Act criticised for ignoring food security

The Food Security Act (FSA) of the UPA government has two blind spots. The right to produce food and national food security, the two key points aspects of food security and food sovereignty, are ignored, said environmental and development activist Vandana Shiva here in Mysore.

The right to produce food and national food security, both are aspects of food sovereignty, one at the level of food producers and the other at the level of the country as a whole. Ignoring these two aspects made the FSA “extremely dangerous”. The FSA has failed to address food security at a serious level, Shiva lamented.

 

She and eminent journalist Kuldip Nayar were delivering lectures at the Crawford Hall marking the Mysore University Foundation day.

Criticising the government’s control over food production, she said the right of producers to produce food was the foundation of food security. This right was internationally evolved through the concept of “food sovereignty”. The FSA had, however, ignored the very right of the food producer. Instead of inviting corporates to the food and agriculture front, the government’s priority should be protection of the farmers’ livelihood.

Food sovereignty was derived from socio-economic human rights, which include the right to food and the right to produce food.

To achieve genuine sovereignty, people in rural areas must have access to productive land and receive prices for their crops that allow them to make a decent living while feeding the nation’s people.

On the other hand. India had more hungry people today than ever before. “It is a ‘hungry India’ now. Most of the producers themselves are hungry. There is something systematically wrong,” she remarked.

Shiva criticised the trend of lands of the poor farmers being handed over to the rich and corporates. The economic power of the West had collapsed. The bubble had burst there. So they are coming to India, she said citing the example of steel industries.

Referring to large-scale indebtedness among farmers, she said nearly 86 per cent of them were in debt as prices of agricultural inputs had become abnormally high. Unable to meet the debt burden, a large number of them were committing suicide. “If our food producers do not survive, what is the point of talking about food security,” she asked.

She blamed capital and chemical-intensive way of food production for the present farm scenario.

Kuldip Nayar, in his address, lamented that the country had failed to meet the ambitions of leaders of Nehru, Gandhi, Patel, Sastry and others in building a poverty-less and disease-free society. A sense of pessimism and helplessness pervades across the country. There was a long way to go to establish a society on moral grounds. “If means are vitiated ends too will be vitiated,” he cautioned.