It’s one thing to draft policies, another to make sense of them to implement holistically. Policy coherence with a focus on food security is what the Indian chapter of the Club of Rome (CoR), a global think tank established in 1968, intends to pursue at its two-day annual conference that began here on Thursday.

Progressive thinking has been CoR’s forte over the decades. In 1972, the group commissioned ‘The Limits To Growth’ report, based on a mathematical model that explored the interaction between exponential economic and population growth and finite resources. Hitherto a subject largely absent in public debate, the report brought the question of sustainable development to the fore and is still quoted some 40 years later.

“The essence of CoR is to think systems and inter-linkages between different sectors and policy initiatives and to see that they add up to a net-positive outcome. We thought we’d push for policy coherence in food security since our policy-making systems often pull in different directions,” said Ashok Khosla, President, CoR, Indian National Association for CoR.

The conference brings politicians, bureaucrats, economists and agri-scientists together to discuss food security policies from socio-economic and political viewpoints. Importantly, it also aims to address how policies can help scale up social entrepreneurship, a growing field in India, alongside agricultural innovations.

“There are five million newborns affected by malnutrition each year. Food security, particularly in developing nations like India, is interesting due to the many related aspects, from trade, water and energy policies, land ownership, the environment etc. All of these subjects play a role in the supply-demand scenario,” Khosla told Business Line .

“So ultimately this conference will look at healthier, more systemic and long-term policymaking on food security and explore the unintended consequences of policies that seemingly don’t impact food production,” he said.

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