The Hindu Business Line : A grain policy all chaff

If India has to progress, there has to be a complete re-orientation of its agricultural planning to a resource-based strategy, primarily soil-based, away from the current commodity-based strategy.

Dr M. S. Swaminathan, Chairman of the National Commission on Farmers (NCF), in June 2005, said: "India is self-sufficient in wheat." Less than a year down the line, the food situation in India, particularly wheat, is not only becoming murky, but, worse, dangerously close to getting out of control. Mr Sharad Pawar, Minister for Food and Agriculture, cleared an order to import of 0.5 million tonnes of Australian wheat at 0 per cent duty and the first consignment is in Chennai port and the rest will soon be at Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu. Global tenders have been called for three million tonnes more. The import is, ostensibly, to send a signal to the wheat trade to hold the price line. Private importers will be allowed to import under the Open General Licence (OGL) scheme.

There is already resentment among the farmers of Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh — the "wheat granary" of the North — that the additional bonus of Rs 50 a quintal promised by the Minister has come too late in the day — precisely, more than three weeks — as harvest is all complete and the farmers who had surplus had sold to private traders. These farmers now feel cheated, because, there is no more wheat to sell and speculators and big farmers, who did not sell, are holding on to their stocks, hoping to make a killing.

At this rate, India well be harking to the "ship-to-mouth" days of the late-1950s. Rice is still a shade away from this dangerous scenario, but, with plateauing crop yields, it too may soon go the wheat way. With the per capita food availability of the cereals basket, of which rice and wheat form the most important component, hovering at less than 400 grams a day, as against the 500g norm stipulated by the National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, India is certainly inching towards a "hunger trap". According to US estimates, India will need to import 92 million tonnes of cereals every year to meet the domestic demand after 2025. The agricultural messiahs of the country would dismiss this as doomsday predictions. But a critical scrutiny shows that it is a very likely scenario when cereal consumption would rise by about 30 per cent in the rural areas and about the same magnitude in India as a whole, if half the number of children in households belonging to different income groups crosses the critical cut-off level of 15 years of age.

Domestic wheat scenario

India's current wheat crop hovers around 72 million tonnes compared to 108.1 million tonnes from 28 million hectares in China, which is an average of 3.9 tonnes per ha. India's average yield of less than a tonne per ha pales in comparison. For a population difference of just under 300 million, this gap is certainly unbridgeable, given, our population policy (the China norm is one child), and the seeming inability of the agricultural fraternity, in particular the plant breeders, the soil scientists and the agronomists, to evolve innovative techniques to raise the yield. The "new" varieties, that are periodically brought out by the ICAR, the Wheat Directorate, the agricultural universities and so on, with yields no higher than 5 per cent over the previous releases, are not the answer to scaling up our production meaningfully.

On April 1, the total wheat stock in the godowns of the Food Corporation of India was 2 million tonnes. If we envisage a total procurement of about 10 million tonnes and an average public distribution offtake of 1.5 million tonnes, wheat stocks can be expected to dip to 6.5 million tonnes by the start of the kharif season and this would be close to 62 per cent less from the normative buffer-stock at 17.1 million tonnes at this time of the year. This simply shows that India will need to import more than 10 million tonnes to meet its domestic commitment.

Declining GDP contribution

From 1970-71 to 1980-81 agriculture contributed 3.43 per cent to GDP, which fell to 2.97 per cent in 1990-91 to 1999-2000. But the crucial fact is, despite this decline, during the same period, GDP climbed from 4.38 to 6.37 per cent, which is a 45.4 per cent increase, 4.8 per cent per annum, and by the end of last century had reached 7.14 per cent. In 1950-51, 76.2 per cent of India's employment was attributed to the agriculture sector and its growth was seen as crucial to sustaining demand for non-agricultural products and services, especially manufactured products. By 1999-2000, it had dropped to 60 per cent, a decline of 16 percentage points in absolute terms or 21.2 per cent in relative terms. This means, per annum, the potential for agriculture as a provider of gainful employment fell by 0.424 per cent.

All this clearly indicates that the heyday of the so-called Green Revolution, which led to a dramatic spurt in cereal production, primarily wheat and rice, is past and what India now experiences is a fallout of this dismal situation. And no crop reflects this better than wheat. To compound the problem, India, during the NDA regime, dabbled in the thoughtless "export" of foodgrains, primarily, wheat. For the 35 million tonnes of foodgrains exported at Rs 5 a kg, which is below the price at which the below poverty line (BPL) section is supplied, India also exported 103 trillion cubic metres of precious water. The latter is crucial for India, where more than 70 per cent of water resources, developed at a huge cost to the nation, are diverted for irrigation purposes. That India's water use efficiency is low is abundantly clear from the fact that while a cubic metre of water in the US produces about 1.3 kg of grain, such as wheat, in India it is just 0.3 kg.

Managing the future

If India has to come out of this situation, there has to be a complete re-orientation of agricultural planning to a resource-based strategy, primarily, soil-based, away from a commodity-based strategy, hitherto in operation. India's arable land to total land ratio is 51 per cent, while the world average is just 11 per cent, which means that we can still bring large parcels of land under the plough, especially for cereal cultivation. There has been a recent clamour to diversify from cereal production in the main cereal bowl of India, Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh, the reason being soil exhaustion.

Here, we must take a cue from China. The country has 69 per cent of the cultivated acreage under grain crops and the state policy does not countenance any diminution. Cutting down on the acreage under cereal production without bringing alternative land under wheat and rice, principally, would be a suicidal policy for India. The mandarins in New Delhi would be well advised to heed to this crucial advice.

(The author, an agricultural scientist with over three decades of experience in Europe, Africa and Asia, can be contacted at nair_kpp@yahoo.com)