Frankly, my dear: Food for thought

Antara Dev Senis Editor of The Little Magazine, an independent publication devoted to essays, literature and criticism on social concerns and issues neglected by mainstream media (www.littlemag.com). Sen has earlier worked as a senior editor with The Hindustan Times and The Indian Express, among other assignments. She can be contacted at sen@littlemag.com

If you are worried about food prices and inflation in your neighbourhood, allow me to escalate your concern. It’s not just us in poor old India. Rising food prices have ushered in a global food crisis that is likely to plunge 100 million people around the world deeper into poverty and hunger.

There are food riots in Haiti, North Korea faces famine and several African countries are hit by devastating starvation. Then there is the slow, less dramatic hunger that kills through malnourishment, poised to coil around the poorer countries of Asia, Africa and Central America. The price rise that affects our kitchens and our everyday lives is part of a much larger global problem.

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This month, four died and at least 20 were injured in a food riot in Haiti. There have been food riots in Egypt and the Philippines, and violent protests in Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Bolivia. In February, 40 people died in price riots in Cameroon. And experts from the World Food Programme have warned that with food becoming unaffordable, North Korea is likely to be hit by a famine. Almost three million people died in North Korea’s famine in the 1990s.

But then, one child dies every five seconds from hunger and its effects. This food crisis will yank up the toll. “The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions,” said United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. “The World Bank has estimated that the doubling of food prices over the last three years could push 100 million people in low income countries deeper into poverty.”

The crisis affects international aid agencies as well. Josette Sheeran, Director of the UN’s World Food Programme, said there were plans to ration food aid because of rising prices and a shortage of funds. Describing the current food crisis as “a silent tsunami” she said: “It knows no borders and it’s affecting many and it has been moving quietly throughout the globe...”

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The scarcity of food will hit more than 73 million people in 78 countries that depend on food handouts from the United Nations World Food Programme. Last month, 36 countries were named as staggering under a food crisis, of which 21 are in Africa. Sierra Leone, Ghana, Kenya and Chad are among those facing “severe localised food insecurity”, apart from Lesotho and Swaziland which are reeling from droughts.

Besides, World Vision Canada, one of the world’s largest humanitarian organisations, is forced to cut aid to 1.5 million people in Africa. Poor countries that depend on international aid to stave off hunger, like Uganda and Sudan, would be the most affected by the double whammy of spiralling costs and the failure of richer countries to live up to their aid commitments.

Not that the richer nations are untouched by this global price rise. In the US, food rationing has been introduced for the first time ever. Even during the world wars, when there was a ration on certain commodities, it never touched essential food items. Now, good old rice is being rationed in WalMart-owned supermarkets both in the US and in Britain.

Of course, the Indian government assures us that we in India have no cause for alarm. “Political parties must not politicise the misery of the people and indulge in scare mongering about food scarcity,” said a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office. This may be right to a certain extent.

After all, India is the second largest producer of both wheat and rice, and part of the global crisis has been created by India’s trying to meet domestic demands by curbing exports. We have, for example, stopped exporting rice — other than the premium Basmati that is out of reach of the unwashed Indian masses anyway.

Even then, essential foods are almost priced out of reach of the poor. The urban middle class is barely managing to cope and kitchen habits are changing rapidly. Prices of rice, daal, wheat, edible oil, vegetables and milk have escalated up to 40 per cent. For poorer households, where a major portion of the family income is spent on basic food, this means a sharp fall in their standard of living, and an erosion of savings.

Ironically, a shortage of food has never been our problem. Even during the infamous Bengal famine of 1943, which killed about 4 million people, there was enough food. The poor just did not have access to it. In our country, bad policies and lack of affordability cause starvation, not so much a real lack of food. Last year alone, 25,000 farmers killed themselves due to hunger. Not because there was no food. But because bad policies, denial of proper prices for their produce and administrative corruption had plunged them so deep in debt that these farmers just couldn’t afford to live.

While India has been emerging as an ‘economic superpower’, there have been gaps. Yes, in the last five years, the Indian economy has been growing rapidly at an average of 8.5 per cent. But this is mainly in the industries and services sectors. Over the same five years, agriculture has grown by barely 2.5 per cent. A particularly depressing figure for a country where 70 per cent of its 1.1 billion people are directly dependent on agriculture.

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Even then, there is food. The government’s tendency to obsessively stockpile food-grains while millions of Indians face malnutrition and even starvation has been criticised for long. But maybe now that the world is facing a food supply crisis, our huge stockpiles of surplus grain would come in handy.

But we still need to get our act together when it comes to storage and distribution. According to government sources, inadequate storage, corruption and terrible security at distribution facilities cost us about 20 million tonnes of food-grains in preventable losses every year. That is about 10.5 per cent of the total production. In a poor country — and in a world where a child dies of hunger or malnutrition every five seconds — this is criminal.

To deal with our own food crisis, this alarming callousness of the Food Corporation of India, and inexcusable wastefulness and corruption in the public distribution system needs to be addressed urgently. And proper government policies need to be in place. Just flaunting a great GDP isn’t enough — not at the cost of farmlands, agricultural produce and farmers’ lives. And sops like waiving some farmers’ loans is not enough.

We need real solutions. Now that spiralling prices have barged into urban middles class homes, upsetting our eating habits — as opposed to just silently starving the lower classes — we will, hopefully, come up with viable ways of stemming the rot in the system.

The views expressed in the article are the author’s and not of Sify.com