Indian Food: Hunger Amidst Plenty

Edited from a NYT article.

RANWAN, India — In this north Indian village, workers recently dismantled stacks of burned and mildewed rice while flies swarmed nearby over spoiled wheat. Local residents said the rice crop had been sitting along the side of a highway for several years and was now being sent to a distillery to be turned into liquor.

 Just 180 miles to the south, in a slum on the outskirts of New Delhi, Leela Devi struggled to feed her family of four on meager portions of flatbread and potatoes, which she said were all she could afford on her disability pension and the irregular wages of her day-laborer husband. Her family is among the estimated 250 million Indians who do not get enough to eat. 

Such is the paradox of plenty in India’s food system. Spurred by agricultural innovation and generous farm subsidies, India now grows so much food that it has a bigger grain stockpile than any country except China, and it exports some of it to countries like Saudi Arabia and Australia. Yet one-fifth of its people are malnourished — double the rate of other developing countries like Vietnam and China — because of pervasive corruption, mismanagement and waste in the programs that are supposed to distribute food to the poor. 

“The reason we are facing this problem is our refusal to distribute the grain that we buy from farmers to the people who need it,” said Biraj Patnaik, who advises India’s Supreme Court on food issues. “The only place that this grain deserves to be is in the stomachs of the people who are hungry.”

After years of neglect, the nation’s failed food policies have now become a subject of intense debate in New Delhi, with lawmakers, advocates for the poor, economists and the news media increasingly calling for an overhaul. The populist national government is considering legislation that would pour billions of additional dollars into the system and double the number of people served to two-thirds of the population. The proposed law would also allow the poor to buy more rice and wheat at lower prices.

Proponents say the new law, if written and executed well, could help ensure that nobody goes hungry in India, the world’s second-most populous country behind China. But critics say that without fundamental system reforms, the extra money will only deepen the nation’s budget deficit and further enrich the officials who routinely steal food from various levels of the distribution chain. 

India’s food policy has two central goals: to provide farmers with higher and more consistent prices for their crops than they would get from the open market, and to sell food grains to the poor at lower prices than they would pay at private stores. 

The federal government buys grain and stores it. Each state can take a certain amount of grain from these stocks based on how many of its residents are poor. The states deliver the grain to subsidized shops and decide which families get the ration cards that allow them to buy cheap wheat and rice there.

The sprawling system costs the government 750 billion rupees ($13.6 billion) a year, almost 1 percent of India’s gross domestic product. Yet 21 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion people remain undernourished, a proportion that has changed little in the last two decades despite an almost 50 percent increase in food production, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute, a research group in Washington.

The new food security law could more than double the government’s outlays to 2 trillion rupees a year, according to some estimates. 

Much of the extra money would go to buy more grain, even though the government already has a tremendous stockpile of wheat and rice — 71 million tons as of early May, up 20 percent from a year earlier.

“India is paying the price of an unexpected success — our production of rice and wheat has surged and procurement has been better than ever,” said Kaushik Basu, the chief economic adviser to India’s Finance Ministry and a professor at Cornell University. “This success is showing up some of the gaps in our policy.”

The biggest gap is the inefficient, corrupt system used to get the food to those who need it. Just 41.4 percent of the grain picked up by the states from federal warehouses reaches Indian homes, according to a recent World Bank study. 

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A wonderful example of the fact that capitalism does not work to meet people's needs in any way. The system here is working perfectly and creating huge profits for the few:- meanwhile, millions starve or face daily hunger amongst plenty. So much plenty in fact it is rotting in stockpiles. 

This abomination, this disgrace, this inhuman example must show, even to those that struggle with politics and theory, that the current state of affairs is wrong in every way and that money alone does not, will not and cannot provide for people's basic needs.

SussexSocialist