Need To Re-Examine Priorities

A country with a huge population cannot afford to let staple cereals lose out to other crops in terms of profitability. However sound its foreign exchange reserves position may be, it cannot depend on the international market for meeting the food requirements of its predominantly vegetarian population. We simply do not have the port capacity to handle large food imports. Besides, we have ample bitter experience in the past due to our dependence on imports, which can at best be an avenue for meeting marginal deficiencies.

A reasonable level of food self-reliance is a must, especially after last years experience. This sector is neither fully equipped to withstand unfavourable weather nor other productivity dampers. The vulnerability to improper input use, whether it is water or fertilisers or pesticides, has been re-established by the last years harvest loss.

 

A certain degree of food self-sufficiency is necessary for yet another reason. The consequences of the deficit domestic food economy invariably tend to be disproportionately higher than the actual shortfall. This observation has been borne out by recent experience. The six million-tonne decline led to a seven million-tonne fall in grain procurement and a 15.5 million-tonne drawdown of public food stock within a short period.

It is amply clear now that foodgrain productivity has to be stepped up evenly in different regions. Dependence on just one area, notably Punjab and Haryana, for nearly two-thirds of the central grain pool stock is far from desirable. Besides the possible crop failure hazard, the constraints in transporting high-volume cargo like foodgrain from a border region to the other corners of the country are too formidable to be overlooked.

Price realisation is the most important factor in influencing the farmers choice of crops. The rapid rise in the output of wheat, and later paddy, in the wake of the green revolution was due largely to the fact that these had virtually become cash crops for the farmers thanks to assured marketing at remunerative prices. This does not appear to be so any more. Though an attempt was made in the early 1990s to remedy the situation through hefty increases in minimum support prices, the advantage was allowed to slip away in the past couple of years. The hike in cereal prices has generally been kept in single digit while the market of the competing crops has tended to be relatively much more buoyant.

The imbalanced and reduced use of chemical fertilisers, too, has been primarily due to price factors. The policy of fertiliser price decontrol, introduced in August 1992, played havoc largely because of the price mismatch caused by the simultaneous 10 per cent reduction in urea prices. This was entirely unnecessary. Though the government tried some damage control through price concession on phosphatic and potassic fertilisers, the move misfired due to faulty implementation. In fact, decontrol remained a misnomer right from the beginning as the special rebate made it obligatory to have state-advised prices. The procedures for administering this scheme were so clumsy that this otherwise well-intended measure turned out to be counter-productive.

The damage to land fertility due to prolonged imbalanced nutrient application cannot, indeed, be undone in one season. The average crop yields, therefore, may not respond adequately to the most favourable weather conditions.