Agriculture policy, impelled by sudden apprehensions and enthusiasm, reflects upon the psyche of politicians worldwide in a very poor light. The political leadership resort to providing short-term solutions for public worries over food security and appease shamelessly to farm (and fishing community) voters.
However, this does not provide any good policy to achieve permanent growth in output. It is not the prerogative of any country to monopolise the agricultural trade with expensive, counterproductive and trade-distorting agricultural policy. The present World Trade Organisation (WTO) Doha Round has collapsed several times due to reluctance of the United States and the European Union to cut down on subsidies that has been damaging to the agricultural interests of others. The U.S. action on biofuels earlier significantly crippled international stocks.
India was placed at the top of international achievement in agricultural innovation. In India, pioneers of high yielding hybrid seeds, in particular M.S. Swaminathan, using to their advantage, a wide variety of international grain types, were able to achieve a real ‘green revolution’ in India in the 1960s and 1970s that impressively boosted the agricultural productivity and made the country fully self-sufficient in its main food requirements for the first time in modern history. Energetic policy at the Union and State levels well supported the scientific innovation to achieve one of the world’s most striking agricultural successes of the twentieth century. However, a purposeful policy could not be executed well and dissolved into politicking and piecemeal implementation.
Without the support of any rigorous policy, unsustainable use of water resources encouraged by free or subsidised electricity for farm pumps and excessive use of fertilisers, led to depletion of sub-surface aquifers and soil degradation. At the same time, an expanding population, climate change and a sudden boost in agricultural commodity prices in 2007–2008 due to lower international grain stocks and a sharp rise in commodity prices, notably oil, raise a warning to India that its agricultural policy needs to be revisited. This was followed by impulse buying on international markets simultaneously when export of some items was prohibited (affecting mainly other developing countries, as the industrialised world cornered all the food it required). A healing step taken by Delhi was the lowering of tariffs on some essential international food imports. However, by November 2008, the government again raised tariffs on some products (soya) protect the interests of the domestic producers.
These set of measures taken together are certainly not a coherent set of policies to raise productivity over long-lasting periods. Instead, as in any place in the world when governments face similar pressures, such measures reek of political opportunism and whim.
India is going to face a persistent crisis in agriculture and a serious threat to its food security. It is not the situation for short-term panic. India will keep doing well in terms of managing its main needs and simultaneously of earning fairly large sums from agricultural exports. However, the factors causing anxiety would be the combination of Indian demographics with the rising success of its overall economy and environmental stress that create a challenge where increasingly prosperous Indians will be consuming more and probably wasting more also, as do middle classes everywhere.
There has been stagnation in global rice production in the past decade, whereas the price has increased four-fold. Earlier, a comment from President George Bush drew huge criticism from Indian commentators when he blamed expanding demands from India and China to be the reason behind international food crisis. Probably his mistake was in not differentiating in terms of consumption between the two countries because while the population in China consumed more than double the food after 1990, that in India also consumed more but at a much more modest rate, by roughly 30 per cent. However, anybody would hardly believe that the food consumption of a significantly more prosperous India will not be greater, including of meat that is so expensive in grain to produce.
To better understand this difference, diverging path of early economic reforms in India and China need consideration. In case of India, its major economic reforms in the early 1990s focused on liberalisation in favour of manufacturing and services sectors. In case of China, however, the key reforms were started earlier, and its prime focus was on agriculture anticipating that a decline in rural poverty might help in gaining favours politically of those raising suspicion of change due to other reforms in the pipeline.
Shenggen Fan and Ashok Gulati produced a fine article in Economic and Political Weekly in June 2008 that presented the outlines of China’s revolutionary attempt in the late 1970s for raising agricultural production on the basis of promoting multiple experiments at the local level, termed as ‘learning by doing’. Following this approach by analysing the outcome of various experiments helped Beijing in forming a full-bore nationwide reform process, a process Deng Xiaoping described as ‘crossing the river while feeling the rocks’. This process was greatly successful in raising productivity and significantly reducing rural poverty. India needs to follow similar steps to reduce rural poverty.
In the scenario of a global slowdown, rural India should be better equipped to cushion the impact in comparison to its Chinese counterpart because of the availability of a large number of Indian anti-poverty programmes constituting a fragile but hopeful safety net.
However, it is not the matter of agricultural policy only to improve productivity and nutrition.
It is widely known and equally surprising that India has higher levels of child malnutrition cases than Sub-Saharan Africa. However, it does not imply that the basic Indian foodstuffs are less nutritious than Africa’s. Though an important contribution was made by Canada’s global micronutrient initiative, co-funded by U. N. agencies and the World Bank, in fight against malnourishment, but stunting and wasting in India (all at disappointing levels, all with life-long effects) is not as successful as expected. The major factors behind this complication are poor rural health, education and physical infrastructure that prevent the free flow of foodstuffs thus naturally alleviating nutrition problems.
Hence, food security is not only about agricultural incentives and disincentives but wider national policies and programmes are equally important. However, despite Indian democracy being vibrant enough, active civil society and admirably free and crusading press, little progress has been made in recent years.
It is high time India take the required steps in the interests of its own food security. In India, an unwanted phenomenon of ice melting in huge quantity is happening in the Himalayas. This does not augur well for India’s northern belt as it may cause changes in water supply that could have devastating effects on the foundation of the country’s food self-sufficiency. The country need to take prudential steps urgently to lessen and adapt to the effects of these upcoming shifts in water supply.
The U.S. and Canadian rural development model succeeded in creating non-farm rural jobs within decades of the first European farming settlement to avoid the subdivision of farms and unemployment. These jobs were created mostly to facilitate a growing agricultural sector and processing food in order to get as much of it as possible to distant markets intact and this is a major challenge which India needs to overcome with respect to fresh produce. India need to adopt coherent government policies to encourage good non-farm jobs in rural areas to draw in the rural migrants instead of misdirected attempts towards forcing the rural migrants from urban settings they have reached in search of livelihoods.
India has a vast agricultural land and per capita, same as Italy and Germany, when both are highly efficient agricultural producers. What India needs is full range of policies necessary to boost agricultural production and nutritional progress. The country may devise sensible water management policies and programmes as is not short of water with perennial monsoons, with some fluctuations, which can be relied on. More importantly, India has plentiful human capital, which is optimistic, hardworking and endlessly entrepreneurial and having such admirable workforce, India can definitely succeed in boosting world agricultural production. However, this need a range of sound policies with a balanced approach taking into account rural interests and perspectives in a more systematic and meaningful way along with determined implementation of those policies.