ECONOMY-INDIA: Good Monsoons, But Millions Still Hungry

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, May 30 2000 (IPS) - Weather experts have predicted India’s 13th good monsoon in a row, bringing cheer to farmers, the government and the booming consumer goods industry, but this is little consolation for tens of millions of underfed Indians.

The Indian government and consumer goods makers heaved a sigh of relief when the Meteorological Department, using supercomputer-based forecasting, declared in mid-May that India would have another good spell of rains this year.

Consumer goods companies have long come to treat rural India, in spite of its persisting image of poverty, as an area for rapid market expansion.

A recent study published by the top business body, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), said that India’s toilet and washing soap industry alone found 40 million new customers in the country’s over half a billion villages between the year 1995 and 1998.

The government’s optimistic estimate of seven percent annual growth in its latest budget tabled in parliament in end February, too was based on the expectation of a good monsoon.

A new national farm policy tabled in Indian Parliament this year said farm growth was vital for industrial growth and demanded that farming be treated as an industrial activity.

The four-month monsoon arises over the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, first hitting the southwestern coastal state of Kerala on or around June 1.

“Plentiful rain should translate into increased crop production which, in turn, means a much higher turnover of fast moving consumer goods and lower end white goods,” exulted the pro-business Times of India newspaper in an editorial Tuesday.

The successive good rains were seen to have boosted food security. Despite a severe water scarcity crisis in western Gujarat and Rajasthan states, the government expected to build up a mountain of 42 million tonnes of grain by the end of June – the highest surplus food grain stocks in the country’s history.

According to Ashok Gulati of the prestigious Institute of Economic Growth, with such a surplus, the country could readily face two consecutive droughts at current consumption levels. India needs a food buffer stock of only 24 million tonnes, he has calculated.

But, Gulati hastened to add, this did not mean that India has banished hunger. Part of the reason for the foodgrain surplus is low consumption by those who need it most.

Despite years of ever more plentiful farm harvests that have propped up mainly rural India’s liberalisation polices begun a decade ago, an estimated one-third of the one billion Indians do not get minimum nourishment, he said.

“Broadly one third of India seems to remain underfed – this coexistence of grain surpluses with large-scale hunger should make any serious policy-maker think,” Gulati said.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has classified India as a low-income, food-deficient country with a third of its population “food insecure” and consuming less than basic energy requirements.

Although the government runs a countrywide network of subsidised foodgrain sales outlet for the poor, this is of little help. Independent surveys have found that the really poor who live in villages are unable to take full advantage of the so-called ‘fair price’ shops.

Hikes in recent years in prices of the grain sold by these shops are said to have reduced the difference from the open market price. Recently, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government sharply hiked fair price shop rates under pressure from multilateral donors to cut the swelling food subsidy bill.

According to Y.P. Gupta a scientist with the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), the present annual per capita food availability in India is 175 kg against 300 kg in most countries.

India cannot simply depend on providentially good monsoons, but must try to boost farm productivity by improving cultivation in both rain-fed and dry land farming areas, Gupta said.

The country would have to double farm production over the next 15 years to not only feed the growing population, but to create farm-related work for the tens of millions of jobless people in the countryside, he has estimated.

It is also important to ensure food quality. A document

released last year by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said the per capita availability of protein for the average Indian had halved since 1951.

Independent food security analysts such as Devinder Sharma have cautioned that Indian agriculture is seriously threatened by the forces of liberalisation.

Wheat and rice farmers in India’s food bowl state of northern Punjab state have been induced by food transnationals (TNCs) to switch to potatoes and tomatoes for the fast food industry, he said.

Last December, India began phasing out decades-old quantitative restrictions on imports of a range of food items including staples such as wheat and rice which, Sharma said, was the most serious threat yet to farmers in this country.