[Reader-list] Feast and Famine

[Rajkamal Goswami]

An interesting article by Siddharth


http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.3/siddhartha_deb_india_food_crisis.php#c5t_form

In the summer of 2009, New Delhi’s Lalit hotel, a 1980s monstrosity
that had recently been remodeled, hosted the “Second Food Technology
Summit,” sponsored by the Ministry of Food Processing and the
Confederation of Indian Industries, a powerful lobbying group. Experts
and government officials sat on stage, taking questions from the
audience, which included the chairman of the Indian Food Processor’s
Association as well as representatives from Coca-Cola.
The questions were largely rhetorical, lamenting the obstacles to the
modernization of India’s food markets. “No one cares about the sell-by
dates of bread,” one man commented. “What happens when the bread gets
old in the village stalls? They fry it in oil and sell it as bread
pakora instead.” In the 600,000 villages and towns in non-metropolitan
India, I learned, none of the teeming hundreds of millions of
residents cared about the mechanized processes and international
standards of hygiene that would allow India to join the industrialized
nations in their eating habits.
Perhaps that is because those hundreds of millions have more
fundamental concerns when it comes to food. The enthusiasm for
expiration dates at the Summit must seem peculiar to the poor in a
country where 43 percent of children under the age of five are
malnourished. In sub-Saharan Africa, the figure is 28 percent; it’s 7
percent in China, to which India is so often compared. The Indian
government’s own data show that 800 million Indians live on about
twenty rupees (about $0.50) a day. Half of those are farmers who
produce food that they, for the most part, cannot afford to eat thanks
to the demands of speculators and affluent urban consumers. According
to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), wheat
prices reached a record high in February, and the cost of rice—which
accounts for 30 percent of the typical Indian diet—hovers at around 22
rupees per kilogram even in Patna and Chennai, capitals of major
rice-producing states. That’s about twice the average cost from 2000
until the middle of 2007, when prices began to rise sharply. The
average Indian consumes 73 kilograms of rice per year, which means
that farmers, assuming they eat at least as much rice as their
non-farming countrymen, are now spending some 20 percent of their
income on rice alone.
Yet dramatically rising prices and the malnutrition crisis were far
from the minds of the conference-goers enjoying their luxury hotel in
the heart of the New Delhi business district. Since the late ’90s,
government food policy has promoted breakneck modernization,
withdrawing support for local agriculture even while attempting to
bring the Indian people into a more globalized food market as
consumers and producers. This has involved the entire spectrum of
food. Government-operated agricultural institutes emphasize patented,
genetically modified crops produced by behemoths such as Monsanto and
support attempts by Walmart and its Indian counterparts to take over
the retail and wholesale systems. These changes have been welcomed by
the 200 million members of the upper and middle classes, largely
concentrated in the metropolises.
For the officials at the conference, it was a matter of faith that
soon the majority of Indians would join in that welcome. India’s
embrace of a “free market” in the early ’90s, its rise as an economic
power, the presence of an outsourcing industry closely connected to
multinational corporations in the West, and the growth of a
frenetically consumerist lifestyle among the beneficiaries, seem to
have led to the notion that, after long decades of Gandhian fasting,
the country has woken up to a perpetual feast. The colorful crowds at
the new malls, eating at local food carts, global chains such as
McDonald’s, and gourmet restaurants reinforce this impression.
Until recently, the new eating habits were noted mostly with approval
in the West. In 2008, however, they began to come under criticism amid
the worldwide rise in food prices. Many observers have pointed to the
use of agricultural land for biofuels and the growing demand for meat
and dairy products as principal causes of spiking prices. Both trends
apply in India, but the government’s free-market modernization scheme
has exacerbated the problem further by encouraging the planting of
animal feed in a country that was already struggling with the basics.
Contrary to widespread stereotypes, Indians are not all vegetarians,
but historically, they’ve eaten less meat than they do today. Whereas
India produced just 121,000 tons of chicken meat in 1971, it produced
1.9 million tons in 2005.
A few days after the Summit, I spoke with Vijay Sardana, a
food-industry consultant and poultry expert who had been in
attendance. At the Lalit, Sardana seemed a symbol of India’s food
markets on the move. He took calls constantly on his Blackberry or
made small talk around the generously laden buffet tables. But when I
spoke to him at his modest apartment in East Delhi, he told a story I
didn’t hear at the Summit.
“It’s not just ignorance at the farmer level,” he said. India’s food
problems included corporate lobbying, commodity trading (“all
speculation,” he claimed), and government policies that were removed
from the rural reality. Officials at the Summit want India to be the
“food factory for the world,” but Sardana was concerned that the
country may not even be able to feed itself.


• • •

The agricultural town of Armoor, in the Southern Indian state of
Andhra Pradesh, feels like a forgotten settlement, no more than a
cluster of mostly ramshackle houses and shops surrounded by a sea of
rice and maize. In the summer of 2008, a riot broke out there. Around
ten thousand farmers went on a rampage, setting ablaze three
government jeeps and the two largest mansions in the town.
A few weeks later, the burnt carcasses of the jeeps were still visible
as I walked around with a man named Devaram, who worked for a leftist
party that had been instrumental in organizing the farmers. We stopped
to take a look at the gutted mansions. In spite of the blackened walls
and gaping door frames, the structures were imposing, standing tall
amid the stunted shacks and scrubland.
India’s poor spend 20 percent of their income on rice alone.
The farmers around Armoor, Devaram said, had become heavily dependent
on agricultural middlemen known as seed dealers, who buy produce from
the farmers and sell it to buyers in other parts of India. The seed
dealers are highly influential in determining which crops farmers
grow. They anticipate demand, passing on their predictions to the
farmers in the prices offered for particular crops. In the past the
government offered minimum prices for staple food grains such as rice
or wheat, crops that require a lot of water and are not entirely
suited to the region. But the free-market approach of the ’90s led to
a decrease in government support—from 1.8 percent of the national
budget in 1993 to 1.3 percent ten years later—and greater uncertainty.
The dealers had replaced most of the agricultural functions carried
out by government agencies, giving out seeds, fertilizers, and even
extremely high-interest cash loans to farmers as advances against
payment for the final produce.
A few months before the riot, around 25,000 farmers in the villages
surrounding Armoor had chosen to grow red sorghum for Mahipal Reddy,
the biggest of the seed dealers in the area. But when the farmers
finished harvesting, Reddy refused to take delivery or to pay them.
The farmers found themselves without the money to buy the seeds they
needed for the autumn planting season, the most important one of the
year. They demonstrated outside the office of the district collector,
the most senior government official in the area, and went on hunger
strikes. But their agitation dragged on without any discernible
response, and one June morning they converged in Armoor for a
demonstration that soon became a rampage. The mansions they burned
belonged to Reddy and another seed dealer.
Farmers work in a field in East Godavari District, India. / ©2007
Aravind Kumar, courtesy of Photoshare.
When I asked Gopeti Rajeshwar, one of the farmers who had taken part
in the riots, why he’d chosen to grow red sorghum, he replied that he
had been offered a high price for it. Besides, it was easy to grow and
needed less water than other commercial crops such as rice and maize.
But his decision was only one small link in a chain that included the
speculation of the seed dealers, the vagaries of the monsoons, the
absence of government support, and the falling reserves of groundwater
that he, like most farmers, exploited desperately through expensive
bore wells. Three farmers had killed themselves the previous year in
Rajeshwar’s village after running into debt from sinking the wells.
They were part of the growing national trend of farmer suicides, with
nearly 200,000 farmers killing themselves from 1997 to 2008, in the
very years that the Indian economy was expanding. If Rajeshwar had
stayed out of debt so far, it was thanks to his father’s two decades
working in the Middle East and his own two-year stint as a
construction worker in Dubai.
It was hard to meet the seed dealer at the center of the riot, but
when I finally spoke to Reddy, he blamed the fiasco on rival dealers.
He had offered the farmers a high price for red sorghum, he said,
because there had been great demand for it in Northern and Eastern
India and in Pakistan. But dealers who had formed a rival “syndicate”
bought some red sorghum on the sly and sold it at a massive loss to
Reddy’s buyers in an attempt to put him out of business. They nearly
succeeded. The bank that agreed to finance Reddy for his red sorghum
purchase backed out when it heard of the falling prices, which in turn
meant that Reddy was unable to pay the farmers. The same syndicate, he
said, had sent thugs to murder him and also instigated the farmers to
ransack his house in Armoor.
I asked Reddy what red sorghum was, if it was something people ate.
“No, no,” his hangers-on cried out. Reddy smiled. “It’s for cattle,
and for chicken,” he said. “It makes them fat, makes them produce more
milk, more eggs, more meat, so that people in the cities can eat them
and get bigger.”


• • •

One might assume that the misfortune of the poor in the countryside
would be the salvation of urban butchers, but they aren’t necessarily
feeling enriched by the increased demand for meat and dairy among
India’s upper classes.
The three Delhi butchers I met on a sweltering August day in 2009 were
all burly men, trying to cover up their social awkwardness as they
waved a folder full of documents at me. For over a century, the center
of slaughtering operations in Delhi has been the Idgah, located in the
old, walled part of the city. The butchers took me on a tour of the
neighborhood, leading me through alleyways that ran past small stalls
holding live animals, the ground beneath our feet thick with grain and
droppings. The slaughterhouse was a large open shed with raised
platforms on all sides. The slaughtering and skinning was done by
hand, and things seemed dirty and disorganized. But it was also, as
the butchers pointed out, a place that offered employment to nearly
2,000 people. Few animal parts were wasted, they said, pointing at the
vendors standing outside the Idgah. They were selling goat heads and
feet at twenty rupees per kilo to people who were too poor to buy meat
but would use the animal parts to make stew.
‘No one cares about the sell-by dates of bread,’ a food technology
summit attendee complained.
The government decided to close the Idgah in 2005, and it was finally
shut down a few months after my visit last year, the land earmarked
for a shopping mall. All large-scale butchering was moved to a
mechanized slaughterhouse in Ghazipur, across the Yamuna river. The
butchers took me to see the new facility, sneaking me past the
security guards employed by the company that held the operating lease.
The assembly lines full of German-made equipment looked far cleaner
and more efficient than what I had seen at the Idgah. In place of the
chaos of the Idgah, the atmosphere at the Ghazipur slaughterhouse was
one of regimentation and precision. The electric guns were, however,
silent. The few workers hanging about were eager to show me around and
express their discontent at suddenly having to make a twenty-kilometer
commute every day. They were young, carrying cell phones and sporting
stylish haircuts, but they were following a family occupation and felt
bewildered at the changes enforced upon them. Even though the
mechanized line was faster than the manual slaughtering they had done
at the Idgah, they made less money now because animal suppliers were
balking at the higher fees charged by the company running the place.
I walked out of the slaughterhouse with my guides to take a look at
the surrounding neighborhood. The modern, hygienic slaughterhouse sat
next to the largest landfill in the Delhi metropolitan area. There was
a low range of trash being turned over with infinitesimal patience by
ragpickers, mostly children. The sky above was crowded with kites and
crows wheeling in urgent circles, drawn there by the landfill, the
slaughterhouse, and the wholesale poultry market next door. A canal
ran nearby, filled with black slush the consistency of Turkish coffee.
It was crowded with feral dogs trying to stay out of the August heat.
The setting is a perfect metaphor for India’s approach to feeding
itself as it grows and becomes more embedded in the global economy.
Some will enjoy the fruits of that growth, and no doubt there are more
Indians living lives of comfort than ever before. But a gleaming new
slaughterhouse is of little benefit to those still waiting for their
slice of prosperity. Under the banners of modernization and
free-market economics, the better off are rigging a system that caters
to their desires, while some of the world’s most desperate people are
left to pick at the refuse accumulated at the edges of luxury. Many
countries have high rates of inequality, but prioritizing, as a matter
of official policy, high-quality meat for the rich in a nation where
half of children are underweight seems especially perverse.


• • •

The most comprehensive effort to address the failures of India’s food
policy is the campaign to pass a right-to-food law in Parliament. The
stark inequality in India when it comes to food has already resulted
in a mid-day meal scheme targeted at poor, school-going children. But
the impact of the subsidized meals, instituted at a national level
since 1995, is hard to measure. Evidence suggests that the program has
been successful in certain parts of the country, but the quality is
sometimes poor, leading to outbreaks of food poisoning. Corrupt
businessmen and officials siphon funds from the program, and prices
are now rising too fast for the government to keep up.
A farmer in Warangal District, Andhra Pradesh, South India. / Jankie,
Flickr (cc).
The right-to-food movement asks not only that the government provide
food to especially vulnerable groups such as children and pregnant
women but also emphasizes the country’s larger policy, noting that
“sufficient availability of food” for the hungry “requires that land
and water must never be forcibly diverted away from food production
for cash crops or industrial use.” The demands made by the movement
are egalitarian, and because the movement is a loose coalition of
organizations and individuals spread throughout the country, it seems
inherently democratic.
Jean Dreze, a Belgian economist who has been in India since 1979, has
been influential in framing the proposed law. He coauthored a number
of books on hunger with the Harvard economist Amartya Sen and became
an Indian citizen in 2002. I asked him what those pushing for the law
hoped to achieve, since it was unlikely that a marginalized,
impoverished majority could sue the government for not giving them
food.
A right to food would bring a check to the deeply hierarchical
market-driven economy.
“The idea is not that everyone will rush to court, although that is an
ultimate possibility,” Dreze explained. “The law would have an
in-built mechanism for accountability, and we’ve seen that the
government tends to become far more responsive when it can be held
accountable in courts for something.” Dreze, who comes across as
Gandhian in many ways, and the members of the right-to-food movement
see food as part of a bigger question of what democracy might mean in
India. In our conversation, Dreze expressed impatience with the
Malthusian idea, floated in some Western circles after the global
price rise in 2008, that India’s growing population was to blame for
putting pressure on limited food resources. He noted that population
growth was decelerating in many parts of the country in 2008. If
people had more money and work, they could buy more food, he said,
citing Sen’s work on hunger in British India, which showed that
famines (the worst of which killed about 4 million people in Bengal)
were a result of inadequate access to food, not inadequate supply.
“If the population needs to be well nourished, we do need to produce
more food,” Dreze said. “But the present system is unsustainable and
inequitable.” He argued that corporate interests manipulate the
government framing the policies. “In child-nutrition programs,” he
said, referring to the mid-day meal schemes, “the corporations have
lobbies to push packaged food. They had pre-formatted letters sent to
various members of Parliament asking them to sign these and send them
on to the ministry overseeing the program. In some instances, they
tried to have cooked meals replaced by packaged biscuits,” which have
less nutritional value.
The government’s public-distribution system, which had provided
subsidized food grains and basic cooking ingredients to everyone, has
also run aground since the ’90s. The old system was inefficient and
subject to corruption, but the current eviscerated version reaches
only a fraction of the people most in need.
For Dreze and the other activists demanding a right to food, having
enough to eat is a part of the right to life. In providing food for
children, mothers, and pregnant women as well as for the rural and
urban poor, the law would make India a more equitable country,
bringing some kind of check to the deeply hierarchical market-driven
economy that has taken hold. When I spoke to Dreze, he had seemed
guardedly hopeful about the prospects for a right-to-food law. More
than eighteen months later, however, the proposal in Parliament is a
diluted version of the early draft, without either the accountability
on the part of the government or the breadth of coverage activists
hoped for.
When I visited India last December, food prices were rising once
again. Onions, a staple in Indian cooking, had more than doubled in
price, and the government had to resort to emergency imports from
Pakistan, obtained in part with threats to withhold its own tomato
exports. But it isn’t clear if there is any desire on the part of the
government to address prices at a systemic level. There has been talk
that the government will work with American companies on genetically
modified crops to put an end to future shortfalls, which would do
little to alter the distorted system in place.
There may be meat and dairy for the privileged at the moment. For the
majority, though, there is not much in the way of affordable food.
Just the occasional biscuit.
Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative
Fund at The Nation Institute.

-- 
Rajkamal