Food for thought

The political establishment is yet to wake up to the fact that foodgrain production will not keep up with rising demand leading to massive food crisis in the country

MR Sivaraman Delhi

Is India heading towards a serious food crisis in the coming years?

The whispers in the corridors of power indicate an anxiety about such prospects. This is because there has been no growth in the production of foodgrain. In 2003-04, agricultural production peaked at 213.19 million tonnes of foodgrain. This year, barring sugarcane, all other agricultural crops have shown a high level of production. But this is no source of comfort, as the graphs of production and demand trends paint a different picture.

GS Bhalla and others in a paper for the International Food Policy Institute Washington DC (1999) have projected a demand for foodgrain at a modest 257.3 million tonnes in 2020. But India was not growing at this pace in 1999. With rising income levels, notwithstanding the changing pattern of consumption, the demand for foodgrain would definitely exceed 253 million tonnes in the current phase.

The figures relating to agriculture in the RBI Handbook of Statistics on the Indian economy (2006-07) should cause concern. The area under foodgrain has declined from a peak of 107 million hectares in 1983-84 to a little over 100 million hectares in 2006-2007. The decline is in the area under cultivation of coarse cereals, with no corresponding increase in area under wheat or paddy. The area under groundnut has declined sharply from over 8.67 million hectares in 1990-91 to 5.8 million hectares in 2006-2007. However, the area under soyabean has increased to 8.15 million hectares from 3.18 million hectares during the same period. The yield under sugarcane has been fluctuating around 66 tonnes per hectare, whereas it touched 71 tonnes per hectare in 2000-01.

Productivity is still hovering around 3,123 kg per hectare of paddy as against over 6,265 kg in China. In the case of wheat, China produces 4,455 kg per hectare as against 2,618 kg per hectare in India.

There is something fundamentally wrong in the implementation of agricultural schemes. Plan expenditure under agriculture and allied services has gone up from Rs 2,650 crore in 1998-99 to an estimated Rs 8,369 crore in 2007-08. To this has to be added the thousands of crores that the states spend on agriculture, irrigation and power for agriculture. In the last three years alone, credit to agriculture has more than doubled. Where have all these thousands of crores gone? The truth is, there has been no tangible result in terms of increase in agricultural production or productivity.

Why has Parliament not debated on such an important issue? There are scores of reports on agriculture and the plight of farmers, but they have merited little attention in Parliament. MPs and state legislatures are expected to keep a watch on how the bureaucracy implements programmes in the field and question them if they have failed. This does not seem to have happened.