.
This is in contrast to a ‘Zero Hunger’ programme initiated by a former Brazilian President Lula da Silva in 2003 aiming to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. President Lula’s famed ‘Zero Hunger’ programme dovetailed a mixture of emergency aid with structural reforms in agriculture. According to The Guardiannearly 32 million people (16 per cent of the population) were pulled out of poverty by 2011 through a programme which relied on “income transfer programmes such as Bolsa Familia – which supported more than a quarter of the population – combine food safety, access to education and health, and measures to foster local development, especially in rural areas.“ Brazil is now ranked 18, even higher than China, in the GHI index.
In essence, Brazil’s ‘Zero Hunger’ programme had successfully linked food production with hunger eradication. There might be gaps, but still it offers a time bound framework that can be replicated. In India, while the policy emphasis remains on increasing food production, and the surplus is then diverted to meet the food requirement in the deficit areas, farmers’ welfare appears to be no where high on priority. With 600 million work force engaged in agriculture, directly and indirectly, a revival of agriculture is fundamental to any attempt to achieve ‘Zero Hunger’. This has to be accompanied by enhancing public sector investments in agriculture, which according to RBI had remained at 0.4 per cent of the GDP between 2011-12 and 2016-17.
A lot of promises and commitments to fight hunger and malnutrition have been half-heartedly made over the past few decades. But the fact that an alarmingly high number of casualties -- more than 2,400 children in India – are succumbing to under-nutrition and various forms of malnutrition every day, categorised as ‘burden of death’, shows how poor diets are responsible for the grave human tragedy. With no shortfall in food production, and with ability to rejix economic policies, all it requires is a strong political will to remove hunger. India cannot dream of being an economic super power with a large population of hungry and malnourished. #
Famished in land of poverty. The Tribune. Oct 21, 2019.
