Central Planning

Are Acche Din Here for Onion Farmers and Consumers?

Yesterday (September 22, 2020), the Rajya Sabha passed the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Bill, 2020. The Lok Sabha had passed the Bill a week back on September 15. The passage of this Bill essentially dropped cereals, pulses, oilseeds, edible oils, potatoes and onions, from the definition of essential commodities.

The government may regulate the supply of food items only under extraordinary circumstances like war, famine, extraordinary price rise and a natural calamity of grave nature.

In this piece we will concentrate on what this change means in the context of onions.

India grows 10% of the world’s onions. It is the second largest producer of onions in the world, after China. In 2019-20, the total onion production across the country stood at 251.46 lakh tonnes. But despite being the second largest producer in the world, the price fluctuations of onions within the country are huge.

In fact, on more than a few occasions in the past, the price of onions has crossed Rs 100 per kg, causing a lot of pain across households, with the onion being an important ingredient in different kinds of food all across the country. Elections have been lost on the price of onions going up, making it a politically sensitive vegetable.

Take a look at the following chart, which basically plots the inflation of onions as measured by the consumer price index. Inflation is the rate of price rise.

Up and Down


Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

(The curve is broken towards the end because data for a couple of months wasn’t available due to the covid-pandemic).

The inflation of onions is all over the place. It just tells us how volatile onion prices are at the consumer level. It’s not just the consumers who face this volatility, even the farmers face volatility in the price they get for the onions that they grow.

All over the place

Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

The above chart shows the volatility of onion prices at the wholesale level. And the way the curve goes up and down, tells us that onion prices move around quite a lot, even at the wholesale level.

What does this mean for the consumer and the farmer? The onion consumer doesn’t get to buy onions at a consistent price, the prices go up and down, quite a lot. On the other hand, the onion farmer doesn’t get to sell onions at a consistent price. There is always a chance that when the farmer goes out to sell the onions he has grown, there is a price crash. In that sense, growing onions for a living becomes a very risky profession.

The question is why are onion prices so volatile? This is where things get interesting. Take a look at the following chart (I know, I am throwing a lot charts at you, dear reader, but these are simple straightforward charts.) The chart plots the wholesale prices of onions through the months, over the years.

Rise in wholesale onion prices

Source: http://ficci.in/spdocument/23156/FICCI’s-paper-on-Onion-Crisis.pdf

What does the chart tell us? It tells us that the wholesale onion price start rising around May and they keep rising till around August-September. This is where the entire problem lies, both for consumers as well as farmers.

Why is that the case? The onion has three harvesting seasons; the Rabi season (March-May), the Kharif season (October-December) and late Kharif season (January-March). Close to 60% of the onion production happens during the Rabi season.

Also, the onions produced during the Rabi season are most amenable to storage. The supply of fresh onions hitting the market between May to September is simply not enough to meet the demand. Given this, a part of demand has to be met through stocks of Rabi onions maintained by traders and wholesalers.

When the supply from the Rabi season starts to run out, the price of onions tends to rise. If there are any rains it makes the situation worse. The rains not only destroy the early Kharif crop which starts hitting the market in late September-early October, but they also destroy the Rabi crop that has been stored.

In fact, this is precisely what has happened in 2019 as well as 2020. As the Economic Survey for 2019-20 points out: “Due to heavy rains in August-September, 2019, the kharif crop of onions was adversely affected leading to lower market arrivals and upward pressure on onion prices. This kharif crop usually caters to the demand during the period from October to December till fresh produce from late kharif crop comes in the market.” Something similar has happened this year as well, with rains destroying the onion crop in Karnataka.

Hence, as an economist would put it, there is a structural problem at the heart of the onion trade in India. The government notices this only when there is a price rise and the media starts splashing it. Hence, there is always a knee-jerk reaction.

The government has a fixed way of reacting. It either invokes the Essential Commodities Act (ECA), 1955, or bans exports of onions (and if not that, it makes exports unviable by increasing the minimum export price).

Last year, on September 29, stocks limits under the ECA were imposed. Retail traders could stock up to 100 quintals of onions and wholesale traders could stock up to 500 quintals. (One quintal = 100 kgs. This was later reduced to 20 quintals and 250 quintals, respectively).

The idea here being that as soon as stock limits are imposed anyone who has onions stocked beyond the limit will have to sell them in the open market and that will push down wholesale prices and in the process retail prices (at least, that is what the government hopes).

This year on September 14, onion exports were banned under the Section 3 of the Foreign Trade (Development and Regulation) Act, 1992. The trigger was the more than doubling in the average price of onion arriving at India’s biggest onion market at Lasalgaon near Nashik, between end of March and September 14.

The modal price of onion as of March 30 was Rs 1,301 per quintal. By September 14, the modal price had jumped to Rs 2,801 per quintal. After the export ban on September 14, on September 15 the wholesale onion prices crashed to Rs 1,901 per quintal. Obviously, this did not go down well with the onion farmers.

The third option that the government resorts to is the import onions. This does not bring immediate consumer relief because imports carried out through government institutions take time. Even after onions have been imported, there is trouble is storing, distributing and selling them, because government institutions involved in this process, really don’t have the expertise for it. Also, in the past, the taste of imported onions hasn’t really gone down well with the Indian consumers.

So, what’s the way out of this mess? Let’s take a look at this pointwise.

1) The ECA is a remanent of an era when India had genuine food shortage. The idea was to restrict activities of some agents who were indulging in black marketing and hoarding at that point of time.

As a July 2018 report titled Review of Agricultural Policies in India published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, points out: “Orders issued by the centre or the states regulate the production, storage, transport, distribution, disposal, acquisition, use or consumption of a commodity.”

While, we do have our share of problems with some food products where the price volatility is very high (pulses and onions in particular), the days of food shortage are long gone. Also, over the years, the fact that ECA exists has undermined investments in India’s agricultural supply chain infrastructure.

As the Economic Survey of 2019-20 points out:

“ECA interferes with this mechanism by disincentivising investments in warehousing and storage facilities due to frequent and unpredictable imposition of stock limits. As stockholding limits apply to the entire agriculture supply chain, including wholesalers, food processing industries and retail food chains, the Act does not distinguish between firms that genuinely need to hold stocks owing to the nature of their operations, and firms that might speculatively hoard stocks.”

This fear of stock holding limits essentially leads to entrepreneurs staying away from creating supply chain infrastructure.

2) The lack of storage facilities adds to the price volatility of onions. As per a report titled A Report on the study of Onion Value Chain, published by the College of Agricultural Banking, Reserve Bank of India, 20-25% of onion production is lost due to post-harvest damages. This is because of the lack of storage infrastructure.

As the report points out:

“Nearly, 60% of the onion produced in Maharashtra during Rabi/ summer is available for storage i.e. 27 lakh tonnes out of total 45 lakh tonnes. The storage capacity created in the state through different government schemes is 8 lakh tonnes. These are scientifically built onion storage structures. Farmers store 5 lakh tonnes of onion in traditionally built local storage structures. Thus the total storage capacity in the state is 13 lakh tonnes.”

What this means that as of 2018, there was a need to create onion storage structures of additional 14 lakh tonnes, just in Maharashtra. Both the ECA and the lack of bank finance come in the way.

3) The ECA also leads to a situation where traders aren’t able to store enough and this creates problems. Let’s take a look at what happened last year. The ECA was invoked in end September. The onion inflation in the coming months just went through the roof (you can take a look at the inflation charts earlier). The stock limits basically ensured that traders couldn’t store onions beyond a point.

As the Economic Survey pointed out:

“Most of the kharif crop, which itself was lower, would have had to be offloaded in the market in October itself [thanks to the stock limits under the ECA]. Absent government intervention through ECA, traders would store a part of their produce to ensure smooth availability of a product at stable prices throughout the year.”

Of course, this does not mean that onion prices wouldn’t have gone up post September. They still might have gone up because of the lower kharif production, but the prices would have risen in a smoother way.

4) The government also resorts to export bans or increases the minimum export price of onions (where you can still export as long as the customer at the other end is ready to pay the higher price). The idea as mentioned earlier is to increase the supply in the domestic market.

In 2018-19, India exported around 22 lakh tonnes of the onions it produced. This was worth around $500 million. The total onion production during the year had stood at 228.2 lakh tonnes. Hence, less than 10% of the onion produced was exported. Also, the value of onion exports isn’t very big in the overall scheme of things.

As per a FICCI document, India’s export policy towards onions was changed 14 times between 2014 and 2019. This does no good to India’s image globally on the export policy front. It makes us look terribly unreliable.

Also, while prices in the Lasalgaon market fell on September 15, a day after the export ban, they have risen since then, and on September 23, the modal price of onion stood at Rs 3,600 per tonne. So much for the policy benefiting the consumer.

So where does all this leave us? The government has removed onions from the list of essential commodities in the hope that it leads to the development of storage infrastructure.

As Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Danve Raosaheb Dadarao told the Rajya Sabha:

“The stock limit conditions imposed through the law were hindering investment in the agriculture infrastructure… The move will boost investment in the agriculture sector and will also create more storage capacities to reduce post-harvest loss of crops.”

The move is also expected to increase the income of farmers.

The question is will this work out in the way the government is projecting it to be? Let’s look at this pointwise.

1) While, the government has removed onion from the list of essential commodities, its export continues to be banned. So, what kind of signal is being sent out to anyone who is interested in building agriculture infrastructure, including onion storage?

2) Even though onion is no longer a part of essential commodities, the government can still intervene, under extraordinary circumstances like war, famine, extraordinary price rise and a natural calamity of grave nature.

How is extraordinary price rise defined as?

“Any action on imposing stock limit shall be based on price rise and an order for regulating stock limit of any agricultural produce may be issued under this Act only if there is— (i) hundred per cent increase in the retail price of horticultural produce; or (ii) fifty per cent, increase in the retail price of non-perishable agricultural foodstuffs, over the price prevailing immediately preceding twelve months, or average retail price of last five years, whichever is lower.”

In the last three years, retail onion inflation has been more than 100% in eight months. Clearly, there is a good chance of high onion inflation in the time to come, given that any onion storage infrastructure isn’t going to be built overnight. Will the government intervene? Or will it sit tight and let the end-consumer pay?

The larger point here is that what the government does on this front in the time to come will determine how many entrepreneurs get interested in building agricultural infrastructure.

Just because onion is out of the essential commodities list doesn’t mean that the government cannot intervene. Any prospective entrepreneurs will like to see more evidence on this front.

3) There is great fear (as has been the case with the two main Farm Bills) of big business taking over. The question is if private enterprise is not allowed to operate in this sector, then what’s the way out? The government doesn’t have the money or the wherewithal to do much here. Central planning has been failure the world over and that it is a failure here as well, isn’t surprising.

Big business has built a lot of things since 1991, which most of us use and enjoy. Of course, along the way there has been crony capitalism as well. And that’s the fear here in the minds of people as well. (I don’t have a clear answer for this and I am saying so).

To conclude, taking onion out of the essential commodities list is just the first step. Many other things need to be done before the consumer can pay the right price and the farmer can get the right price.

In an ideal world, these are things that should have started in May 2014, when Narendra Modi was elected the prime minister for the first time. It would have been best to carry out small experiments in states and see how they go, before a nationwide plan was unleashed. There is always a gap between theory and practice and it’s best to correct that gap at a smaller level.

I would like to thank Chintan Patel for research assistance.

GDP growth at 5.3%: A lot needs to be done for the economy to see acche din again

deflationVivek Kaul

India has largely been a centrally planned economy since independence. The central planning increased dramatically in the second term of the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.
This led to a situation where India’s economy grew at greater than 8% in the aftermath of the financial crisis, when economic growth was collapsing all around the world. But this extra central planning has created many problems for the Indian economy since then.
As Bill Bonner writes in Hormegeddon—How Too Much Of a Good Thing Leads to Disaster, “Central planning can do a good job of imitating real progress at least in the short run.” And that is what precisely what happened in India, in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
The government expenditure exploded. In 2007-2008, the total government expenditure stood at Rs 7,12,671 crore. This doubled to Rs 14,10,372 crore by 2012-2013. This increased spending by the government landed up as income in the hands of the citizens, and they in turn spend the money. And this ensured that the Indian economy kept growing at a fast pace though economic growth was slowing down world over.
A substantial amount of this increased government spending was directly distributed to citizens through schemes like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The minimum support price offered on rice and wheat was also increased much more than was the case in the past.
This led to rural income growing at a faster rate than it had in the past. Initially, it did not matter. But as time passed this increased income translated into high inflation, particularly high food inflation.
Further, the trouble was that the government wasn’t earning all this money that it was spending. Between 2007-2008 and 2012-2013, the total income of the government did not go up at the same pace as its expenditure (it went up by around 57%), and the government borrowed more to make up for the difference.
The fiscal deficit in 2007-2008 was Rs 1,26,912 crore. This shot up by 286% to Rs 4,90,190 crore by 2012-2013. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends. And the government makes up for the difference through increased borrowing.
This increased borrowing by the government crowded out other borrowers, that is, there wasn’t enough left on the table for other borrowers to borrow. This meant banks had to offer higher rates of interest to attract deposits. This pushed up interest rates at which they loaned out money as well.
Also, to control the high inflation, the Reserve Bank had to push up the repo rate, or the rate at which it lends to banks. Further, during the good years, the corporates loaded up on debt, borrowing much more than they could ever repay. A major portion these loans were taken by crony capitalists from public sector banks.
All these reasons led to what analysts call the “India growth story” coming to an end. High inflation forced people to cut down on spending as incomes did not keep pace with expenditure. Economic growth fell to around 5% from double digit levels and that is where it has stayed for a while now.
It was widely expected that with Narendra Modi taking over as the prime minister, the Indian economy will start seeing acche din soon. But that hasn’t happened. For the three month period July to September 2014, the economic growth, as measured by the growth in the gross domestic product (GDP), was at 5.3%. During the period April to June 2014 the economy had grown at 5.7%.
The financing, insurance, real estate and business services sector which formed a little over 22% of the GDP during the period, grew by an impressive 9.5%. But other sectors did not do so well.
Agriculture which formed around 10.8% of the total GDP during the quarter grew by 3.2%. It had grown by 5% during the same period last year. Manufacturing which formed around 14.6% of the total GDP during the quarter was more or less flat at 0.1%. In fact, the size of manufacturing sector has fallen by 1.4% in comparison to the period between April and June 2014.
What this tells us clearly is that sustainable economic growth cannot be created by the government giving away money to citizens and then hoping that they spend it and create economic growth. For sustainable economic growth to happen a country needs to produce things. As the Say’s Law states “A product is no sooner created, than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value.” The law essentially states that the production of goods ensures that the workers and suppliers of these goods are paid enough for them to be able to buy all the other goods that are being produced. A pithier version of this law is, “Supply creates its own demand.”
In an Indian context this is even more important given that nearly 60% of the population remains dependent on directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture, even though agriculture now forms a minor part of the overall economy. What this tells us is that the sector has many more people than it should. Hence, people need to be moved from agriculture to other sectors like manufacturing. And for that to happen jobs need to be created in these sectors.
The government recently launched the Make in India programme to create jobs in the manufacturing sector. But just launching the programme is not good enough. For companies to make products in India a lot of other things need to be provided. They need access to electricity all the time and for that to happen we need to sort out the mess our coal sector is in. The physical infrastructure of roads, railways and ports needs to improve. The ease of doing business needs to go up considerably and so on.
As Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson write in Why Nations Fail—The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty regarding the industrial revolution that happened in Great Britain in the 19th century: “The English state aggressively…worked to promote domestic industry…by removing barriers to the expansion of industrial activity.” Similar barriers need to be removed in India as well. Also, entrepreneurs need to be confident that their contracts and property rights will be respected.
These things are easier said than done. What makes the scenario even more difficult in the Indian case is that Indian businessmen who operate in the infrastructure sector are not the most honest people going around. Raghuram Rajan, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, more or less hinted at it in a recent speech.
As he said “The amount recovered from cases decided in 2013-14 under DRTs (debt recovery tribunals) was Rs. 30,590 crore while the outstanding value of debt sought to be recovered was a huge Rs. 2,36,600 crore. Thus recovery was only 13% of the amount at stake. Worse, even though the law indicates that cases before the DRT should be disposed off in 6 months, only about a fourth of the cases pending at the beginning of the year are disposed off during the year – suggesting a four year wait even if the tribunals focus only on old cases.”
If incumbent businessmen do not repay their loans and then banks cannot recover those loans, banks will not lend or charge a higher rate of interest when they lend. And this does not help the businessmen currently looking to expand their businesses by borrowing.
To conclude, there is a lot that the government needs to do to get economic growth up and running again. The only action that one has seen from the government until now is demanding that the RBI cuts the repo rate. Now only if creating economic growth was simply about cutting interest rates.

The article appeared originally on www.FirstBiz.com on Nov 29, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

Wake up UPA. Central planning didn’t work for Soviet Union, it won’t work for you either

upaVivek Kaul 

In the last ten years that the Congress led United Progressive Alliance(UPA) government has run this country, its solution for almost every socio-economic problem facing this country, has been bigger government. This was a practice followed by the erstwhile Communist countries all over the world, particularly the Soviet Union. And there was a basic reason behind why the system did not work.
Diane Coyle explains this point in her new book GDP – A Brief But Affectionate History. As she writes “The communist countries had centrally planned economies, not market economies. Ministries in Moscow set the figures for the total number of all items to be produced in the economy and cascaded that down to specific production quotas for different industries and individual factories. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that the idea bureaucrats could possibly known enough about a large, complex economy to plan it from the center successfully is ludicrous.”
Coyle further explains why central planning did not work. “Individual factories were set output targets by the planning ministry. These were expressed in terms of volume—number of TV sets or pairs of shoes—or even weight. Targets of this kind are easy to meet. It doesn’t matter what the shoes are like, whether they are durable, comfortable, in the right sizes for the majority of wearers, or stylish. It doesn’t matter whether the TV sets work after six months or if the panel at the back constantly falls off.”
While India is no longer centrally planned to this extent, but our love for central planning has persisted. Take the case of the Right to Education which was introduced in 2009. At the heart of the Act is a noble idea of ensuring that education is a human right that should be free and compulsory for all children between the ages of 6 and 14.
But like is the case with all big bang centrally planned initiatives the Act tries to achieve too many things at once. It ordered schools to have infrastructure like playgrounds and toilets. Again noble ideas which easy to mandate by law, but difficult to implement immediately.
Many “bottom of the pyramid” kind of private schools have been providing education at a rock bottom fee. If they are asked to suddenly create adequate infrastructure which meets the criteria set under Right to Education, their cost of operation goes up. Their only option is to pass on this cost and increase the fee that they charge.
The trouble is that even though most parents want to educate their children, they may not be in a position to pay the higher fees.A recent article on www.bbc.com deals with precisely this issue. It quotes Gitanjali Krishnan, a teacher in a school in Panchsheel Enclave in New Delhi as saying that the school would have to triple student fees to meet the criteria set under the Right to Education. And this is something that parents of the children studying in the school won’t be able to afford. “Our parents are the poorest of the poor, labourers and migrant workers, they won’t be able to afford it,” she said.
This has led to a scenario where schools are simply shutting down. “Baladevan Rangaraju, director of think tank India Institute, who has been monitoring media reports, has counted 2,692 schools shut and 17,871 at risk,” the BBC article said.
State governments are also shutting down schools which don’t meet the criteria set under Right to Education. The thinking among bureaucrats seems to be that in private schools the quality of teaching is not guaranteed. This is a rather stupid argument given that if the teaching in government schools was good, then the government employees and bureaucrats would be sending their sons and daughters to these schools, which is not the case.
Also, shutting down schools is not a solution. Even if the education offered by private schools is not upto the mark, isn’t some education better than no education? As Parth J Shah, founder president of the Centre for Civil Society writes in a blog “Actually many government schools themselves would not be able to meet the rigid input norms((like playground, classroom size and teacher-student ratio) that the Right to Education has mandated.”
Further, what the Right to Education does like all centrally sponsored scheme is to set a target. And the target is to complete the syllabus. Economist Abhijit Banerjee talked about this sometime back. He conducted a small experiment in Bihar and the results were astonishing. “We did one experiment in Bihar which was with government school teachers. This was in summer around two years ago. The teachers were asked that instead of teaching like you usually teach, your job for the next six weeks is to get the children to learn some basic skills. If they can’t read, teach them to read. If they can’t do math, teach them to do math. At the end of six weeks, these teachers were given a small stipend. They had also been given a couple of days of training. At the end of six weeks, the children had closed half the gap between the best performing children and the worst performing children. They had really improved enormously,” said Banerjee.
So what was happening here? The teachers did not have to complete the syllabus in this case. They had to teach students what the students did not know. As Banerjee put it “The reason was they were asked to do a job that actually made sense. They were asked to teach the children what they don’t know. The usual jobs teachers are asked to do is teach the syllabus – which is very different. Under the Right to Education Act, every year you are supposed to cover the syllabus,” said Banerjee.
Central planning essentially tries to implement what should be the best outcome. But that is easier mandated by the law than implemented in reality. As Banerjee put it “One thing that we forget is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. We are trying to have an education system that is perfect and that every child should come out with wisdom at the end of it and as a result they learn nothing.”
Moving beyond the Right to Education, let’s take the case of the food security scheme, which aims at providing subsidised rice and wheat to nearly 82 crore Indians or 67% of the total population. Again, a big Act which tries to achieve the impossible.
Government data over the years has clearly shown that the percentage of hungry people is very low. An article in the Mint points out “A February[2013] report of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) shows the proportion of people not getting two square meals a day dropped to about 1% in rural India and 0.4% in urban India in 2009-10. Interestingly, the average cereal consumption of families who reported that they went hungry in some months of the year (in the month preceding the survey) was roughly equal to the average cereal consumption of those who reported receiving adequate meals throughout the year.”
Hence, what people need is not subsidised rice and wheat, but food that is more nutritious. Howarth Bouis, director of HarvestPlus, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), made a very interesting point in an interview to the Mint in 2013. “If you look at all the other food groups such as fruits, vegetables, lentils, and animal products other than milk, you will find a steady increase in prices over the past 40 years. So it has become more difficult for the poor to afford food that is dense in minerals and vitamins,” he said.
No steps have been taken to tackle this problem. Over and above this other factors also need to be taken into account. As a research paper titled National Food Security Bill: Challenges and Options authored by economists belonging to the belonging to the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), which is a part of the Ministry of Agriculture points out “Women’s education, access to clean drinking water, availability of hygienic sanitation facilities are the prime prerequisites for improved nutrition. It needs to be recognised that malnutrition is a multi-dimensional problem and needs a multi-pronged strategy.”
This means taking many small steps in the right direction, which necessarily don’t involve big government and more central planning.
To conclude, the Congress led UPA government is spending its last six weeks in power. And if there is one lesson it can draw from its last ten years in power is that Soviet style central planning doesn’t really work any more and perhaps it never did.
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on March 27, 2014

 (Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)