Food muddle - answers continue to elude

By S. Swaminathan

At the end of May this year, foodgrain stocks with the Centre reached a ``new high'' at 60.4 million tonnes as against 42.8 million tonnes one year earlier. Rice stocks amounted to 22.8 million tonnes while wheat stocks exceeded 37.5 million tonnes - making a complete mockery of what is often reverentially invoked as the sublime objective of food security. In the 12 months ended May 2001, food procurement had mopped up about 18 million tonnes of output while the offtake of grains from the public distribution system, with all the cajoling of the State governments and the slashing of issue prices for below-the- poverty-line (BPL) consumers, had marginally exceeded the year's procurement level. This is not much to write home about although the situation indicated that there had been some little improvement.

The flip side

Food stock management continues to defy the logic of economic rationale as well as that of distributive justice. Food offtake for BPL families was only 55 per cent of the allocation. Although the Centre has come out with new schemes for free food supply for the aged destitute and as part of food-for-work programme in drought-stricken States, the offtake of foodgrains by the States continued to lag behind expectations. According to Mr. Shanta Kumar, Union Food Minister, out of 24 lakh tonnes of foodgrains which the Centre had offered for free distribution under the food-for-work programme, the States had lifted only 14 lakh tonnes. What was even more disquieting, of the 14 lakh tonnes, the State governments concerned (unconcerned?) had actually distributed only seven lakh tonnes! An agonising record this, of rampant administrative inefficiency, which also demolishes the axiomatic myth that food offtake from the PDS, by the BPL families, is miserable because it is mainly a problem of lack of purchasing power of the poor!

The impact of judicial pressure

The Supreme Court, hearing a slew of public interest litigation (PIL) petitions recently, has come down heavily on governments at the Centre and in the States for their failure/lethargy/callousness in not addressing the food needs of the poor at a time when the Government's granaries were overflowing.

Whether or not the Supreme Court's fundamental posers regarding food as an entitlement for people have struck any sensitive chord of the Government, there are grounds for believing that the Centre and the States now appear to be hastening towards a largely intractable process of identifying the BPL families, that is, the very poor, scattered over vast geographical stretches including remote regions and tribal belts. Some ``New Deal'' for the poor is perhaps about to materialise, if only the way poor let themselves be identified!

At a different level, the Centre has managed to unleash a new bureaucratic regime under the outmoded Essential Commodities Act. The PDS, henceforth, is not a mere programme of the Centre and the States but a statutory entity prescribing mandatory obligations on State Governments to identify BPL families within three months and to plug loopholes in the system.

The rationale is quite clear. The Centre is just ``fed up'' with the States for their refusal to accept active responsibility for decentralised procurement operations and honour their constitutional commitment to organise, manage and regulate food distribution among the people, more particularly the poor. No more of persuasion will ensure that the States will fall in line with their PDS responsibilities. The time has come for the Centre to wield the stick against officials at the state level and their minions, at the local level, for delinquency in the matter of running the PDS network on proper norms.

Will the new legal approach do the trick of rendering the PDS a pro-poor apparatus? Or will it merely beg the larger issues of misguided and politicised emphasis on food procurement, and a Centrally-organised system of allocation and distribution through the Food Corporation of India (FCI) with its well-known leakages and wastages?

The CAG exposure

The growing unease among the policymakers and active citizens about the gross mismanagement of the food system in the country is yet to evoke a response in terms of a rational reappraisal of the whole cluster of policies in this area. The Comptroller and Auditor-General of India, Mr. V. K. Shuglu, in a recent address at the Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad, has focussed on the counter-productive implications of the current foodgrains procurement policy. Can there be much dissent from the assessment that food procurement has only benefited the creamy layer - the top 2-3 per cent of the farmers - or that the dynamics of minimum support prices operate at the behest of rich farmers who enjoy overwhelming political clout? As Mr. Shuglu has pointed out, massive procurement operations themselves at artificially high prices have led to a situation where market prices for foodgrains had risen. The irony of it all is that in the name of ``food security'' (a term which has become a short- hand expression for jacked-up prices for foodgrains), huge stocks accumulate at the godowns of the FCI with the attendant problems of proper upkeep and circuitous logistics for despatch to various States, not to speak of the uncontrollable and unaccounted wastes involved in a Byzantine public sector organisation such as the FCI. The fact that the PDS prices are high (even when they are not promptly aligned with the revisions of minimum support prices from season to season) explains why the offtake is often sluggish. The crux of the whole situation is that food subsidies are supposed to be for the benefit of the consumers - the poor while, in reality, they operate in favour of the producers - the well-to-do farmers.

How can the paradox of food mountain and hunger be resolved without decentralised food procurement and a free-flowing all- India foodgrains market?

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