Yesterday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the national lockdown in place to combat the rapidly increasing number of coronavirus cases in the country will be extended by another few weeks until at least 3 May. At the same time, Dongyu Qu, the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) predicted that the ongoing pandemic could worsen global hunger, especially in developing states. For a country that already ranks 102nd out of 117 on the World Hunger Index, how have Modi's emergency decisions regarding the coronavirus and the lockdown affected India’s agricultural sector and food security?
The FAO food price index, which tracks monthly changes in the international pricing of food commodities, recorded a decrease of 1% between January and February, the first such incident in the past four months. For Indian rabi farmers especially in Madhya Pradesh and a few northern states, the coronavirus outbreak and the complete national lockdown struck just when they were about to harvest a bumper wheat crop of over a record 106 million tonnes. The prices of wheat were already falling due to continuously well-supplied markets, but the negative demand resulting from the spread of COVID-19 has further contributed to a fall in prices. Also, due to the dangerous spread of misinformation that non-vegetarian food can cause the virus, the demand for poultry and meat, and therefore maize and other feed, has also majorly plummeted.
While the demand for staple items in India is usually inelastic, the retail pricing of perishable fruits and vegetables has increased by 20-30% due to hoarding and panic-buying, even though wholesale prices have fallen by nearly 20% because of a reduction in demand. For example, even though the prices of bananas fell by INR 400 per quintal in Maharashtra's Jalgaon district, there were still no buyers as the overhead costs for distribution channels and transportation, which are borne by consumers at the end of the chain, have skyrocketed since the implementation of the lockdown.
There are several reports from states regarding the closure of APMC (Agricultural Produce Market Committee) markets, leaving many farmers with no place to sell their new harvests. There is also a major disconnect between national lockdown guidelines and state implementation, with numerous reports of police extortion of traders and truckers for supposedly violating lockdown rules. In states like Gujarat and Karnataka, farmer producer organizations and government procurement operations have been suspended.
In larger cities and urban centres like Mumbai, revised lockdown rules have included the closure of vegetable and fruit markets. Thus, private micro delivery and e-commerce firms have faced major disruptions, with shipments being stopped at borders and delivery agents being harassed by the police, forcing many to suspend their operations. Several direct farmer-to-customer operations have also become dysfunctional over concerns and fears regarding transportation and safety.
Due to the lack of access to government-regulated or private markets during the lockdown, poor farmers are unable to sell their recent rabi harvests and already looking at a massive wastage of products–fruit farmers are expected to collectively lose more than INR 7,500 crores ($1 billion). Apart from this, the past two months have seen a tremendous amount of unprecedented rainfall, with states in Central India seeing twice the amount of average rain in March. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) revealed that between March 26 and April 1, after the lockdown was imposed, north-western India had 235% excess rain, which severely damaged the expected bumper wheat crop that was ready for harvest. In Uttar Pradesh alone, INR 255 crores ($33.6 million) worth of crops was damaged by heavy rainfall and hailstorms across 35 districts.
In recent years, changing climatic patterns leading to extreme conditions like floods, droughts, and unseasonal wet or dry spells have severely harmed crop production. This year, smallholder farmers were looking at two seasons of losses thanks to a 12% decline in rice and soybean production due to the erratic monsoon last year. For a country that already witnesses an unsettling number of farmer suicides, the double threat of climate change and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has further impacted already vulnerable croppers and informal workers involved in the complicated supply chain of agricultural products.
To exacerbate matters, the lockdown has led to one of the worst internal migrant crises in the country, with thousands of migrant workers suddenly rendered unemployed being forced to violate lockdown rules in an attempt to go back to their villages where they can be guaranteed safe housing and food. Shocking incidents in Delhi last week and in Mumbai this week prove how desperate workers are to return home and avoid the uncertainties that an expensive city life during a lockdown proves to their existence.
Such hurdles in the food supply chain caused by a lack of movement and the reverse migration of workers could seriously aggravate the food situation in states like Goa, Kerala, and certain parts of the North-East, which are already witnessing a shortage of essentials. TM Thomas Isaac, finance minister of Kerala, is tense, as 80% of the state’s food comes from outside and its heavily lauded welfare activities are completely dependent on these supplies. He said, “We have provided everybody 10 kg of rice through ration shops and started community kitchens. But this is a new situation: we feel an absolute shortage may emerge.”
At the same time, foodgrain stocks at the Food Corporation of India (FCI) approached a record high in March, at a whopping 77 million tonnes before the rabi harvest, almost three times the buffer-stock requirements. Last year, Central granaries were so overburdened that the Ministry of External Affairs suggested exporting surplus goods to countries in need as humanitarian aid. Many retain hope that this excess produce will provide relief during these trying times. But, as Jean Dreze points out, the government’s inability to distribute surplus goods is majorly due to food-subsidy accounting. This food essentially pays for all losses that the FCI incurs when it buys crops from farmers at Minimum Support Prices (MSPs) and sells it at even lower Public Distribution System (PDS) prices, while also bearing the costs of transportation and storage. Dreze explains that “food subsidy does not enter the central government's accounts until stocks are released”.
Therefore, to pump centrally stored foodgrains into the Public Distribution System (PDS), Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had to budget INR 40,000 crore in her relief package just to release the excess food stocks. From an accounting perspective, this is an expensive affair as the cost is only recovered much later, if at all, thereby shifting the focus from the food economy to the national fiscal deficit.
The PDS has been mired with corruption and bureaucratic challenges for years now and needs massive and urgent reforms. The compulsory requirement of ration cards has also impeded a majority of those in need of food from accessing it through the PDS. The ration list, as per the National Food Security Act, 2013 (NSFA), has not been updated in a very long time and has, in its Aadhar updation processes, struck off scores of beneficiaries as ‘ghosts’. This badly affected poor states like Jharkhand and has prompted New Delhi, Chattisgarh, and Rajasthan to temporarily suspend their documentation requirements to ensure food for all during the ongoing health crisis. There is an urgent need for states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra, who have a history of starvation and impoverishment, to universalize the PDS system. However, even at this stage, the Centre is yet to decide whether that should be made a nationwide rule.
As civil society has stepped in to fill the large hunger gap left by the government and its lack of foresight prior to the lockdown, the Centre has allowed NGOs to directly buy foodgrains for relief distribution from the FCI. But there is also a need for government-controlled community kitchens in parts of rural and urban India that are inaccessible to such groups. This idea was a part of the proposed National Food Security Bill, 2011, but did not make it to the final NFSA.
Lastly, the farmer relief fund of INR 15,000 crores announced at the beginning of the lockdown isn’t nearly enough to cover the additional costs and losses faced by already overburdened farmers. Rural India expert and veteran journalist P Sainath has blasted the government’s farcical relief package, noting that the INR 2000 ($26) benefit under the PM Kisan Yojana was already in place, with no clear breakup of how the new package would make any difference to the existing scheme. Suhail Masood, a farmer from tehsil Goharganj in Madhya Pradesh, told Young Bhartiya that while he has received intimation of the emergency fund being credited to his account, he is yet to receive last year’s subsidy under the wheat MSP. Even the Jan Dhan Yojana, aimed at women, only provides INR 500 ($6.5) per woman for the next three months, while pensioners, persons with disabilities, and widows are to receive a one-time amount of INR 1000 in two installments over three months. According to Sainath, these abysmal amounts in today's economy are “worse than tokenist, it’s obscene.”
The coronavirus has revealed the deep cracks in India's food supply and distribution system, which ascertain that the continuous cycle of poverty and hunger among farmers and the underprivileged cannot be blamed solely on exceptional circumstances like climate change or epidemics. Rather, poorly thought out policies that only look at short-term relief have, for decades, perpetuated an extremely unfair system where farmers remain poor while stockpiles at the Centre keep overflowing.
To overcome the overwhelming situation right now, there is an urgent need for the administration to step up its food security laws by lifting lockdown restrictions on transport and trade of agricultural goods, universalizing the PDS, and injecting more money into universal cash grants for the poor on an urgent basis. Central and state governments must financially support migrant workers, who make the backbone of the food labour and supply chains and need to introduce new and improved relief packages for farmers. In the long term, it is essential that agricultural policy becomes more centered around the impending climate emergency as such anomalous phenomena are likely to increase and will continue to affect farmers and the poor, who stands to continue risking lives and livelihoods to climate change and uncertain conditions even once the pandemic is over.
Image Source: The Hindu