Abstract
Food security occupies a central place in our debate on food policy. The accepted definition of food security—as the adequate economic and physical access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet the dietary needs for a healthy life for all at all times—also provides the criteria to assess the same. Has India succeeded in achieving a decent degree of food security? It seems that the high growth rate and absolute increase in food grain production have created complacency around food security and even numbed the sensitivity to continuing hunger and malnutrition. Many books have focused on food security in terms of food production and distribution, but those that closely interrogate them together are rare. The book under review is one such that evaluates food security from a health and nutrition angle and poses a formidable challenge to the official view on this question and its claims. Based on meticulous collation and interpretation of the data, the authors reveal the colossal failure to produce and distribute adequate amounts of essential nutritious food, in spite of a plethora of food distribution programs. They offer a comprehensive critique by going into the fundamental cause of this failure.
The book has eight chapters: food as a critical determinant of health; failure of food security; the food security-public health-poverty triad; diagnosis of the failure; food production failure; consumption anomalies; political economy of agriculture; and comparison with Chinese experience. K. B. Saxena’s introduction to the book gives the necessary background to this question by taking the reader into how the persistence of the targeted approach in food distribution policy, combined with the inadequate budgeting, has led to failure in reaching the last mile, whether it is the public distribution system, the special ration programs to vulnerable groups, midday meals, or Integrated Child Development Programs, conveying a lack of conviction in the public policy.
Chapter 1 places nutrition at the center of civilizational achievements under modernity: increase in life expectancy, decrease in child and overall mortality, as well as decline in morbidity, especially tuberculosis, infectious diseases, and an increase in anthropogenic parameters. Nutritious food, it is argued, is a fundamental right of the people, making it imperative on the state to ensure its adequate production and distribution, in order to break the nexus between poverty and illness.
Taking up food production, the authors then challenge the dominant view that India has achieved self-sufficiency in food production but is failing at distribution. They point out that, even though food production has increased after the Green Revolution and market intervention in the 1990s, thereon there has been a gradual deterioration of in per capita food grain availability. The growth of food grain production, in fact, fell behind population growth, declining from 165 kg/year in 2005 to 146 kg/year in 2016. Nor is there a significant growth in milk, meat, eggs, pulses, fruits, and vegetable production in per capita terms. There is a fundamental production failure at the bottom, the authors argue, after which they turn their attention to the ‘falling relative demand for food’.
Over the past 30 years, the average caloric consumption of the bottom six income deciles of the population fell below 1600 calories, while the middle four deciles was less than the recommended level, with only the top deciles consuming 2950 calories. It extends to cereals and meat-milk-eggs as well. In the mid of falling per capita food availability and calorie consumption for the bottom deciles, how is it that poverty has officially fallen? The authors point out that the poverty line itself got manipulated when the Tendulkar Commission pushed the required calorie consumption of the rural and urban poor downwards to 2100 and 1800 calories from 2400 and 2100, respectively. This was done with full knowledge that the poor involved in hard labor need 3000 calories. As a result, there was a dramatic fall in ‘below poverty’ households, but malnutrition continued, for which the official explanation is changing preferences and substitution with noncereals. However, the authors point out that National Sample Survey (NSS) data on consumption does not show any such trends, thereby demolishing the ‘tastes and preferences’ argument. Even sub-Saharan countries consume more than 2900 calories. The official view that increased mechanization requires less calories is also shown to be specious, as greater mechanization in the rest of the world did not lead to a similar fall. India, therefore, cannot be a basket case. This, probably, is the best critique offered on the food security policy debate so far. By painstakingly digging into NSS data, the authors show that the bottom 60 per cent households are compelled to divert their spending to meet education, health, transport, and other needs.
The authors review all the existing nutrition programs to find them falling short of the need and efficacy. Even the objective of the so-called Food Security Act 2013 is compromised by resorting to the ‘targeted’ approach, with a marginal raise in allocation of food grain. With rising unemployment, weak growth in real income, the book convincingly shows the comprehensive failure of the Indian state in filling the food deficit.
The last four chapters focus on India’s failure to produce adequate food grains and the political economy dimensions. The book seems slightly hung over on the argument that land reform failure is central to food security failure. It harks back to the age-old thesis of inverse size-productivity nexus, which has ceased to exist for a long time. Agriculture, dominated by the large share of marginalized small peasantry, is facing a serious viability crisis. The land, rather than landlessness, is the source of bigger trouble. Its analysis of the production crisis seems stuck in the 1970s, oblivious to the changing ground level reality after globalization. Also, institutional measures like agricultural cooperatives to revitalize agriculture are missing from its scope.
Chapter 7 dwells on how globalization led to revamping of global supply chains, contract farming, agribusiness supply chains, farm mechanization, and MNC penetration into agricultural markets. These are seen as predatory developments with the connivance of the state. While rental extraction in the value chain has increased due to intermediaries, to see the forces of such capital as extraneous and to characterize its hegemony over the capital of the periphery as mere ‘semi-feudal-comprador’ seems to lack the required nuance. Moreover, feudal relations loosened long back, with increased labor migration, remittances of historically backward areas, penetration of irrigation, modern inputs, processing units, and bank credit, and there is a considerable variation across India.
The last chapter presents the Chinese experience as a comparable case for India, as one that has achieved genuine food self-sufficiency from radical land reforms in the postrevolution Maoist period. This is a contested claim, as China went from peasant production to village collectives and back to the individual responsibility system. In any case the comparison becomes futile, for the revolution, as the necessary condition, remains farfetched for India. Also in the postreform period in China, food production increased much more with institutional support such as micropoly housing technologies, bank credit, and marketing.
The book, overall, is an important contribution. It makes a solid evidence-based case for necessary levels of food production and distribution, clearing all kinds of specious but popular arguments on its way, which is commendable. It is a must read for every student and scholar working on food security in India.