India faces food shortage

Ravi Velloor, Straits Times 28 Jun 10;

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's six years in power have produced an economy poised for double-digit growth, infrastructure that is finally getting fixed and rising clout on the global front.

But he has one growing worry: India's failing farm sector, where six out of 10 of its citizens make their living.

Shortages of grain are a major concern, and food prices are soaring. Misery on the farm front, including farmers' inability to pay off moneylenders, leads to thousands taking their own lives every year.

'India must strive to raise agricultural production from 2 per cent annually on average to 4 per cent,' Dr Singh, an economist by training, said recently.

The annual monsoon has become unreliable. When it failed last year, production of food grains dropped to below 220 million tonnes, barely enough to feed a population of 1.2 billion.

Farm productivity is so poor that India lags behind its neighbours Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in the amount of rice it can extract from every acre of land.

'We are on the verge of a disaster,' says Professor M.S. Swaminathan, India's foremost agriculture scientist and a Magsaysay Prize winner. 'We will be in serious difficulty if food productivity is not increased and farming is neglected.'

Even though the forecast is for a normal monsoon this year, long-term issues remain to be tackled and that is on Dr Singh's mind.

'India commands about 2.3 per cent of the world's land area and about 4 per cent of the earth's fresh water resources, but feeds about 17 per cent of the world's population,' he pointed out. 'This puts tremendous pressure on our resources and makes the need for newer and better technologies even more critical.'

What is proving elusive for Dr Singh is the sort of success that his home state, Punjab, achieved in the late 1960s, when Prof Swaminathan and other scientists helped bring about what is known as India's Green Revolution.

Using a combination of advanced farming techniques, fertilisers and a proactive public policy, Punjab's farm productivity rose from 600kg a hectare in the mid-1960s to more than 5 tonnes a hectare in the early 1970s.

Thanks to such initiatives, India, once considered dependent on handouts like United States- supplied grain, soon became self-sufficient in food.

However, farmers now say that level of productivity is no longer available, and they would be lucky to squeeze out 3.3 tonnes a hectare. And even that is achieved by using higher and higher amounts of urea fertiliser, disrupting the soil's ecology.

'The soil health is deteriorating, but we don't know how to make it better,'Mr Kamaljit Singh, a farmer from Punjab, told the Wall Street Journal. Farmers are stuck as more fertiliser is needed to make up for declining fertility of the soil, he said.

Worse, salinity levels of the land are rising even as the water table is dropping. In farmer Harmesh Singh's village in Punjab, 95 per cent of the farmers are in debt, mainly because they have to dig deeper borewells for water every few years, the Chandigarh Tribune newspaper reported this month.

If ever there was a time that India needed a second Green Revolution, it is now. That is why sharing advanced farming technology is a key element of the emerging India-US strategic relationship.

There are many reasons for agriculture's poor showing besides unreliable rains. Farm holdings are severely fragmented. Land ceilings prevent big industries from attempting industrial farming. As so many of its 1.2 billion people live off the land, politicians have pampered them with inefficient subsidies, ranging from free power to below-cost fertiliser. All this has a huge impact on farming efficiency.

To be sure, the solutions also stare India in the face. For instance, the small-sized holdings that arise out of fragmentation of land can be met by collective farming. Half a century ago, small milk farmers in Gujarat showed this was possible by setting up a cooperative that has now come to be recognised nationwide by the Amul brand of milk products, the world's biggest producer of packet milk.

There is no evidence that a similar attempt has been made in pooling land resources. Other things need fixing as well.

'A phased increase in fertiliser prices and economically rational user charges for irrigation electricity could raise resources to finance investment in rural infrastructure, benefiting both growth and equity,' said Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of India's Planning Commission, which is chaired by Prime Minister Singh.

'Competitive populism makes it politically difficult to restructure subsidies in this way, but there is also no alternative solution in sight.'