Nutrition

Does the Food Security Act Really Offer Food Security?

food

In late June 2016, the food minister Ram Vilas Paswan, said that by July 2016, the entire country would come under the ambit of the National Food Security Act. As he said: “National Food Security Act is in force in 33 States/UTs, and in states of Tamil Nadu and Nagaland it will be implemented in next month.”

The National Food Security Ordinance (NFSO),8 2013 was promulgated on July 5, 2013. A little over two months later, the National Food Security Act (NFSA) was enacted on September 10, 2013. Given this, it has taken the states nearly three years to implement the Act.

The Food Security Act offered food security by freezing the price of rice, wheat and coarse cereals at the central issue prices of Rs 3, Rs 2 and Re 1, respectively, for a period of three years, up to July 2016. The targeted public distribution system forms the largest component of the Food Security Act.

In fact, there are two types beneficiaries under the targeted public distribution system. There are those who come under the Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) and then there is something termed as priority households. The AAY was launched in December 2000 and it aims to reduce hunger among the poorest of the poor. Priority households on the other hand includes all families which come under the below poverty line. The broader definition of the priority households has been left to the state governments.

As far as entitlements go, every AAY household is entitled to 35 kg of food grains every month. Those coming under priority households are entitled to 5 kg per person of food grains every month. Close to 12.2 crore individuals come under AAY whereas 69.3 crore individuals come under priority households.

Nearly three years after the Food Security Act was passed, a question worth asking is, does it really offer food security to the citizens of this country?

The Food Security Act largely focusses on making food grains available to the citizens of this country at a rock bottom price. In order to support the ambitious coverage of the Act (nearly 81.5 crore individuals or two-thirds of the country’s population as per 2011 Census), the government has to acquire a large amount of rice and wheat through the Food Corporation of India as well as other state procurement agencies.

This has led to the defacto nationalisation of the grain trade. As Shweta Saini and Ashok Gulati write in a working paper titled The National Food Security Act 2013—Challenges, Buffer Stocking and the Way Forward: “Such large-scale public procurement also has the impact of strangling private trade (as has been the case in Punjab, Haryana and now Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh) (CACP, 2014). Of the total market arrivals of wheat and rice in these states, 70-90 per cent is bought by the government, indicating a de‐facto state take‐over of grain trade.”

This has an unintended consequence. Simply stated, the law of unintended consequences refers to a situation where economic decisions have unexpected effects.

In this context Saini and Gulati point out that “the monopolisation of the grain market by the government, where increasingly lower quantities of grains are available in the open market, also leads to the problem of support reversal.”

And what is support reversal? “The average cereal consumption in India is 10.6 kgs per person per month (NSSO, 2011), and NFSA supplies nearly half of it (5 kgs per month per person, except for those under the AAY who have a family entitlement of 35 kgs per month). People go to the open market to buy their remaining cereal requirements. However, with the government mopping up the supply of cereals, the open market is left with less causing an upward stickiness in prices,” write Saini and Gulati.

Even for those coming under AAY, the NFSA doesn’t supply enough food grains. Assuming five people per household, the average individual entitlement comes to 7 kgs per month, which is lower than the average cereal consumption of 10.6 kgs per month.

The point being that even though the idea behind the Food Security Act is to provide food security by selling food grains at a very low price, it makes things a little difficult by pushing up prices of food grains. Further, one needs to take into account the fact that food grains are not the only thing that people are eating in order to survive.

The government offers a minimum support price at which it buys rice and wheat from farmers. This helps on two counts. One is that it encourages farmers to grow rice and wheat, knowing well in advance what price they can sell it at. Further, the government buys rice and wheat to create a buffer stock in order to support the food security programmes, as well as maintain food security of the nation.

But this leads to other issues. As Shweta Saini and Marta Kozicka write in a research paper titled Evolution and Critique of Buffer Stocking Policy of India: “The buffer stocking policy of food grains has become the one tool with the government to fulfil the interlinked objectives of supporting food producers and food consumers, and of ensuring food availability at the national level. Buffer stocking is used to simultaneously tackle the problem of volatility in the price of food grains, provide food security and incentivise high production. Using the same instrument to achieve the objectives of ensuring remunerative price to farmers and providing the food grains so procured to the poor at highly subsidised prices creates conflicts.”

One clear problem is the fact that farmers end overproducing rice and wheat, given that the government buys all the rice and wheat that is brought to it. This discourages farmers from growing fruits, vegetables and dal. As the Economic Survey of 2014-2015 points out: “High MSPs result in farmers over-cultivating rice and wheat, which the Food Corporation of India then purchases and houses at great cost. High MSPs also encourage under-cultivation of non-MSP supported crops. The resultant supply-demand mismatch raises prices of non-MSP supported crops and makes them more volatile. This contributes to food price inflation that disproportionately hurts poor households.”

This essentially means that even though the Food Security Act wants to help people by selling rice and wheat at a low price, it ends up creating a difficult situation because prices of other crops tend to go up, as farmers tend to concentrate on buying rice and wheat. Food inflation in June 2016 was at 7.79 per cent. Within food, vegetables, pulses and sugar, saw an increase in price of 12.72 per cent, 28.28 per cent and 12.98 per cent, respectively. Spices went up by 8.13 per cent.

Hence, the unintended consequence of the Food Security Act is to make things more expensive on the whole. What is the way around this? I shall discuss some solutions in the weeks to come.

The column originally appeared in Vivek Kaul’s Diary on July 21, 2016

Why does UPA want to feed 67% if only 21% of India is poor?

congress-party-symbol1
Vivek Kaul
Poverty in India has fallen between 2004-05 and 2011-12, or so suggests data recently released by the Planning Commission. The poverty ratio was 37.2% in 2004-05 and fell to 21.9% by 2011-12.
The Congress led United Progressive Alliance(UPA) has been quick to claim credit for this fall in poverty. The opposition parties from the left and the right have slammed the government, and questioned the numbers put out by the Planning Commission.
So who is right on this occasion? The government? Or the opposition? Before we get around to answering these questions, it is first important to understand how the Planning Commission decides who is poor and who is not.
A poverty line separates the poor section of the population from the non poor section. Those below the poverty line are deemed to be poor and those above it are deemed to be not poor. And what exactly is a poverty line? As S Subramanian writes in The Poverty Line “A poverty line is identified in monetary units as the level of income or consumption expenditure required in order to avoid poverty.”
So how is the level of income or consumption expenditure required in order to avoid poverty decided on? An essential criterion for avoiding poverty is the availability of adequate nutrition, writes Subramanian. Hence, a calorie norm is identified. The amount of money required to consume the identified number of food calories becomes the cut off point, or the poverty line. Those who consume less than that are deemed to be poor.
This criteria was first clearly addressed by the Indian planners in 1979 in a Planning Commission Report of the Task Force of Minimum Needs and Effective Consumption Demand. As Subramanian writes “In identifying consumption expenditure poverty norms for India, the Task Force employed a nutritional norm of 2,435 (rounded off to 2,400) kilocalories per person per day in rural areas, and a norm of 2,095 calories (rounded off to 2,100) kilocalories per person per day in the urban areas. These were average figures based on calorie allowances recommended by a Nutrition Expert Group in 1968…The Task Force was able to come up with an ‘average’ requirement of calories for what one might call a ‘representative’ Indian, in each of the rural and urban areas of the country.”
So what does this mean? It means that anyone in rural India consuming less than 2,400 kilocalories per day was deemed to be poor. For urban India this number was at 2,100 kilocalories. Through a statistical regression the total expenditure necessary to consume either 2,400 kilocalories or 2,100 kilocalories was estimated.
The Tendulkar Committee formula, a new formula to estimate the poverty line, came into effect in 2009. This formula, other than considering the expenditure on food, also took expenses on education, health and clothing into account.
When Professor Suresh Tendulkar changed the formula he argued that the old formula did not take into account the fact that calorie intake had dropped to 1770 kilocalories in urban areas. Despite this change the influence of the old calorie norm on the new formula is considerable, feel experts.
And how much is the expenditure as per the Tendulkar Committee formula ? As the Press Note on Poverty Estimates, 2011-12, released by the Planning Commission points out “for rural areas the national poverty line…is estimated at Rs. 816 per capita per month and Rs. 1,000 per capita per month in urban areas. Thus, for a family of five, the all India poverty line in terms of consumption expenditure would amount to about Rs. 4,080 per month in rural areas and Rs. 5,000 per month in urban areas.”
Assuming 30 days in a month, this expenditure comes to Rs 27.5 per day for the rural areas and Rs 33.33 for urban areas. Hence, anyone whose expenditure per day is less than these amounts is categorised as poor.
How adequate is this poverty line of Rs 27.5-Rs 33.33 per day? If one were to believe film star turned Congress politician Raj Babbar, this amount is more than enough. “Even today in Mumbai city, I can have a full meal at Rs 12. No no not vada paav. So much of rice, dal sambhar and with that some vegetables are also mixed ,” he told reporters today (i.e. July 25, 2013).
Of course, this clearly proves that Mr Babbar has not stepped onto the streets of Mumbai for a very long time. His days of struggle in the film industry having been long over.
Even if we believe that one can get a meal for Rs 12 in Mumbai, eating is not the only expenditure that a man needs to incur in order to survive.
Given this, it is easy to prove that the poverty line in India has been set at a very low level. There have been a spate of comments criticising this. Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh called the Planning Commission figures a cruel joke on the poor. “I would like to ask the Prime Minister and Congress president whether they could have their meal in just Rs 32(if one divides Rs 1000 by 31 days, it comes to Rs 32.25),” Chouhan said.
This is something that Praful Patel of the Nationalist Congress Party, which is a part of the UPA, agreed with. “The ceiling set by them (Planning Commission) is totally wrong. In today’s time, Commission should set a new ceiling keeping in mind inflation and high cost of living. We do not agree with this data,” Patel said. Brinda Karat of the CPI(M) said that the Planning Commission figures were “dubious” and “discredited” and added “salt to the wounds of the poor”. Similar reactions came in from other political parties as well.
So, the poverty line in India is at a very low level and hence needs to be increased is a conclusion that can be easily drawn from. As N.C. Saxena, member of the National Advisory Council, who headed a Planning Commission panel on poverty told The Hindu “the narrow definition of poverty we have been using, where the line is really what I call a ‘kutta-billi’ line; only cats and dogs can survive on it.”
But raising the poverty line is not simple and has serious implications. As Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya write in India’s Tryst with Destiny “While reasonable people may differ on whether it is reasonable to further raise the poverty line, the subject is far more complex than commonly appreciated.”
And why is that the case? “The dilemma in raising the poverty lines is best brought out by considering the implications of poverty lines that are significantly higher than those currently in use and are advocated by many of the current critics of the Planning Commission. Thus, for example, suppose we raise the rural poverty line to Rs 80 and the urban one to Rs 100 at 2009-10 prices. What would these lines imply?” ask Bhagwati and Panagariya.
This would designate 95% of the rural population and 85% of the urban population to be poor. The impact of this would be that the money that the government spends to tackle poverty would be spread over a much larger number of people and thus would have less impact in tackling poverty. As Bhagwati and Panagariya point out “With tax revenues still relatively modest, significant redistribution in favour of the destitute requires limiting such redistributions to the bottom 40 percent or so of the population. Spreading them thinly over a vast population will give too little to the destitute to make a major dent in poverty.”
Lets understand this through an example. Let us say there are 100 people. Of this 20 are deemed to be poor. The government decides to spend Rs 100 to help them. Hence, on an average each one of them benefits to the extent of Rs 5.
Now lets the definition of poverty is changed and 90 out of 100 people, are deemed to be poor. The government still spends Rs 100 on them. The benefit per person comes down to a much lower Rs 1.11 (Rs 100/90). Hence, the more poor lose out at the cost of the less poor.
In fact, this is not the first time such a situation has arisen. In 1962, the Perspective Planning Department (PPD) of the Planning Commission had discussed a similar dilemma. As Subramanian writes partly quoting a PPD document “’The balanced diet recommended by the Nutrition Advisory Committee together with a modest standard of consumption for other items would cost approximately Rs 35 per head (per month). But at present less than 20% of our population can afford it’…The implication is quite clear. A poverty line of Rs 35 per person per month would have plunged 80 per cent of the Indian population into poverty: wiser counsel advocated a more modest norm of Rs 20 per person per month.” This brought down the poverty rate to 60%.
Hence, there is no point in pushing up the poverty line without having the resources to tackle it. If resources are limited they should be deployed to help those who need it the most.
But the Congress led UPA government has done exactly the opposite by getting the President to sign on the Food Security Ordinance. The food security scheme aims at providing subsidised rice and wheat to nearly 82 crore Indians or 67% of the total population.
This effectively means that the government thinks that 67% of the Indian population is poor and cannot afford to buy rice and wheat at market rates. But as per the current poverty line only 21.9% of the population is not getting adequate nutrition. So which is the right number? 21.9% or 67%? The Congress led UPA government needs to answer that question.
It seems the government is working on a new poverty line to justify the massive expenditure that it will incur on the Food Security scheme. As The Hindu reports “economists advising the Ministry of Rural Development have told The Hindu that the exclusion criteria to be derived from the ongoing Socio-Economic and Caste Census are likely to leave out the top 35 per cent of the population while the bottom 65 per cent will be considered below poverty line.”
Meanwhile, it will claim that the poverty has come down on the basis of the current poverty line and numbers put out by the Planning Commission because of the social programmes it has launched over the last few years.
As the old saying goes “heads I win, tails you lose”.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on July 25, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 
 

Mr Chidambaram, you can't fool all the people all the time

P-CHIDAMBARAM 

Vivek Kaul
 P Chidambaram was at his rhetorical best in Jaipur yesterday defending the food security ordinance. “The Food Security Ordinance which I hope becomes a bill is intended to deal with both hunger and malnutrition. There are direct benefits, there are huge indirect benefits,” the finance minister said.
But does supplying more grain to nearly two thirds of the country’s population at a highly subsidised rate really help? There is more than enough evidence from the past three decades that it doesn’t.
The amount of grains distributed through the public distribution system has gone up dramatically over the years. As T N Ninan wrote in a recent column in the Business Standard “Back in the 1980s, the government distributed an average of nearly 16 million tonnes of foodgrain each year through the public distribution system (PDS). The 1990s saw an increase in the PDS throughput to just over 17 million tonnes. The striking change came in the decade of the “noughties”, which saw the annual figure climbing to around 20 million tonnes, then 30 million tonnes, and in the final years of the decade more than 40 million tonnes. Now the figure is closer to 50 million tonnes. On a per capita basis, the grain made available through the PDS has doubled, from 20 kg per year in the 1990s to 40 kg now.”
But even this hasn’t helped tackle the country’s malnutrition problem. As Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, who are seen as the intellectual gurus of the current Congress led UPA government, write in their new book An Uncertain Glory – India and Its Contradictions “In at least one field – that of nutrition and especially child nutrition – South Asia fares distinctly worse than sub-Saharan Africa. More than 40 per cent of South Asian children ( and a slightly higher proportion of Indian children) are underweight in terms of standard WHO norms, compared with 25 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa (the corresponding figure, incidentally, is less than 12 per cent in every other region in the world).”
This is something that other experts also agree with. A research paper titled National Food Security Bill: Challenges and Options authored by several authors at the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices(CACP), Ministry of Agriculture, points out “According to National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) conducted in 2005-06, 20 per cent of Indian children under five years old were wasted (acutely malnourished) and 48 per cent were stunted (chronically malnourished). The HUNGaMA (Hunger and Malnutrition) Survey conducted by Nandi Foundation conducted across 112 rural districts of India in 2011 showed that 42 percent of children under five are underweight and 59 percent are stunted.”
One reason for this could be that a major portion of the subsidised grain distributed through the PDS never reaches the intended beneficiaries. It is estimated that in 2009-10, the PDS had a leakage of 40.4%. This is a significant improvement from 54.1% in 2004-05, but is a large number nonetheless. The food security scheme is being executed through the same ‘leaky’ PDS.
The other reason for the lack of nutrition is the fact that improving nutrition is not simply about selling grains to more people at a subsidised rate. “Access to sanitation facilities and women’s literacy in particular are found to be strong factors affecting malnutrition,” write the CACP authors.
Drèze and Sen compare sixteen extremely poor countries on various social indicators. When it comes to access to improved sanitation, India is 13th on the list. Only Cambodia, Haiti and Nepal come behind India on this indicator. In fact Pakistan and Bangladesh fair much better than India on this indicator, and so does war-torn Afghanistan. “In India, a full 50 per cent of households had to practise open defecation in 2011, according to the latest population census – a higher proportion than in almost any other country for which data are available…This hardship passes largely unnoticed, and indeed, the need for universal access to basic sanitation facilities has not been a major concern in Indian planning till very recently,” write Drèze and Sen. And it is well worth remembering here that the Congress Party has ruled the country for a major period of time since independence. So if lack of sanitation leading to malnutrition is a problem in the country, it is because the Congress party has chosen not to address it till date.
There is enough evidence to prove that food security scheme is unlikely to do much on the improvement of nutrition front. What about the scheme helping people to buy rice and wheat at very subsidised rates and hence ensuring they do not have to go hungry?
As a recent article in the Mint points out “A February 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.”
So the government’s own data conclusively proves that people are able to buy as much rice and wheat that they need.
To improve nutrition more consumption of vitamins and minerals is required. Howarth Bouis, director of HarvestPlus, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), made a very interesting point in an interview to the Minta few months back. “Food prices have been going up over time but we have to make a careful distinction in the Indian case between cereal and milk prices on the one hand, and all other foods on the other hand. After the green revolution, yields of rice and wheat shot up, and prices actually came down. Maybe prices have risen in the past couple of years but over the past 40 years, prices have fallen. The story is similar for milk. But 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.”
Food prices have gone up dramatically over the last few years due to the easy money policy run by the Congress led UPA government. (You can read the complete argument here). During the period 2008-2009 to December 2012, the food inflation averaged at 10.13% per year. It has more or less continued at same levels since then. And this is one of the major reasons that has been impacting nutrition, at least over the last few years.
Lack of nutrition among children and needs to be tackled on a war footing. The trouble is that the medicine being prescribed for it just does not work. As Ashok Gulati and Surbhi Jain of CACP point out in a research paper titled Buffer Stocking Policy in Wake of NFSB (National Food Securities Bill) “There is a need to innovate in our food management and welfare policies so that same expenditure brings much higher returns in terms of tackling hunger and malnutrition of this country.” And that is really not happening.
Given this, P Chidambaram might well want to remember what Abraham Lincoln, the great American President, who brought slavery to an end, once remarked: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

Food Security Act is another opportunity for Rahul to say I don't want to be PM

 

 rahul gandhi
Vivek Kaul
The Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is in a hurry to somehow introduce the right to food security during the course of this year. Media reports suggest that a special session of the Parliament may be convened to get the bill passed.
But there are several major questions that the Congress led UPA government hasn’t answered with regard to the right to food security. This has writer has discussed some of these questions in the past. (You can read them here, here, here and here).
Here are some more important questions that need to be answered before the right to food security can move from being just a Bill to an Act.
1. The current plan is to sell subsidised wheat and rice to nearly two thirds of India’s population through the public distribution system. This system comprises of around 5 lakh fair price shops. Estimates suggest that nearly 60% of the food that is supposed to be distributed through this system is either siphoned off or is simply wasted. Given that, the eventual plan is to move the right to food security to a cash transfer system.
In this those entitled to food subsidy will have to buy rice and wheat directly from the market, at the market price, and the subsidy will be directly paid into their bank accounts or will be given to them through business correspondents hired by banks.
So what happens to the public distribution system in this case? Will it be dismantled? And if that is done, imagine the kind of unemployment it will lead to. Are political parties (even those within the UPA) which are so opposed to foreign direct investment in retail, thinking about this? And these shops are largely located in rural areas.
2. If right to food security eventually does move to a cash transfer kind of system, where the subsidy is direct paid out to those entitled to it, what happens to the elaborate procurement system for rice and wheat that the government has put in place? Currently the government declares a minimum support price for wheat and rice. At this price the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and other state government agencies, operating on behalf of the government, buy wheat and rice from the farmer., which then stocked and distributed through the public distribution system. This system is expected to continue for implementing the right to food security as well.
But what happens once the right to food security moves onto the system of cash transfers? Those entitled to the right to food security will have to buy wheat and rice directly from the open market. And that being the case the government need not maintain the humongous stocks of food grains that it currently does. The government will have to just buy as much of rice and wheat as might be needed to maintain a buffer stock, which currently amounts to somewhere between 14 million tonnes to 22 million tonnes of rice and wheat.
In 2006-2007, 169.1 million tonnes of rice and wheat was produced in the country. Of this, 43.8 million tonnes or around 26% was procured by the government. In 2011-2012, 198.2 million tonnes of rice and wheat was produced. Of this 88.5 million tonnes or nearly 45% was procured by the government.
So procurement rice and wheat by the government directly from the farmers has gone up tremendously over the last few years. And this has happened primarily because of the fact that the minimum support price has been increased consistently over the years. Farmers have been encouraged to sell to the government. If right to food security moves onto a cash transfer based system, what happens to the farmers who have become now used to selling at a fixed price to the government,which they know off well in advance? How fair is it on them? Are these things even being thought about?
While the current system of procuring more and more rice and wheat directly from the farmer has led to severe distortions, but doing away with it suddenly, will have its own severe repercussions.
3. What happens in a drought like situation? In a situation where the production of rice and wheat will come down, how will the government procure the amount that will be needed to be distributed to those entitled to the right to food security? The easy answer is that rice and wheat will be imported. But as this writer has pointed out in the past “Rice is a very thinly traded commodity, with only about 7 per cent of world production being traded and five countries cornering three-fourths of the rice exports. The thinness and concentration of world rice markets imply that changes in production or consumption in major rice-trading countries have an amplified effect on world prices.” (Source: National Food Security Bill Challenges and Options, Ashok Gulati, Jyoti Gujral, T.Nandakumar, Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), Ministry of Agriculture)
What is interesting is that there is a Force Majeure clause in the Right to Food Security Bill using which the government can shirk any responsibility to provide rice and wheat at a subsidised rate.
The Bill provides for a Force Majeure clause (Clause 52) that “the Central Government, or the State Governments, shall not be liable for any claim by persons belonging to the priority households or general households or other groups entitled under this Act for loss/damage/compensation, arising out of failure of supply of foodgrains or meals when such failure of supply is due to conditions such as, war, flood, drought, fire, cyclone, earthquake or any act of God.”
But it is precisely at this point of time that the right to food security, if there has to be one, should be working. As CACP report points out “It is worthwhile to note that precisely in these conditions a failure of market forces, volatility in prices and resultant distress is expected and at times like this the poor and vulnerable would depend on government to ensure their food security.” 
4. Also, what is the basic goal of selling rice and wheat at subsidised prices. Who is it supposed to help? As a recent article in the Mint points out “Apart from the extremely poor, who form a small fraction of the population, nearly everyone else can afford the rice and wheat they require, as Bouis points out. A February 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.”
So the point is that government’s own data clearly points out that the number of those who cannot even afford to buy rice and wheat for their daily meals is less than 1% of the total population. Doesn’t it make sense to target this section properly than doling out subsidised rice and wheat to all and sundry? But then targeting just them really won’t help the Congress party led UPA to get the votes in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. And if that does not happen how will Rahul Gandhi, get another opportunity to say, I do not want to be Prime Minister?
5. One of the goals of the right to food security is to improve nutrition. How does selling rice and wheat at a subsidised price help improve nutrition? The NSSO data quoted above clearly shows that most Indians can afford the rice and wheat they need to buy. To improve nutrition more consumption of vitamins and minerals is required. Howarth Bouis , director of HarvestPlus, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), made a very interesting point in an interview to the Mint a few months back. “ Food prices have been going up over time but we have to make a careful distinction in the Indian case between cereal and milk prices on the one hand, and all other foods on the other hand. After the green revolution, yields of rice and wheat shot up, and prices actually came down. Maybe prices have risen in the past couple of years but over the past 40 years, prices have fallen. The story is similar for milk. But 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.”
This explains the real reason behind poor nutrition in India. And no amount of selling of rice and wheat at subsidised prices can cure that. If nutrition needs to be improved food inflation which has gone through the roof needs to be controlled.
There are other factors as well. As the CACP report points out “studies have shown that the challenge of improving absorption lies in linking nutrition with health, education and agriculture interventions. Access to sanitation facilities and women’s literacy in particular are found to be strong factors affecting malnutrition.”
These are some more questions regarding the right to food security which need to be answered. In its current form the Right to Food Security Bill is nothing but a vote gathering ploy for Rahul Gandhi and nothing else, the bleeding hearts of jholawalas notwithstanding.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on May 16, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)