The Hindu Business Line : Hungry in `Shining India'

FIFTY-seven years after Independence, and nearly four decades after the launch of the so-called "Green Revolution", India is home to one-third the world's nearly 860 million hungry. Of the poor, the majority are women — many pregnant mothers, most of whom work in gruelling situations — and disadvantaged children condemned to a life of starvation and despair. The nation has the unenviable record of mitigating hunger, worse than even Sub-Saharan Africa, where there never was a Green Revolution.

The cause of hunger has caught the attention of intellectuals, social activists and even the judiciary, especially when the state is boasting of its granaries (the Food Corporation of India godowns, that is) bursting at the seams, with much of the grains purchased from the affluent farmers of Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh at unrealistically high prices, ubiquitously known as the minimum support price (MSP). And the common refrain is that it is the mismatch between the purchasing power of the poor and not grain supply per se that is the cause of widespread hunger.

A critical scrutiny of India's record on food production, which reflects in per capita the calorie consumption, would unequivocally show that it is not just "policy delusions", as Dr Amartya Sen would have us believe, that is at the root of Indian hunger. It is the mismatch between production and demand. And the "Green Revolution" has not been able to address this problem in the past more than two decades when it ran out of steam, and the scientists, who hoisted this unsustainable high-input farming technology on an unsuspecting India, have failed miserably to provide a viable alternative to this nation.

In vast stretches of barren fields of Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, the cradle of the Green Revolution, not a blade of grass can grow any more. A look at some unexplained aspects of Indian hunger.

There clearly must be a distinction between two aspects of the debate on hunger vis-à-vis food — the right to food and the right to eat. What does the right to food imply? In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed and the right to food was acknowledged. The international declaration, asserting the right to food, does not imply that states shall be responsible directly for fulfilling the individual's need and right to food. Article 25 of the declaration maintains that "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well- being of himself and his family, including food... and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control." In 1966, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which further formalised the right to food as a basic human right. Article 11 of the Covenant endorsed Article 25 of the 1948 Declaration cited above. By 1989, as many as 85 states, including India, had signed the Covenant. Yet, more than half a century after adopting the original Declaration and after two World Food Summits in Rome, where the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is headquartered, India is home to the largest number of the world's hungry.

The right to eat is a much more tragic case. Only two years ago, Rajasthan was experiencing the worst famine-like situation, where hungry tribals in their hundreds and prematurely aging young men and women, due to excessive fluoride content in well water, were dying not far from Jaipur where the FCI godown was piled high with foodrains. In December 2000, the Union Minister for Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution wrote to all Chief Ministers admitting that 50 million peope were victims of starvation.

In an interview to a TV news channel, a Senior Regional Manager of the FCI said that he could allocate the grains only on authority from the Centre. Tragically, there was a proposal to dump the grain into the sea as room had to be made for the new harvest. The irony of the fact is that the starving tribals and the overstuffed FCI godowns were separated only by a few km.

All of the above would convince even a casual observer of the mismatch between purchasing power and grain supply that is at the root of Indian hunger. But is this the reality? To know it, one has to critically examine the enigma of calorie consumption pattern in India.

At the centre of Indian hunger is the more startling features of the country's development over the past several decades, which pertains to the decline in per capita calorie consumption among the poor. The average calorie consumption was already low by international standards and the fact that it has actually declined in spite of apparently high economic growth rates, is something that merits serious attention. In the rural areas, the percentage population with less than 90 per cent of the normative calorie intake rose from 40 to 45 between 1983 and 1999-2000.

A careful analysis of the situation would show that the declining rate of calorie consumption in India is linked to the gradual decline in per capita grain production. The percentage annual compound growth of crops in India between 1980-81 and 1991-1992 and 1992-93 and 1999-2000 in the case of foodgrains was 2.9 and 2 respectively with a break-up of 3.1 per cent and 2.1 per cent for cereals and 1.4 per cent and 0.8 per cent for pulses. Crop-wise, it was 3.7 per cent and 2.2 per cent for rice and 3.6 per cent and 3.6 per cent (no change) for wheat. In fact, coarse cereals (poor man's food) came down to negative figure (-1.6). Many economists in India tend to attribute the yield decreases to lower sown area. In reality, this is not so. For instance, during the above-mentioned period, the area under wheat rose 157 per cent, while that for rice 54 per cent.

Clearly, the Green Revolution, centred primarily on wheat and rice, has fallen on its face.

What the protagonists of the Green Revolution and the food self-sufficiency bandwagon are proclaiming is that the production pattern is responding to a major shift in the consumption pattern, rather than deceleration in the quantum of foodgrains produced per se. In other words, effectively, India is experiencing the Engles Curve-type shift, whereby Indians are moving from consuming coarse cereals such as bajra, ragi, sorghum, maize, and so on, to finer cereals such as rice and wheat, and other supplements such as fruits, vegetables, fish, meat and dairy products. This argument gets empirical support from the findings of the National Sample Surveys (NSS) over time, that per capita foodgrains consumption has been declining in the 1980s and the 1990s and that such declines are evident even from the lower consumption expenditure deciles.

Obviously, one serious flaw in this argument is that, in terms of continued prevalence of poverty, it can be pointed out that the total foodgrains production in the country is still based on a situation where around one-third of India's population lives in abject poverty, which implies that it has no access to a consumption basket that allows enough expenditure on food to meet the minimum calorific norm. Additionally, the NSS also says that 60 per cent of the population actually consumes less than this norm. The proponents of the earlier detailed argument respond to this situation by suggesting that even the eating habits of the poor, including the rural poor, is shifting to the urban pattern, where finer cereals such as rice and wheat are preferred to coarse grains and also choosing a greater variety in the food basket rather than relying dominantly on consumption of foodgrains alone. If this argument is accepted, it follows that domestic production data are either outdated or the concern simply alarmist. Perhaps this is the logic behind the new thrust to diversify from foodgrains to other cash crops such as fruits, sugarcane and cotton. This is a catastrophic view, and can only be accepted at a terrible price to the nation's food security.

There are several reasons why it should not be accepted. First relates to the actual food demand in the country. If it were a case where production of foodgrains is following a shift in the demand pattern, rather than reflecting actual production constraints, such as the lack of really very high yielding new crop varieties, sensible and sustainable soil fertility management, all of which will affect the supply pattern, the relative price of foodgrains would not have escalated the way it did. In Delhi, wheat is now being sold at Rs 1,000 plus a quintal and that means atta at Rs 20 plus a kg. What should a poor daily-paid labourer (earning about Rs 100 a day, which translates to about $2, the world's poor, according to the World Bank) with a wife and two-three children do to keep the family going when his daily need of atta would be not less than two-three kg?

Food has simply become so expensive that an average family spends in excess of 40 per cent of its income on food alone, when in the US the family would be entitled to free food stamps. And the prime reason is deceleration in production. Noted economist Prof Abhijit Sen, who headed the high-level panel on long-term policy on foodgrains, is on record that "The per hectare yields are not rising and the cost of production is not coming down and yield increases in staples such as rice and wheat was practically zero in the last few years".

This is a clear indictment of India's agricultural fraternity, which has been unable to breach the yield barrier in rice and wheat despite colossal crores of rupees being spent on `research'.

The price of food grains, in relation to the aggregate wholesale price index (WPI), has increased markedly in the 1990s compared to the 1980s. It should also be taken note of that the period of rising production in the 1980s was also when relative prices of foodgrains fell and incidence of poverty dropped. Conversely, it is the deceleration in production that signalled rising relative prices coupled with increased incidence of poverty. The nation will pay a terrible price for this and the deceleration in food production and the escalation of food prices will adversely impact the overall economic strategy of the country. Rising food prices will put pressure on both agricultural and non-agricultural wages. These wage increases will automatically reflect on product costs and, in turn, price out Indian products from the international markets. Thus, the price the country will pay in opening up agricultural trade, in the hope of enhancing export, will, ironically lead to just the opposite result. Under these circumstances, one wonders if it is really possible to be sanguine about India's food production capacity and food prices. These are the core issues of hunger.

While China is racing ahead with its hybrid rice, Indian genetic `engineers' have only been talking of decoding the rice genome for the past almost five years. It is a bitter fact that the country has to accept that the pay off from the agricultural research is found so much wanting. In terms of staff strength and funds,

India's agricultural research compares very well with that of China and Brazil, though the latter two have much more to show. In the absence of any significant increase in grain production in the foreseeable future, the only alternative will be to manage low grain prices to the really poor and needy. Does New Delhi have the political will to do it? An alternative to this would be anarchy, where hungry hordes will have to be encouraged and physically supported to loot the FCI godowns. Food mountains and hunger must not co-exist. Just as protests do not stop wars, radical changes will not be negotiated by indifferent governments; it can only be enforced by people.

India cannot afford to have the luxury of "discipline" at the cost of dignity. Right to eat, and not just right to food, is part of that dignity. A government's victims are not just those that it chooses to kill and imprison. The millions displaced, dispossessed and condemned to a lifetime of starvation also count among them. This, unfortunately, is not symbolic of a "Shining India"

(The author was formerly National Science Foundation Professor, Royal Society, Belgium, and can be contacted at nair_kpp@yahoo.com)