It
is not surprising that questions of food security and
the right to food have become such urgent political
issues in India today. Rapid aggregate income growth
over the past two decades has not addressed the basic
issue of ensuring the food security of the population.
Instead, nutrition indicators have stagnated and per
capita calorie consumption has actually declined, suggesting
that the problem of hunger may have got worse rather
than better.
Consider
the evidence on nutritional outcomes from the most recent
National Family Health Survey (NFHS) conducted in 2005-06.
According to this, 46 per cent of children below 3 years
are underweight; 33 per cent of women and 28 per cent
of men have Body Mass Index (BMI) below normal; 79 per
cent of children aged 6-35 months have anaemia, as do
56 per cent of ever married women aged 15-49 years and
24 per cent of similar men; 58 per cent of pregnant
women have anaemia. The national averages mask locational
differences: all these indicators are much worse in
rural India.
Further, these indicators have scarcely changed, or
have changed very little, since the previous NFHS in
1998-99. In terms of calorie consumption the picture
is even worse. According to the National Sample Survey
Organisation (NSSO) large survey of 2004-05, the average
daily intake of calories of the rural population has
dropped by 106 Kcal (4.9 per cent) from 2153 Kcal to
2047 Kcal from 1993-94 to 2004-05 and by 51 Kcal (2.5
per cent) from 2071 to 2020 Kcal in urban areas. The
average daily intake of protein by the Indian population
decreased from 60.2 to 57 grams in rural India between
1993-94 and 2004-05 and remained stable at around 57
grams in the urban areas during the same period.
The all India averages do not capture the wide variation
across states and even within states. For example the
India State Hunger Index 2008 (brought out by the International
Food Policy Research Institute) shows very large differences
across 17 major states, ranging from 13.6 for Punjab
to 30.9 for Madhya Pradesh. If these states could be
compared to countries ranked in the Global Hunger Index,
Punjab would rank 34th and Madhya Pradesh would rank
82nd. However, few Indian states perform well in relation
to the global index. Even the best-performing Indian
state, Punjab, lies below 33 other developing countries
ranked by the Global Hunger Index. The worst-performing
states in India have index scores that would be at the
bottom of the global rankings: Bihar and Jharkhand rank
lower than Zimbabwe and Haiti, and Madhya Pradesh falls
between Ethiopia and Chad.
What is especially significant in the IFPRI index is
that the indicators of hunger do not always correspond
to poverty ratios. For example, the lower incidence
of income poverty in Gujarat and Karnataka is associated
with worse performance in terms of hunger – and this
is confirmed by calorie consumption data.
The recent rise in food prices in India is likely to
have made matters much worse, and the effects of the
global crisis on employment and livelihoods within the
country are likely to cause further deterioration in
people's access to food. Clearly, therefore, food security
is currently one of the most important policy areas,
and demands stressing a rights-based approach to public
food strategy have gained ground. This is what underlies
the current discussion around the legislation on the
right to food, which has been put in the 100-day agenda
of this UPA government.
The most loose definition of food security is one in
which the population does not live in hunger or fear
of starvation. But recent definitions have been more
stringent. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation
(FAO), food security in a particular society exists
"when all people, at all times, have access to
sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary
needs and food preferences for an active and healthy
life."
Such a definition appears to be simple, but is actually
quite complex and begs many questions. What is ''sufficient''?
How is access to be determined and provided? To what
extent must food preferences be taken into account?
All these questions become even more important when
food security is sought to be converted into a legally
justiciable right.
It is evident that genuine food security among a population
requires a wide range of features, all or many of which
are associated with the need for some public intervention.
Ensuring adequate supplies of food requires increases
in agricultural productivity, possibly changes in cropping
patterns, and certainly the sustained viability of cultivation,
all of would be necessary at both local and national
levels. Making sure that food can be accessed by all
the people requires that they have the purchasing power
to buy the necessary food, which in turn means that
employment, remuneration and livelihood issues are important.
Social discrimination and exclusion still play unfortunately
large roles in determining both livelihood and access
to food by different social categories, and this too
needs to be reckoned with.
Malnourishment is closely linked to poor sanitation
and other unhealthy practices, so that the provision
of clean drinking water, sanitation and access to other
basic amenities, as well as knowledge about correct
or desirable eating habits, are all necessary. Child
malnutrition in India tends to be the worst at the age
of 5 to 11 months, which suggests that breast-feeding
and weaning behaviour matters – and this emphasises
the need for society to educate mothers and to enable
them to continue breast-feeding and shift to appropriate
solids when required.
All of these issues must be addressed if the rampant
problem of undernutrition has to be dealt with. But
obviously most of these cannot easily be translated
into legal provisions and so it is clear that a law,
however well-intentioned and carefully phrased, can
only address some of the complex factors that determine
food insecurity. It is important for the government
to be aware of the need for a multi-pronged approach
to the problem that has to extend beyond a legal promise
if it is to be successful.
This does not mean that a food security law would be
meaningless: far from it. In fact, by focussing on universal
food access and assigning responsibility and culpability,
it would force the government at both central and state
levels to take up the entire gamut of issues, which
relate not just to actual food distribution but also
to its production and patterns of consumption, so as
to eventually ensure genuine food security.
The key point here is that such a law must guarantee
universal access. The dominant failing of drafts of
the proposed legislation that have been circulating
in various quarters, is that they do not promise or
even try to aim at universal food access. Instead, they
tend to be obsessed with targeting food security to
the Below Poverty Line (BPL) population and some defined
vulnerable groups. Some drafts have gone even further,
by suggesting that the non-BPL population be excluded
entirely from any public distribution.
There is no question that poor and vulnerable groups
have to be the focus of all public action to ensure
food security. But making this a legal provision is
likely to have exactly the opposite effect from what
is intended, by actually reducing the access of such
groups.
There are many reasons why these targeted schemes, and
this one in particular, are unlikely to work. Most significant
of all, there are the well known errors inherent in
targeting, of unjustified exclusion of the genuinely
poor and unwarranted inclusion of the non-poor. These
are not simply mistakes that can occur in any administrative
scheme, they are inbuilt into systems that try to provide
scarce goods to one section of any population. In hierarchical
and discriminatory societies like India, where social
and economic power is unequally distributed, it requires
no imagination to realise that making a scarce good
(cheap food) supposedly available only to the poor is
one of the easiest ways to reduce their access.
The second problem relates to the distinction between
food insecurity and poverty as currently defined. It
is evident from NSSO and NFHS surveys that the proportion
of the population that is nutritionally deprived is
significantly larger than the ''poor'' population, and
in many states they are not completely overlapping categories
either. To deal with food insecurity in an effective
manner, it is counterproductive to base public food
provision on a predefined group of the ''poor'', which
would deprive a large number of others who are also
food-insecure.
Part of the reason for this relates to the third problem,
the absence of any notion of dynamics in a rigid law
that defines ''poor'' and ''vulnerable'' households in a
static sense and changes the group only at infrequent
intervals. Households – and people within them – can
fall in or out of poverty, however defined, because
of changing material circumstances. Similarly they can
also go from being food-secure to food-insecure in a
short time. The reasons can vary: crop failures, sharp
rises in the price of food, employment collapses, health
issues that divert household spending, the accumulation
of debt, and so on. Monitoring each and every household
on a regular basis to check whether any of these or
other features has caused it to become food-insecure
is not just administratively difficult, it is actually
impossible.
This is why all successful programmes of public food
distribution, across societies, have been those that
have gone in for universal or near universal access.
This provides economies of scale; it reduces the transaction
costs and administrative hassles involved in ascertaining
the target group and making sure it reaches them; it
allows for better public provision because even the
better off groups with more political voice have a stake
in making sure it works well; it generates greater stability
in government plans for ensuring food production and
procurement.
Even among the states of India, those states that have
a better record of public food distribution are those
that have gone in for near-universal access. Kerala,
Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh all have defined BPL in
such an inclusive way that the vast majority of the
population is included, which makes their schemes close
to universal.
So an effective food security law must be universal
and not targeted, and it must provide for enough food
to meet nutrition requirements (both cereals and pulses)
for every citizen. This also means that the entitlement
must not be household based but individual based. Without
these features, the law will not be able even to lay
the grounds for genuine food security in the country.
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