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Towards Hunger
Free India - Media Coverage
26 April 2001, Economic Times, New
Delhi, India
Scarcity despite plenty:
UNWFP tells why
Our New Delhi Bureau
IN MANY places across India’s countryside, mountains of
grain have piled up, often covered with little more than scraps of tarpaulin
or plastic sheets. These grain mountains now amount to a little less than 50
million tonnes — about a fourth of all the grain that India produced last
year. Yet, as uneaten grain piles up, in many parts of the country people
remain chronically undernourished. Results of an extensive study by the
United Nations World Food Programme released on Tuesday, throw new light on
the paradoxes of India’s food economy.
The UNWFP says factors like geographical terrain, food imports, market
integration, subsidies, health, sanitation and even the quality of water are
important factors that affect the availability of food and the degree of
nutrition among people. Another factor, as Amartya Sen and everybody’s
grandmother pointed out long ago, is that poor families don’t have the money
to buy food, even when there’s enough to go around. Putting all these
factors together, the UNWFP and the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation have
compiled a Food Insecurity Atlas of Rural India.
The Atlas ranks different states according to the level of `food security’
that people have. Punjab, Haryana and Kerala figure as the best fed
states. Unsurprisingly, Bihar and the newly created state of Jharkhand
are among the three worst off states. Madhya Pradesh, where chief minister
Digvijay Singh’s decentralising reforms are supposed to have made life easier
for people figures among the three worst-off states in India in terms of food
security. Chhattisgarh, widely believed to be poorer than Madhya Pradesh,
does better than MP according to the Atlas.
A companion volume to the Atlas, called Enabling Development: Food Assistance
in South Asia (Oxford University Press, 2001), sums up research on the
economics of food in south Asia, including India and its neighbouring
countries. It points out that India has come a long way since Partition, when
it inherited 82 per cent of the population of undivided India, but only 75
per cent of the cereal farmland.
Today, enough foodgrain is grown to feed the population, but future trends
will depend crucially on whether the dietary habits of increasingly better
off Indians stay heavily cereal based, as they are now, or whether they shift
to consuming more meat, poultry and dairy foods. Paradoxically, if Indians
shift to a more protein-heavy diet, the country’s requirement of grain will
go up sharply as enormous volumes of grain will be required as animal
feed. The book argues that, "India will be facing a herculean task
if it wants to cover rising domestic demand from its own
production." The UNWFP says governments in India and its
neighbouring countries should use food-based aid to boost nutrition and health
levels.
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