India Impacted by Rise in Food Insecurity Worldwide, Deteriorating Economic Conditions
Crisis Policy Forum, Food Supply Security, Quipu Economic Forum, Water Scarcity :: Comments (0)
21 December 2008 :: by J.E. Robertson
CafeSentido.com :: There are over 230 million people suffering from hunger or undernourishment in India. No other nation has so many people suffering chronic malnutrition, and the undernourished in India represent 27% of the worldwide hunger-stricken population. While India’s economy develops and the potential for an expanded middle class takes root, the total number of Indians going hungry has risen, despite the overall percentage of undernourished, as part of the whole population, having been reduced in recent years.
The current global economic crisis puts the most vulnerable in India at severe risk of persistent or even chronic hunger. Hundreds of millions of people living at the margins of a society in which the privileges of modern life are far from universal —people kept in a state of chronic poverty by countless socio-economic factors and often treated as the detritus of an incomplete political system struggling to comprehend its own massive responsibilities— simply do not have access to extra resources to cover worsening deficits in their food supply.
This means that a population the size of many nations may be facing the perils of a deepening condition of chronic hunger in a nation whose arable land is being diminished by huge dam projects, overuse and soil erosion, impromptu irrigation systems, hyper-expansion of water-use for non-sustenance purposes —industry, development and personal hygiene— and urban sprawl of a kind rarely seen in human history. Climate change is also putting India’s climate stability and water resources at risk, and chronic water shortage brings both the potential for tens of millions of water refugees and for outbreaks of cholera and other diseases.
The population facing food shortage is roughly half the population of the expanded European Union. In fact, only China, India, the United States and Indonesia have populations larger than the 230 million undernourished within India. That population is actually about 5 million more than the combined populations of Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Venezuela, Malaysia, North Korea, Taiwan, Ghana and Romania — all among the 50 most populous nations. So one could say that the number of malnourished in India encompasses the entire populations of 8 populous nations.
India’s food production and food consumption are both massive, by any standards, but the huge population makes the modes of distribution intensely relevant to the quality of life of hundreds of millions who find themselves at the fringes of that system. According to Time magazine:
India’s current food-distribution system is a legacy of the 1940s and ’50s, when chronic food shortages led the government to crack down on hoarding of produce by unscrupulous cartels. In 1966 the government introduced a new law that banned farmers from dealing directly with retailers and forced them to sell through licensed middlemen, called mandis.
India’s problem may be more to do with global harvest capacity and food distribution than with the nature of the retail sector there, however. India’s central plateaus are one of the world’s most prolific grain-producing regions. The country was saved from catastrophic famine in the 1960s by the so-called ‘Green Revolution’, which used modern farming techniques and highly efficient grain varieties to vastly increase crop yields, eventually making India a major exporter of grains. But in 2006, India was forced to import 3.5 million tons of wheat.
Nevertheless, there has been talk of using India as a sourcing point for produce to be exported to cities in Europe and Asia. This could lead to a devastating drain on basic nutrients available to poor Indians, should the model flourish, though some argue agricultural exports are necessary to provide a trade-based national income that raises standards of living and allows for expanded import potential.
The root of this food-supply trade problem is in poor land-use policies, which have led to even more poorly planned water-use policies, around the world. Even as India seeks to find export markets to expand income levels for its vast agricultural sector, comprising as much as 70% of the working economy of regions like the Deccan Plateau in Andhra Pradesh, it is negotiating trade agreements designed to shore up its faltering food supply at home.
New Zealand’s agriculture minister, Jim Anderton, at this year’s global food security crisis conference in Rome, said: “Right now India has turned to New Zealand and is asking for a free trade agreement with a country that is a reliable and high quality food supplier — that wouldn’t have happened 18 months ago”. Australia’s foreign minister issued a press release in September, announcing that he had visited a joint Australian-Indian research project in India, designed to prevent crop yields from declining due to water scarcity:
The aim of this Australian-funded project is to speed up the development of advanced, more robust sorghum crops through the use of advanced biotechnology – in particular a plant-breeding process known as marker-assisted selection (MAS). The objective is to develop crops that are better able to cope with water stress during drought.
The complexities of global food distribution are staggering, and global systems have very real dilemmas that need to be solved. For instance, worldwide mismanagement of water resources, the damaging reduction in overall arable land for many countries, and booming population growth, mean India may have less of its own harvest to spread around at home, food aid —an absolute necessity for tens of millions to survive— may also be contributing to hunger in some of the poorest countries. The Winnipeg Free Press has reported the following:
Consider that each year the U.S. grows millions of tonnes of sorghum, a staple grain in many African nations, but one which is not consumed in the U.S. The only reason U.S. farmers grow sorghum is to export it as food aid.
A flood of heavily subsidized U.S.-grown sorghum means that it is simply not cost-effective for farmers in Africa to grow their own sorghum and wheat. And that means that developing countries never cultivate a functional agricultural economy so they can end their reliance on foreign aid.
Sorghum is also an export crop grown in India, but over which domestic distributors and demand from overseas are in constant struggle. Clearly, truly famished nations —with millions in chronic hunger and no farm sector to cover food security shortfalls— need some form of international food aid. But there also needs to be better planning for what the real effects will be of providing a specific resource at zero cost that could be developed locally to stimulate economic development, and coordinate such efforts with long-term economic viability in mind.
The executive director of the UN’s World Food Programme, Josette Sheeran, said last week that India needs to make further efforts to improve its state-run Public Distribution System (PDS), to better ensure food reaches the poor, and to combat malnutrition nationally. Efforts by India to tackle this problem could have a positive impact on global efforts to reduce hunger, as India has many of the contributing factors that lead to severe hunger elsewhere: a population boom, water scarcity, mass poverty and a farm sector that does not always benefit the people in need.
India’s health ministry, in a joint study with UNICEF, has found that nearly 46% of children under three years of age in India are suffering from undernutrition. That health problem, which can lead to underdevelopment in crucial growing years, can also lead to a deeper kind of chronic food scarcity, intensified by the habits of a population not accustomed to having any means of acquiring adequate nutrition.
The global hunger situation is worsening rapidly, likely due to fallout from food prices, grain prices and economic crisis. 40 million more people have joined the worldwide population of undernourished this year alone, and conditions in major cities like Delhi, mean that figure could continue to rise in 2009. The prices for wheat and rice have doubled over the last year, leaving poor families in big Indian cities like Delhi unable to buy enough food. The UN considers it necessary to follow two parallel paths to food security: increasing food supply, while finding means to deliver aid to those who cannot afford or find food.
A representative of the UN says India is doing both, but that “implementation” of the strategy may be the biggest obstacle to reaching the Millennium Development Goals key measure of reducing hunger by half by the year 2015. It looks like the number of chronically hungry will pass 1 billion, if drastic efforts are not made in the next year, and India may see more of its population falling into food insecurity, a reversal of course at the worst possible time, with the twin risks of population growth and price-rises threatening the most in need.
