Paradoxes about food

Food security partly lies in an effective storage system but there are too many vested interests in not developing one

Was it Oscar Wilde who asked why the poor didn't ring for dinner to be served when they felt hungry? That's one among many paradoxes about food, especially in this country of scarcity amidst plenty. Not surprisingly, criticism of the Food Security Ordinance is riddled with inconsistencies and irrelevancies.

Such contradictions existed long before the Economist gushed artlessly about "an infinite supply of langoustine and Veuve Clicquot served, to a piercing guitar solo, by a waiter who probably lives in a slum". What is new is that many of the Indians who order langoustine and Veuve Clicquot nowadays are not themselves too many generations removed from the slum where the waiters live. That's social progress for you.
 

I used to wonder what Australian audiences thought when the great C S Subramaniam, the architect of our Green Revolution, assured them India was self-sufficient in food except that a large number of Indians couldn't afford to buy it. Nor is this the only baffling feature. One of Mahatma Gandhi's objections to railways was that quick transport would enable farmers to get higher prices in distant markets instead of having to sell cheap to people in the growing area. One man's meat is another man's poison, literally so.

Under the Ordinance, the government will spend Rs 125,000 crore on distributing about 60 million tonnes of food to 67 per cent of India's 1.2 billion population. This target audience intrigues me. We've always been told there aren't more than 200 million people below the poverty line and that the Western-controlled international agencies exaggerate India's poverty. Yet, the Ordinance tacitly admits that 67 per cent of Indians would starve without a handout.

If the Congress' arithmetic seems puzzling, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s fury is even more illogical. What's curry for the goose is curry for the gander: if the Centre shouldn't give away wheat and rice, neither should states. Yet, BJP-ruled Chhattisgarh does just that for 45 per cent of its people. Congress' erstwhile allies on the Left are squirming in the usual dilemma of supporting the measure but not daring to say so lest it loses the votes of those who still dream of the red revolution to come. United Progressive Alliance allies grumble that the Congress is selfishly thinking only of its own electoral prospects. All this is pushed into the shade by hysterical TV anchors whose only thought seems to be that an ordinance bypasses the Parliament. No one has told them that the Parliament must sooner or later ratify ordinances.

I can think of two more serious objections, one philosophical and the other practical. The first is that welfare subsidies are a retreat to the Fabian socialism that the reforms P V Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh began in 1991 were supposed to banish. Perhaps that can be overlooked in terms of the post office socialism J K Galbraith condoned or even the soup kitchens so beloved of High Tories. What is far more worrying is that even more Indians will starve if this ambitious scheme to mop up and distribute 60 million tonnes of food is entrusted to the Food Corporation of India (FCI) of which the World Bank said with admirable restraint, "The FCI's inefficiencies not only lead to high losses of the grain, they also drive up the costs of food handling." Grain rots in FCI godowns where they are exposed to rain, sun, rodents and massive theft. According to one estimate, 71 per cent of the food collected goes waste; the FCI itself admits that nearly 80 million tonnes of wheat have been lost since 2009.

A partial answer lies in more effective storage facilities. Patna's famous Golghar represents an early appreciation of the importance of storage though, as so often in India, bungled execution ruined a great idea. In recent times, Swaziland and Bolivia successfully introduced metal silos. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations helped 16 other countries to do so too. But when, many years ago, my paper published an article on the virtues of metal silos that could be imported at relatively low cost from the US, there were complaints that the author worked for an American silo-manufacturer. The accusations fell just short of implying I, as editor, was hand in glove with him.

As with the Food Security Ordinance, no one addressed the basic need, which in this case was of protecting precious food. They hoped to destroy the concept by impugning the proposal. A sound distribution system wasn't in the interest of those who profit from stolen or damaged grain and exploiting the resultant scarcity. It still isn't.