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Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. XIV, No. 44, October 30, pp.33-38, Jayati Ghosh (2010)

The urgent need to deal with the persistent problem of food insecurity in India requires multi-pronged policy interventions that cover a wide range of issues including addressing the policy neglect of agriculture under neoliberal market-oriented policy framework, banning financial speculation in the global commodity market and creating public food distribution system that guarantees universal access to food.

The global food crisis has once again highlighted the problem of food insecurity plaguing different parts of the developing world for some time now. India is one such country where the problem of pervasive hunger continues to afflict majority of its people. Impressive economic growth of the Indian economy over the past two decades has not help improve food security for the bulk of its population. The recent global food crisis and the ongoing economic downturn, is likely to have worsened the problem of hunger even further. A recent report by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) on the Global Hunger Index, states that the level of hunger in India is "alarming". In this context there has been growing demands stressing a rights-based approach for providing food security for the people of India.

Ghosh argues that the Government of India needs to adopt a multi pronged approach that includes but goes beyond a legal promise guaranteeing access to food in order to ensure genuine food security of its people. The need for a multi-pronged approach arises from the fact that the problem of food crisis facing various developing countries, including India, is the result of a combination of real economy factors, especially those affecting supply, and more recently, speculative activity in global commodity markets.

Among the factors affecting global supply of food, two factors are of particular significance. The first short-run factor relates to the policy of promoting bio-fuel and the associated “effects of diversion of both acreage and food crop output for bio-fuel production” in the USA, Europe, Brazil and elsewhere. The second and more medium term factor concerns the policy neglect of agriculture over the past two decades. The open market-oriented policy framework adopted by various nations over this period lie at the root of this neglect. Lack of public investment in agriculture and in agricultural research, rise in costs of various inputs, reduction in subsidies to farmers, decreasing access to institutional credit and the ensuing problem of farmers having to depend on more expensive informal credit networks, are some of the policy-driven impacts that have adversely affected financial viability and sustainability of agricultural (and food) production.

As a result, even before the global economic crisis hit the world, various parts of the developing world have been afflicted by growing prevalence of hunger and food insecurity.

The global food crisis and the attendant volatility in world trade prices of important food items have obviously worsened the situation further. However, the dramatic swings in global food prices since 2007, the author points out, are largely a result of financial speculation in the commodity market that resulted in “excessive volatility displayed by important commodities over 2008”.

Therefore, the author argues, the resolution of the problem of growing hunger and food insecurity in India requires a shift in policy orientation towards stronger public intervention to increase domestic food production by improving productivity and financial viability of farming, avoid volatility in domestic prices of foodgrain and “curb speculative tendencies”.

The other aspect of ensuring food security concerns the creation of a public food distribution system that reaches all the people. To be effective, food distribution has to be combined with public food procurement. In this respect, a law that ensures universal access to food and that places responsibility and culpability on government can play an important role in addressing issues related both to food distribution and its production and procurement. For this it is essential that such a law ensures universal access rather than only to a section of the population.

Unfortunately, various versions of the proposed “Right to Food” bill in India, the author points out, are “travesties of the original promise and negations of the spirit of ensuring genuine food security”.

The reasons are many. Firstly, the initial version of the bill circulated by the government proposed to provide subsidised food only to those below the poverty line (BPL). Such targeted approaches are known to suffer from the inevitable problems of mis-targeting. These problems of “unfair exclusion of the genuinely poor and unwarranted inclusion of the non-poor” are bound to arise, especially in a hierarchical and discriminatory system, when scarce goods are made available to only to a section of the population.

Secondly, under-nutrition rates in India tend to be much higher than poverty estimates, so that focusing only on the poor would leave out the majority of the population who are nutritionally deprived but are not ‘officially’ poor.

Thirdly, the surveys to identify the poor or the food-insecure are carried out infrequently, as a result they often fail to capture variability in material conditions that push people into poverty or make them food insecure. Monitoring regularly to overcome these problems is administratively impossible.

Fourthly, by allowing for replacement of physical provision with a system of cash transfers, this version of the bill seriously compromises the role of a public procurement and distribution system in ensuring national food security. Public procurement and distribution system provide “an incentive price to farmers for foodgrain production and ensure the distribution of such food to deficit areas”. Replacing physical provision with cash transfers weakens this role considerably.

Even the recent revised version of the bill, the author explains, is not free from these problems. The revised draft proposes to provide subsidised food to nearly 90% of the rural population and 50% of the urban population. However, instead of a providing uniform entitlement at a common price, the bill adopts a complicated procedure of providing “varying entitlements” at different prices to priority households and general households. The author suggests that other than the usual problems of leakages and misappropriation, the administrative costs involved in managing such a complicated system is likely to far outweigh the benefits.
The author concludes by arguing that a system to provide universal access, at a common price is far more sensible and “political and social mobilisation around this issue, …, is therefore essential” for ensuring that the need for providing universal food security is taken seriously by the government.

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References:

NAC: “National Food Security Bill: Proposal to NAC on 30 August 2010 on Behalf of NAC Working Group”, 30 August 2010

IFPRI et al, 2010. “Global Hunger Index”, The Challenge of Hunger: Focus On The Crisis Of Child Undernutrition”, October.