Food stocks - the enduring paradox

S. Swaminathan

Between April and December 2000, official stocks of foodgrains had increased from 36.6 million tonnes to 45.5 million tones. The stocks in December comprised 19.5 million tonnes of rice and 26 million tonnes of wheat. Between April and October 2000, rice procurement was of the order of 9.55 million tonnes while the offtake was 5.7 million tonnes. In the case of wheat, the mismatch was of a much greater magnitude with the offtake being only 2.8 million tonnes against procurement of 16.4 million tonnes! With another surge in crop arrival about to begin, the storage position will become more exasperating and with added pressure for the fisc in terms of subsidy cost which has a large component of ``carrying cost'' for the Food Corporation of India.

Diagnostics aplenty

For at least three years now, the country has witnessed this spectacle of mounting food stocks without the policymakers being able to figure out how the phenomenon, the paradox of plenty of foodgrains in official godowns along with widespread poverty, could go on despite statistical consolations to the contrary. Economists have made the facile conjecture that the low offtake from the public distribution system has been caused by the inferred lack of purchasing power of the poor, particularly in the rural areas.

This has to be set against the upward revision of issue prices of foodgrains by the Centre last year - a delayed response to years of liberal increase in procurement prices under pressure from powerful farm lobbies from Punjab and Haryana. Whether this device - escalation in issue prices - is a corrective or an aggravation of mismanagement of the PDS is an open question. If it only serves to make government stocks of foodgrains less marketable than otherwise, why should not the policymakers explore alternatives, among which a nationwide food for work programme would appear to be justified in terms of both economic viability and equity?

As the paradox persists, the puzzle also would endure as to why the Vajpayee Government continues to dilly-dally on this possibility, giving rise to the fear that large food stocks would deteriorate in storage and finally be written off and destroyed as not being fit for human consumption.

PM's focus on distant horizons

The Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, in his address at ``The Hunger-free India'' conference in New Delhi last week, admitted that food stocks at 45 million tonnes and food subsidies at Rs. 13,000 crores, did pose a problem. But instead of raising hopes of any strategy to deal with the procurement-offtake divide, all that Mr. Vajpayee would say is that the PDS is seriously flawed in distributive efficiency especially in the poor North and North-eastern States. His catch-all formulation that regional and seasonal variations, fluctuations in the purchasing power of the poorest households, natural calamities and so forth accounted for the continuing food insecurity of the people has, in fact, served to draw attention away from how the Government can intervene in a situation where foodstocks are going abegging.

The Prime Minister has only reiterated what the Finance Minister adumbrated in the budget. Investments are critically needed in agriculture for vastly increased infrastructure in food storage, post-harvest processing and preservation and distribution. As for foodgrains procurement, the strategic shift that the budget envisages is from centralisation of purchase of grain from the farmers by the FCI to decentralisation of procurement by the State governments themselves with financial assistance provided by the Centre. That many State governments are not too keen to take over the responsibility is another tragic dimension of the food paradox.

Freedom from hunger

Is poverty abolition the precondition for ensuring that no Indian need to go to bed without a single meal for the day? Mr. Vajpayee at the conference seems to have hinted at the much-needed distinction between government policy and a system of social consciousness required to deal with the hunger of the poor. In the long evolution of values in Indian society, anna daan (sharing of food) has had a pride of place, even though the PDS has mistakenly been identified as a replacement of the ``decadent'' virtue of charity. Temples and other religious places (with Sikh gurdwaras providing langdas, the community kitchens) have long served as providers of free food for the poor.

That the large number of voluntary agencies that have grown over the years can complement the work of food distribution to the poor at the micro-level, along with temples, mosques, churches and gurdwaras, must be reckoned with in any strategy for banishing hunger.

There must be a way for the Government to use at least a tenth of the official stocks of foodgrains to systematise a movement towards the supply of free food for the poorest in every locality. To say that this would be an effective method of using food subsidies to serve the poorest of the poor, would be quite appropriate, but it would be far more justifiable to identify such a programme as the food security for the poor, transcending the cruelties of the market-place, if not as a meaningful system of social insurance at the basic level.

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