Lockdown: Agriculture serves as the lifeline

When people across the country are confined to their homes the only pressing requirement they have is for food – and that too three times a day. Whether you are rich, sitting comfortably in your homes and trying out new recipes to prepare a fresh dish every other day or you are a poor migrant struggling to find a banana that you can still eat from the rotten heap lying on the banks of Yamuna river, food is after all a basic human necessity.

It is at this difficult time of a lockdown that the often repeated phrase -- agriculture is the mainstay of the Indian economy – not only becomes obvious, but is firmly established.

But imagine the chaos if the country didn't have enough food at these testing times? Imagine if we had followed the prescription of our mainline economists who had wanted food stocks limit to be reduced to feed only 20 per cent of our population? Imagine if we had dismantled the APMC mandis and done away with crop procurement as the industry had always wanted us to do? Even despite having a record foodgrain surplus – 77 million tonnes, at least three times more than the requirement -- still 96 per cent of the lakhs of migrants did not get their share of dry rations, says a study.

The avalanche of migrants heading back home after the lockdown was imposed, travelling on foot for hundreds of kilometres, without an assured supply of food, has provided a visual image to a monumental crisis that was building up for decades. The massive reverse migration, and subsequent efforts being made by the state governments to provide temporary shelter and food to those struck on the way, has brought forth another hidden dimension of the ongoing agrarian crisis. Urban centres had failed to ‘absorb’ the migrant workforce, maintaining a clear cut social distance from the migrants, and when the daily wage link was suddenly snapped the teeming work force felt abandoned.  

A majority of these migrant workers are unlikely to return soon. The fact that they took the hard decision to tread back home to be with their families, where they wouldn’t be at least facing hunger, speaks volumes of the flawed economic thinking which actually pushed people out of the rural areas to migrate into the cities because the cities needed cheap labour. With farm prices kept low to keep food inflation under control, and at the same time provide cheaper raw material to the industry, agriculture was deliberately kept impoverished. Despite being denied their rightful income, farmers continued to produce a surplus for the country year after year.

The lockdown coincided with the rabi harvest season. This year, despite unseasonal rains, production was expected to be bountiful. But with people asked to stay indoors, and with restaurants, hotels and dhabaspulling down the shutter, the demand for perishable vegetables and fruits collapsed. Reports of farmers re-ploughing fields of cabbage, cauliflower, raddish, peas and other vegetables poured in. Tomato farmers dumped the harvest in the crop fields. Premier products like strawberry had to be fed to cows. Button mushroom rotted. The demand for premier Alphonso mangoes, grapes, banana and even plantation crops like coffee, tea, cashew nuts and spices faced price crash. Poultry suffered the worst. Milk, fisheries and flowers were similarly badly hit.

Shortage of farm labour compounded the existing crisis. Even in case of wheat, where a record 106 million tonnes of grain is to be harvested, paucity of farm workers has hit harvesting operations. Although the government has for all practical purposes kept agriculture, horticulture, plantation crops, fisheries and animal husbandry out of the lockdown provisions from April 20, procurement of wheat is slowly picking up. But interestingly, while it is agriculture that suffered a severe blow during lockdown 1.0, the impression being generated is that the rural areas are relatively better off.

This crisis apart, the bigger question is whether the pandemic will change the way we look at agriculture? Whether agriculture will receive priority in public policy? Or once the fire-fighting operations are over, it will be back to square one. While the State’s role in health and education is expected to expand, will agriculture also emerge on the top of dominant economic thinking? Will a relook at agriculture bring back the focus on making agriculture economically viable? These are questions that need to be seriously deliberated because the policy changes after Covid-19 will determine the future of agriculture.

Corona virus pandemic therefore has come as a loud knock at a time when the dominant economic policies were aimed at propping up the industrial sector. Over the past few decades, agriculture had been systematically ignored in policy planning. The best reflection for this perhaps comes from the declining public sector investments in agriculture. Between 2011-12 and 2017-18, public sector investments in agriculture hovered between 0.3 to 0.4 per cent of the GDP for a sector which employs 50 per cent of the total workforce. It is futile to expect a miracle in agriculture without providing adequate investments commiserating with the population involved.

With agriculture emerging as the strong pillar of the economy at these difficult times, it should be abundantly clear that any further effort to marginalise farming will be politically suicidal. While agriculture will need a total revamp, and with huge investments the challenge will be to provide farmers with a remunerative price and being assured a monthly income. At the cost of repeating again, an OECD study had shown Indian farmers lost Rs 45-lakh crore between 2000 and 2016-17 by being denied their rightful income. Imagine if Rs 45-lakh crore (or Rs 2.6 lakh crore every year) was paid to farmers, there would have been hardly any possibility of farmers abandoning agriculture and migrating to the cities. Post Covid-19, let’s aim at Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas and Sabka Vishwas.

This is not a wishful thinking. It is an idea whose time has come. #

Saved by Plough. Orissa Post. April 18, 2020
https://www.orissapost.com/saved-by-the-plough/ 

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Hunger Amidst Plenty

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 25^th 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.

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/famished-in-land-of-plenty/850558.html?fbclid=IwAR3eQae070zJJ1BL-NHcZxQbfshVrvpSSsbHiXK2PpbuhHkPYbbsw64gd48

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