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K. P. Prabhakaran Nair

WHAT are the real costs of food? When we buy a kg of rice or wheat, have we at any time wondered what its real cost could be against what we pay in the shop? We only are concerned about the `market' price of food, and not what it costs to produce. In extreme cases when food prices soar beyond control, food riots can take place, as happened in ancient Rome when price of bread went through the roof!

A myth has been built up around the world, especially in India, that food is cheap, thanks to the "Green Revolution", and that it is only `inaccessibility', meaning insufficient "purchasing power", that keeps food out of the mouths of millions of poor and starving Indians.

Food, indeed, would have been cheap, had this country succeeded in producing enough for the burgeoning population. The cost of food per se in the market is only one side of the coin. The other side, more insidious, which almost all Indians, including agricultural scientists, whose business should be to produce enough food for the bulging population, are oblivious to is that food is not cheap in India, or anywhere else, where industrial agriculture is the order of the day.

A number of hidden costs — in terms of irreparable damage to the environment, and human health hazards, which stem from industrial agriculture — are not taken into account. If food appears cheap, it is because many of the hidden costs are externalised, and the real costs of production are not internalised in the price of food.

This does not imply that food prices in the shops should rise, as this would ultimately affect the poor.

Using the taxes that the rich in India pay to support development, including agricultural development, is a potentially progressive effort, because as the rich pay more taxes, the poor, who spend proportionally more of their earnings on food, benefit much, when food prices stay low.

Unfortunately, this idea of fairness falters, when set against the massive distortions wrought by industrial farming of the "modern type" — a classical example being the so-called Green Revolution, which is characterised by the monoculture of wheat and rice in Punjab, Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, where the super-rich farm lobby has been reaping a great bounty, thanks to New Delhi's pampering, regardless of the large environmental and health costs imposed on the economy.

Other people and institutions pay these costs, and if the real costs of producing food are added up, one can see how inefficiently modern-day industrial farming performs vis-à-vis sustainable agriculture.

However, this argument is against the winds of pervasive thinking in the official agricultural machinery and the corporate farm lobby. The distortions arise because, we permit `cost-shifting' — the costs of degrading the soil environment, which also tell upon the climate ultimately, the disappearance of the rich biodiversity, first the mindless tapping of groundwater and then its pollution, the drying aquifers, and the secondary ill-health that follows from all these ravages.

The entire costs accruing from these distortions are shifted away from the big farmers who produce food in huge amounts, but inflict irreparable damage on the environment.

Indeed, if a critical quantification and calibration of these hidden costs are added on to the costs of producing food, food in the market will no more be cheap. This happens because the Indian system of farming lacks methods to determine a price on these side-effects, the external costs.

In a recent study in the UK (Jules Pretty, 2002) it has been estimated that these external costs were at least £1.5 billion to £2 billion annually. These are costs imposed on the rest of society, and are, in effect, a "hidden subsidy" to the polluters. None ever thinks or talks about it or is even aware of it. It is the `external' food subsidy that is choking the nation.

In the above study, the annual external costs arising from damage to the atmosphere is £316 million, water £231 million, bio-diversity and landscapes £126 million, to soil £96 million and human health £777 million. Employing a similar framework of analysis, the external costs in the US work out to nearly £13 billion annually.

Of all the factors analysed, the staggering cost to human health is alarming. Such an analysis is a sad testimony to the incompetence and indifference of the agricultural fraternity when we harp endlessly on the `wonders' of the so-called Green Revolution and wake up and make noises only when innocent children and adults, both men and women, succumb to the indiscriminate spraying of a chemical such as endosulfan in the cashew plantations of Kerala or the millions of dead fishes floating in the foothills of Wayanad due to mindless spraying of copper-based fungicides to control pepper diseases or when excessive DDT is detected in mothers' milk. Even when such health hazards surface, there are the countless agricultural `scientists' who, while looking the other way, try to invent reasons and save their skin, because they have their own axes to grind.

The multi-functionality of agriculture

It is the multi-functionality of agriculture that sets it apart from other activities and makes it unique. Agricultural systems, at all levels, rely for their success on the value of services which flow from the total stock of assets which they control.

Five such types of assets — natural, social, human, physical and financial capital — are now recognised as important.

Farming is sustainable only when these assets are optimised. As agricultural systems shape the very assets upon which they rely for inputs, a vital feedback loop occurs from outcomes to inputs. Good farming makes people healthier, promotes a just society, and preserves the earth and its networks of life.

Present day industrial agriculture has totally failed to achieve these principles. Good farming protects the land even when using it. Hence, sustainable agriculture has a positive effect on natural, social and human capital, while unsustainable ones feed back to deplete these assets, leaving less for future generations. For instance, an agricultural system that results in soil degradation, as in the vast tracts of Punjab and Haryana — the aftermath of the Green Revolution — while producing food, externalises costs that others must bear, as, for instance, the problem of pesticide residue.

On the other hand, a system that sequesters carbon in soils, leading to build up of organic matter, through green manuring, legume intercropping, crop rotation as opposed to continuous monoculture as wheat or rice, agroforestry, positively contribute to sustainable farming.

Similarly, a diverse agricultural system which enhances on-farm wildlife for pest control contributes to wider stocks of bio diversity, while a simplified monoculture — that is the characteristic of the Green Revolution — that eliminate wildlife do not. The inherent danger of the Bt cotton is the most disturbing example of this.

Further, agricultural systems which offer labour absorbing opportunities, through resource improvements or value-added activities, can boost and help reverse rural to urban migrations, which create a large body of unemployed agricultural labour which is at the mercy of the ubiquitous "food for work" programme.

The most illuminating example of value-addition is the brainchild of Mahatma Gandhi. When he brought the charkha to the village and urban home, he was not merely giving the spinning wheel to fabricate the home-spun khadi, but adding value to the native grown cotton, thereby achieving two ends at the same time — providing employment for the unemployed village poor, and simultaneously taking on the British might and monopoly on Indian textiles.

Until then, the established practice of the East India Company — that became the British Raj — was to export the home-grown cotton to Lancashire, spin it there and sell it back to rich Indians of bygone days.

The way out

It seems a vice like grip of industrial agriculture has come to stay in India. The subsidy-MSP (minimum support price) nexus has set in a mindset that monoculture is the best bet to make a fast buck. Such an approach is not only unsustainable, but dangerous even to human health.

If New Delhi is convinced that the MSP is the only incentive or disincentive, as the case may be, to wean away or induce farmers to go in for a specific crop, then it can devise a different MSP regime for mixed farming in the same plot — say, a cereal-legume mix or a cereal-oilseed mix — rather than defining just a cereal, or legume (pulse crops) or oilseeds.

That will be the starting point for a sustainable agriculture system than what it has been all the past four decades where through monoculture the country has neither been able to produce enough food to make it cheap nor prevent import of colossal quantities of edible oil at enormous cost to the exchequer, nor provide enough vegetable protein to the poor through pulses.

Developing such a protocol calls for both ingenuity and drive on the part of the researcher, the bureaucrat and the commitment of the politician who will need to convince the masses on the merits of an uncharted course. Are these in short supply on the Indian agricultural front?

(The author is a senior fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.)

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