With more than a billion people and a growth rate of 6% in which the contribution of agriculture is almost 12-13%, India is considered one of the largest agrarian economies. However, over the past 15 years, the debate about food, under a rights-based perspective, has become increasingly complex. Concerns about famine, emergency relief and technology-driven green revolutions have given way to discussions on the state's failure to deliver public distribution programmes, the discrimination these programmes perpetuate, legal entitlements to land, climate change, price volatility and the role of NGOs. In other words, the debate has shifted from starvation and subsistence to dignity and justice.
With the specter of drought haunting the countryside, speculators, hoarders and black-marketeers are back in business. Prices of essential commodities like pulses, edible oil, sugar and salt are going through the roof. Vegetables are out of reach of the average family with the price of a kilo of potatoes increasing by over 100% in the last month. But the government, preoccupied with its internal squabbles, cares little for the insecurity rising prices and consequent food deprivation causes Indian families. For the government this is collateral damage in its mission to implement pro-corporate reform (PCR) and cut food subsidy.
This approach is now reflected in its policy regarding the surplus food grain stocks it holds. The buffer stock in the month of July, according to the quarterly buffer stock norms India has, should be 3.3 crore tonnes. Current stocks are as high as 8.2 crore tonnes. Instead of distributing these surplus stocks to the millions of families wrongly defined as non-poor, the government has chosen to permit exports "to liquidate the stocks". Most of the exported food grain will be ultimately used as feed for livestock converted to animal products in developed countries.
The government sees nothing unethical about subsidizing grains for foreign cattle but not for its own people. The decision to export is influenced by agribusiness lobbies, which want to take advantage of rising wheat prices in the international market driven upwards by reported crop damage in major wheat growing areas across the globe.
The future will belong to nations with grains and not guns. We have enough grains for all – we need to open and expand our thinking on what can be done, and how to build a future where everyone on the planet always has enough to eat.
Yet, the Indian elite shrieks at the prospect of formalizing a universal right to food. Notwithstanding the collective moral deficit this reveals, it also shows that the millions of Indians whose food rights are so flagrantly violated are completely voiceless in the policy space. India's problem is not only to secure food, but to secure food justice.
What can food justice practically mean? First, to prevent situations where grains rot while people die — a very basic principle of distributive justice. But it has to mean a lot more: people must have the right to produce food with dignity, have control over the parameters of production, get just value for their labour and their produce. Mainstream notions of food security ignore this dimension. Food justice must entail both production and distribution. Its fundamental premise must be that governments have a non-negotiable obligation to address food insecurity. They must also address the structural factors that engender that insecurity. Most governments, however, appear neither willing nor able to deliver food justice. It needs therefore the devolution of power and resources to the local level, where millions of protagonists, with their knowledge of local needs and situations, can create a just food economy.
What is required is a proper mechanism at the national and state level for co-ordinated policy making. Storage capacities should be built in food deficit regions while developing cold storage chains and food processing to prevent wastage. A plan must be made to improve agri-infrastructure with backward and forward linkages to help boost production, cut wastage and develop agri markets.
