[nukkad] Real Issues

["Fernandes, Nelson \(NBC\)" <>]

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Never advise anyone to go to war or to marry. -Spanish Proverb
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One of the many real issues which gets lost in the melee of Hindu/Muslim
bashing.

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December 2, 2002
India's Poor Starve as Wheat Rots
By AMY WALDMAN

 
HANNA, India - Surplus from this year's wheat harvest, bought by the
government from farmers, sits moldering in muddy fields here in Punjab
State. Some of the previous year's wheat surplus sits untouched, too, and
the year's before that, and the year's before that.

To the south, in the neighboring state of Rajasthan, villagers ate boiled
leaves or discs of bread made from grass seeds in late summer and autumn
because they could not afford to buy wheat. One by one, children and adults
- as many as 47 in all - wilted away from hunger-related causes, often
clutching pained stomachs.

"Sometimes, we ate half a bread," said Phoolchand, a laborer whose
2-year-old daughter died during that period. "Sometimes, a whole bread."

More than two decades after a "green" revolution made India, the world's
second-most-populous country, self-sufficient in grain production, half of
India's children are malnourished. About 350 million Indians go to bed
hungry every night. Pockets of starvation deaths, like those in the Baran
district of Rajasthan, have surfaced regularly in recent years.

Yet the government is sitting on wheat surpluses - now at about 53 million
metric tons - that would stretch to the moon and back at least twice if all
the bags were lined up. Persistent scarcity surrounded by such bounty has
become a source of shame for a nation that has taken pride in feeding
itself.

Advocates for the poor and those pushing for economic reforms ask how a
country can justify hoarding so much excess when so many of its people
regularly go hungry.

"It's scandalous," said Jean Drèze, an economist who has been helping to
document starvation deaths for a Supreme Court case brought by the People's
Union for Civil Liberties, an advocacy group, to compel the government to
use the surplus to relieve hunger.

The reason, experts and officials agree, is the economics - and particularly
the politics - of food in India, a country that has modernized on many
fronts but that remains desperately poor.

Critics say the central government, led for the last four years by the Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, has catered to political allies and
powerful farm lobbies in a few key states by buying more and more grain from
farmers at higher and higher prices. At the same time, it has been
responding to pressure from international lenders by curbing food subsidies
to consumers.

One result has been huge stockpiles going to waste, while higher prices for
food and inefficient distribution leave basic items like bread, a staple of
the rural poor diet, out of reach for many. Even though the surplus is
supposed to be distributed to the poor, politics and corruption often limit
their access.

"It's not an economic issue anymore - it's a straightforward political
issue," said Jairam Ramesh, the senior economic adviser to the Congress
Party, the country's main opposition party.

Answering such criticism, Asok Kumar Mohapatra, who was until recently a
joint secretary with the Department of Food and Public Distribution, said
any system trying to feed a billion people was apt to have inefficiencies.
"It's easy to find fault with this kind of organization," he said. But he,
too, acknowledged the politics involved. "The simple thing is they have
lobbies," he said of the farmers, "and lobbies work everywhere."

Both the glut in Punjab and the deprivation in Rajasthan reflect a
government in transition between a quasi-socialist past and a free-market
future, and one that at the local level especially seems deeply ambivalent
about its obligations to its poorest citizens.

After a devastating famine in 1943 that killed three million people and
humbling food scarcities in the 1960's, Indian central governments have been
determined to ensure that the country could feed itself.

A nationwide system was set up to distribute subsidized food via a network
of "ration shops" that today number 454,000. At the same time, India made
great advances in increasing its productivity, by developing high-yield
seeds and investing in infrastructure, like irrigation.

The green agricultural revolution quadrupled staple food production, from 50
million metric tons in 1950 to 209 million metric tons by 2000.

The fruits of those efforts can be witnessed nowhere more vividly than in
Punjab. Today it is India's only state (along, perhaps, with neighboring
Haryana, which was carved from Punjab), that derives more than 40 percent of
its income from agriculture; until recently it had the highest per capita
income in India. It has some of the country's best roads and, with only 2
percent of the country's land, grows 55 percent of its food.

While farmers in poorer states have either no grain surplus or no mechanism
by which to sell it to the government, Punjab has 1,600 wholesale grain
markets, including the one here in Khanna, the largest in Asia.

But the same system that has built up Punjab has also run into trouble on
almost every front, and even the farmers here know it cannot last.

Over the past four years, even as advisory committees recommended
stabilizing or lowering the support prices paid to farmers, prices instead
went up, and up - to about $129 a metric ton, 2,200 pounds, for wheat this
year from about $99 in 1997.

Punjab farmers, eager to cash in, are farming so much rice and wheat that
they are depleting the state's water and soil, creating a long-term threat
to the country's agricultural self-sufficiency.

"We know every year we take the water level down," said Bachittar Singh, 67,
a farmer with 125 acres near here. "But what alternative do we have?"

Then there is the effect of such policies on the price of grain itself. The
high prices paid to farmers by the government have inflated consumer prices,
making it harder for the poor to buy grain. In some cases, the government,
wanting to keep market prices in India high, has exported grain at lower
prices than it was selling it to its citizens.

By the mid-1990's, India was spending close to 1 percent of its gross
domestic product on food subsidies, with much of that lost to waste and
theft. Under strong pressure from the World Bank and other international
lenders to curb spending, the government decided in 1997 that only those
below the poverty line would be able to buy heavily subsidized food.
Everyone else would have to buy it only slightly below market price.

But with politics, indifference and corruption conspiring to limit the
number of those identified as poor, the amount of food being bought from
ration shops dropped significantly and stockpiles soared. The problem is
compounded by the fact that even many of those classified as poor are unable
to buy the subsidized grain because of inaccessible ration shops or dealers
who steal the grain for sale on the black market.

Today the government has run out of warehouse space and has taken to storing
the grain in fields rented from farmers. A recent report found that it was
spending more on storage than on agriculture, rural development, irrigation
and flood control combined.

Some of the wheat, often protected only by porous jute bags and black
plastic tarpaulins, is rotten; even official estimates concede that 200,000
tons are "damaged," with the real total probably far higher. Inspectors have
found worm-infested wheat at schools where the state is supposed to provide
free lunch.

It is about 400 miles from the abundance here to the barren, scrubby
landscape of Baran, in the southeast corner of Rajasthan. This year was the
third year of drought, and the most brutal, with rainfall down by 70
percent.

In the village of Swaans, isolated by jolting dirt roads and dry riverbeds,
one man, Gobrilal, lost an 8-year-old son to hunger this fall. He sat
recently beneath the shade of a thatched shelter, surrounded by children who
were all rib cages and swollen bellies, and recounted two months of agony.

On good days they ate once a day, but many days they ate nothing. Gobrilal's
son began vomiting, even while asking for food, and died two days later. "If
we had money," his father said listlessly, "we would have bought him wheat
so he wouldn't have died."



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