🍔 Food Security

Food production and consumption trends in India

Historical Trends in Food grain production

• In 1947, India’s population was 330 million and in those days, feeding people was biggest challenge. In the initial decades, India relied on supplies from the United States under its Public Law 480 (PL-480). The reason as to why India relied on United States only and why not other countries was that India did not have enough foreign currency to buy food grains from global markets. The PL-480 programme allowed India to buy in Rupee payments.
• At that time, India could by maximum 8 MT of food grains from international markets (with available foreign currency) while under PL-480, it imported 10 MT. Those were the days when India’s food grain production hovered around 50 million tonnes, unable to feed the population.
• A major problem arose in 1960s when United States suspended the supply of wheat to India due to some political differences; despite that India was facing back to back droughts in those years. The Indian leadership however, immediately learnt the Lesson that India could even lose its freedom if self-sufficiency in food production is not achieved. In 1966, India imported 18,000 tonnes of high yielding varieties (HYV) of wheat from Mexico and ushered into the era of green revolution.
• From 330 million in 1947 to 1.25 billion today; India’s population has increased by almost 3.8 times. In this period, India’s food grain production increased from 50 MT (1951) to 257 MT in current year. During this period, production of wheat gone up by 15 times, rice by five times, maize by 14 times, milk by 8 times and so on.
• The result is in front of all of us. Today, India is not only self-sufficient but also a net exporter of food grains and largest exporter of rice in the world. The key stakeholders of this turn around were policy makers like C. Subramanian, scientists Like M.S. Swaminathan. However credit should go to the Indian farmer, who took the risk of adopting new technologies.

Availability of Food Grains

Per capita expenditure on food

• In 2018, expenditure on food per capita for India was 372.2 US dollars (Rs 28,500). Expenditure on food per capita of India increased from 193 US dollars in 2009 to 372.2 US dollars in 2018 growing at an average annual rate of 7.73%.
• The monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE) on food items has declined from 72.83% to 52.76% and on nonfood items has increased from 27.15% to 47.24% in the rural India during 1972-73 to 2011-12.
• While in the urban India the expenditure on food items has decline from 64.45% to 42.46% whereas expenditure on non-food items has shown a steady increase from 35.55% to 57.54% during 1972-73 to 2011-12.

Food availability stagnant

In 1991, the per capita foodgrain availability per annum was 186.2 kg and 177.7 kg in 2016. Between 1903 and 1908, the net availability of foodgrains was 177.3 kg. These historically low figures are reminders of the times of British rule in India that witnessed similar food availability. In contrast, in 2015, China’s foodgrain availability per capita was 450 kg, 200 kg in Bangladesh and more than 1,100 kg in US.

Production in 2020-21

icon=“hazard” We have already covered important topics related to food and nutrition like

⭐️ Green Revolution, FCI, CACP, Agricultural Pricing policies, FCI etc. in the previous sections.

National and international food policies

• The history of food policy in India began taking shape during the Bengal famine of 1943. Prior to this, the government of India had no set principle of food policy but only a sort of ad-hoc arrangement of feeding the people during crisis.
• But the famine of 1943 led to the appointment of the first Foodgrains Policy Committee under the Chairmanship of Sir George Gregory, which after examining the whole situation recommended:

1. Procurement of foodgrains from the surplus areas
2. Rationing for equitable distribution and
3. Statutory price control for checking the price rise

FCI

• As of January 1, 2020, the stock of rice was 23.7 million Tonnes and the stock of wheat was 32.79 million tonnes. (56.7 million Tonnes)
• As per the buffer stock norm, only 7.6 million tonnes of rice and 13.8 million tonnes of wheat are required.
• FCI also has 27.87 million tonnes of unmilled paddy lying in its godown.

Food security

• As per the Economic Survey (2018-19), India needs to take big initiatives to improve its food security as it faces supply constraints, water scarcity, small landholdings, low per capita GDP and inadequate irrigation.
• Food security, as defined by the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security, means that

all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life.

• Food security is the combination of the following three elements:
  • Food availability i.e. food must be available in sufficient quantities and on a consistent basis. It considers stock and production in a given area and the capacity to bring in food from elsewhere, through trade or aid.
  • Food access i.e. people must be able to regularly acquire adequate quantities of food, through purchase, home production, barter, gifts, borrowing or food aid.
  • Food utilization: Consumed food must have a positive nutritional impact on people. It entails cooking, storage and hygiene practices, individuals health, water and sanitations, feeding and sharing practices within the household.
• Food security is closely related to household resources, disposable income and socioeconomic status. It is also strongly interlinked with other issues, such as food prices, global environment change, water, energy and agriculture growth.

Importantance of Food Security for a Nation

• For boosting the agricultural sector
• For having a control on food prices
• For economic growth and job creation leading to poverty reduction
• For trade opportunities
• For increased global security and stability
• For improved health and healthcare

Food Security in India

• Food security concerns can be traced back to the experience of the Bengal Famine in 1943 during British colonial rule, during which about 2 million to 3 million people perished due to starvation.
• Since attaining independence, an initial rush to industrialize while ignoring agriculture, two successive droughts in the mid-1960s, and dependence on food aid from the United States exposed India’s vulnerability to several shocks on the food security front.
• The country went through a Green Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s, enabling it to overcome productivity stagnation and to significantly improve food grain production.
• Despite its success, the Green Revolution is often criticized for being focused on only two cereals, wheat and rice; being confined to a few resource abundant regions in the northwestern and southern parts of the country that benefited mostly rich farmers; and putting too much stress on the ecology of these regions, especially soil and water.
• The Green Revolution was followed by the White Revolution, which was initiated by Operation Flood during the 1970s and 1980s. This national initiative has revolutionized liquid milk production and marketing in India, making it the largest producer of milk.
• Of late, especially during the post-2000 period, hybrid maize for poultry and industrial use and Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton have shown great strides in production, leading to sizeable exports of cotton, which made India the second largest exporter of cotton in 2007–2008.

Concerns vis-a-vis Food Security in India

• India, currently has the largest number of undernourished people in the world i.e. around 195 million.
• Nearly 47 million or 4 out of 10 children in India do not meet their full human potential because of chronic undernutrition or stunting.
• Agricultural productivity in India is extremely low.
• According to World Bank figures, cereal yield in India is estimated to be 2,992 kg per hectare as against 7,318.4 kg per hectare in North America.
• The composition of the food basket is increasingly shifting away from cereals to high⎯value agricultural commodities like fish, eggs, milk and meat.
• As incomes continue to rise, this trend will continue and the indirect demand for food from feed will grow rapidly in India.
• According to FAO estimates in ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, 2018” report, about 14.8 % of the population is undernourished in India.
• Also, 51.4% of women in reproductive age between 15 to 49 years are anaemic.
• Further according to the report 38.4% of children aged under five in India are stunted (too short for their age), while 21% suffer from wasting, meaning their weight is too low for their height.
• India ranked 71st in 113 countries assessed by The Global Food Security Index (GFSI) in the year 2021, based on four parameters—affordability, availability and quality and safety.
• As per the Global Hunger Index, 2021, India was ranked 101st out of 116 qualifying countries
• According to the World Food Programme and World Bank, malnutrition affects cognitive ability, workdays and health, impacting as much as 16% of GDP of the world.

Challenges to Food Security

• Climate Change: Higher temperatures and unreliable rainfall makes farming difficult. Climate change not only impacts crop but also livestock, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture, and can cause grave social and economic consequences in the form of reduced incomes, eroded livelihoods, trade disruption and adverse health impacts.
• Lack of access to remote areas: For the tribal communities, habitation in remote difficult terrains and practice of subsistence farming has led to significant economic backwardness.
• Increase in rural-to-urban migration, large proportion of informal workforce resulting in unplanned growth of slums which lack in the basic health and hygiene facilities, insufficient housing and increased food insecurity.
• Overpopulation, poverty, lack of education and gender inequality.
• Inadequate distribution of food through public distribution mechanisms (PDS i.e. Public Distribution System).
• Deserving beneficiaries of the subsidy are excluded on the basis of non-ownership of below poverty line (BPL) status, as the criterion for identifying a household as BPL is arbitrary and varies from state to state
• Biofuels: The growth of the biofuel market has reduced the land used for growing food crops.
• Conflict: Food can be used as a weapon, with enemies cutting off food supplies in order to gain ground. Crops can also be destroyed during the conflict.
• Unmonitored nutrition programmes: Although a number of programmes with improving nutrition as their main component are planned in the country but these are not properly implemented.
• Lack of coherent food and nutrition policies along with the absence of intersectoral coordination between various ministries.
• Corruption: Diverting the grains to open market to get better margin, selling poor quality grains at ration shops, irregular opening of the shops add to the issue of food insecurity.

Recent Government Initiatives

National Food Security Mission

• It is a Centrally Sponsored Scheme launched in 2007.
• It aims to increase production of rice, wheat, pulses, coarse cereals and commercial crops, through area expansion and productivity enhancement.
• It works toward restoring soil fertility and productivity at the individual farm level and enhancing farm level economy.
• It further aims to augment the availability of vegetable oils and to reduce the import of edible oils.

Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY)

• It was initiated in 2007, and allowed states to choose their own agriculture and allied sector development activities as per the district/state agriculture plan.
• It was converted into a Centrally Sponsored Scheme in 2014-15 also with 100% central assistance.
• Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) has been named as Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana-Remunerative Approaches for Agriculture and Allied Sector Rejuvenation (RKVY-RAFTAAR) for three years i.e. from 2017-18 to 2019-20.
• Objectives: Making farming a remunerative economic activity through strengthening the farmer’s effort, risk mitigation and promoting agri-business entrepreneurship. Major focus is on pre & post-harvest infrastructure, besides promoting agri-entrepreneurship and innovations.

Other Initiatives

• Integrated Schemes on Oilseeds, Pulses, Palm oil and Maize (ISOPOM)
• Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY)
• E-marketplace: The government has created an electronic national agriculture market (eNAM) to connect all regulated wholesale produce markets through a pan-India trading portal.
• Massive irrigation and soil and water harvesting programme to increase the country’s gross irrigated area from 90 million hectares to 103 million hectares by 2017.
• The government has also taken significant steps to combat under and malnutrition over the past two decades, through
  • The introduction of mid-day meals at schools. It is a Centrally-Sponsored Scheme which covers all school children studying in Classes I-VIII of Government, Government-Aided Schools.
  • Anganwadi systems to provide rations to pregnant and lactating mothers,
  • Subsidised grain for those living below the poverty line through a public distribution system.
  • Food fortification
  • The National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013, legally entitles up to 75 % of the rural population and 50 % of the urban population to receive subsidized food grains under the Targeted Public Distribution System.
  • The eldest woman of the household of age 18 years or above is mandated to be the head of the household for the purpose of issuing of ration cards under the Act.

International Organizations involved in ensuring Food Security

Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)

• Established as a specialized agency of the United Nations in 1945.
• One of FAO’s strategic objectives is to help eliminate hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition.

World Food Programme (WFP)

• Founded in 1963, WFP is the lead UN agency that responds to food emergencies and has programmes to combat hunger worldwide.

International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)

• Founded in 1977, IFAD focuses on rural poverty reduction, working with poor rural populations in developing countries to eliminate poverty, hunger, and malnutrition.
• It is a specialized agency of the United Nations and was one of the major outcomes of the 1974 World Food Conference.

World Bank

• Founded in 1945, the World Bank is actively involved in funding food projects and programmes.

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

• It was established in 1972 as the international arm providing guidance and governance to environmental issues. One of the topics that UNEP addresses currently is food security.

International Initiatives

• The High-Level Task Force (HLTF) on Global Food and Nutrition Security was established by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2008.
• It aims to promote a comprehensive and unified response of the international community to the challenge of achieving global food and nutrition security.
• Formulation of the First Millennium Development Goal (MDG 1), which included among its targets cutting by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger by 2015.
• The United Nations Secretary-General launched the Zero Hunger Challenge in 2012 during the Rio+20 World Conference on Sustainable Development. The Zero Hunger Challenge was launched to inspire a global movement towards a world free from hunger within a generation. It calls for:
  • Zero stunted children under the age of two
  • 100% access to adequate food all year round
  • All food systems are sustainable
  • 100% increase in smallholder productivity and income
  • Zero loss or waste of food
• With the largest number of undernourished people in the world, India needs to hasten to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2 of ‘Zero Hunger’ by 2030.
  • “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”

Steps to be Taken to Ensure Food Security

• The government policy needs to adopt an integrated policy framework to facilitate agriculture productivity.
• The measures should focus mainly on rationale distribution of cultivable land, improving the size of the farms and providing security to the tenant cultivators apart from providing the farmers with improved technology for cultivation and improved inputs like irrigation facilities, availability of better quality seeds, fertilizers and credits at lower interest rates.
• Aeroponics and hydroponics are systems that allow plants to be grown without soil. Plants grown in this way take in water and nutrients efficiently. These methods can be used in the areas of poor soil quality and soil erosion.
• Adoption of crops and techniques with lower water requirements, such as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method of rice production, contributes to resilience by enabling equal or better yields to be achieved with less water withdrawal.
• Planting crops with lower water requirements and agricultural practices that maintain soil moisture, such as maintaining vegetative cover between crops, can also contribute to resilience.
• Crop diversification: Higher profitability and stability in production highlight the importance of crop diversification, e.g. legumes alternative with rice and wheat. Growing of non-cereal crops such as oilseeds, fruits and vegetables etc need to be encouraged.
• Strategies for better food storage should be adopted.
• The Blue Revolution: Sea, lakes and rivers can be used to provide food and nutrition. Fish are a very good source of protein and do not require good soil.
• Biotechnology and appropriate technology: Selective breeding or genetic modification (GM) of plants and animals can be done to produce specific features and adaptations.
• For example, selective breeding has been used on dairy cows to increase milk yields. GM has been used on wheat to produce crops that are disease resistant.
• Existing direct nutrition programmes should be revamped to enable management by women’s Self Help Groups (SHGs) and /or local bodies along with orientation and training of community health workers, Panchayati Raj Institution (PRI) members, other opinion leaders, caregivers and other stakeholders can be another area.
• Efforts should be made by the concerned health departments and authorities to initiate and supervise the functioning of the nutrition related schemes in an efficient way.
• Annual surveys and rapid assessments surveys could be some of the ways through which program outcomes can be measured
• Focus needs to be shifted to the workers in the informal sector by providing decent wages and healthy working conditions.
• Local community education on key family health and nutrition practices using participatory and planned communication methodologies will be helpful.
• The cooperatives play an important role in food security in India especially in the southern and western parts of the country. The cooperative societies set up shops to sell low priced goods to poor people. The cooperatives should be encouraged.
• Fostering rural-urban economic linkages can be an important step towards ensuring food security by -
  • enhancing and diversifying rural employment opportunities, especially for women and youth,
  • enabling the poor to better manage risks through social protection,
  • leveraging remittances for investments in the rural sector as a viable means for improving livelihoods

Way Forward

• Food security of a nation is ensured if all of its citizens have enough nutritious food available, all persons have the capacity to buy food of acceptable quality and there is no barrier on access to food.
• The right to food is a well established principle of international human rights law. It has evolved to include an obligation for state parties to respect, protect, and fulfil their citizens’ right to food security.
• As a state party to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, India has the obligation to ensure the right to be free from hunger and the right to adequate food.
• India needs to adopt a policy that brings together diverse issues such as inequality, food diversity, indigenous rights and environmental justice to ensure sustainable food security.
• World population is expected to increase from around 6 billion now to around 8 billion by 2020. And more than 95% of the additional will be in the developing countries. The prospects of food security for them, therefore, remain bleak. In South Asia and Africa, two out of five children will remain malnourished, despite distinct improvement in per caput food availability. Thus, food and nutritional security will continue to remain major challenge for developing countries all over the world.
• To meet domestic demand in South Asia, it is estimated that the required percentage increase in production by 2020 (over the 1994-96 average productions) will be of the order of 55% in foodgrains, 142% in fruits, 28% in milk, 57% in meat and 24% in fish. This calls for unprecedented growth rate in agricultural sector. And the challenges in non-food crops are equally daunting.

Poshan Abhiyan

• POSHAN Abhiyaan PM’s Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nourishment was formally launched by Hon’ble Prime Minister on 8th March, 2018 from Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan.
• POSHAN Abhiyaan is an overarching umbrella scheme to improve the nutritional outcomes for children, pregnant women and lactating mothers by holistically addressing the multiple determinants of malnutrition and attempts to prioritize the efforts of all stakeholders on a comprehensive package of intervention and services targeted on the first 1000 days of a child’s life.
• Target of Abhiyaan is to bring down stunting of the children in the age group of 0-6 years from 38.4% to 25% by the year 2022.
• It is based on 4 pillars:

1. Ensuring access to quality services across the continuum of care to every woman and child; particularly during the first 1000 days of the child’s life.
2. Ensuring convergence of multiple programs and schemes: ICDS, PMMVY, NHM (with its sub components such as JSY, MCP card, Anaemia Mukt Bharat, RBSK, IDCF, HBNC, HBYC, Take Home Rations), Swachh Bharat Mission, National Drinking water Mission, NRLM etc.
3. Leveraging technology (ICDS-CAS) to empower the frontline worker with near real time information to ensure prompt and preventive action; rather than reactive one.
4. Jan Andolan: Engaging the community in this Mission to ensure that it transcends the contours of being a mere Government programme into a peoples’ movement inducing large scale behaviour change with the ownership of the efforts being vested in the community rather than government delivery mechanisms.

Golden Rice (Vitamin A)

• Contain β – carotein, precursor of Vitamin A developed by Peter Beyer and Ingo Potrykus.

Bio fortified sorghum

• ICSR 14001 (Prabhani Shakti)
• India’s first biofortified sorghum variety, with significantly higher amount of zinc and iron than regular sorghum developed by ICRISAT, it was released for cultivation by Vasantrao Naik Marathwada Krishi Vidyapeeth (VNMKV), Maharashtra.

Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture

• Nutrition-sensitive agriculture is a food-based approach to agricultural development that puts nutritionally rich foods, dietary diversity, and food fortification at the heart of overcoming malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies.
• This approach stresses the multiple benefits derived from enjoying a variety of foods, recognizing the nutritional value of food for good nutrition, and the importance and social significance of the food and agricultural sector for supporting rural livelihoods.
• The overall objective of nutrition-sensitive agriculture is to make the global food system better equipped to produce good nutritional outcomes.