In the middle of a severe famine in Somalia and a severe food crisis in the Horn of Africa, I was reminded of this aphorism. I happened to read a report on the enormous and unconscionable wastage of food that happens in India. Apparently, India wastes more food than Australia produces or the UK consumes. That at a time when millions of poor Indians, especially women and children are starving. Cannot think of a more ironical situation. The questions that come to mind are
- Why does this happen?
- Is it a management issue? Incompetence?
Nope. I think is it by design, though I wish that it were as simple as incompetence which would have made it easier to fix.
Why do I think that? Cos I feel that a country that has innovation (jugaad too), entrepreneurial actions and out-of-the-box management thinking at all levels, should be able to manage this issue. It is not even new. Economists have been talking about it for decades.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that the food wastage is by design.
What happens when food rots or is wasted?
- Supplies dwindle leading to scarcity thus driving up prices.
- Increased prices naturally reduce access to food for the poor.
- The poor respond by using what development workers call ‘negative coping strategies’. Stripped of the jargon it means any or all of cutting down food consumption (disproportionately within the family), borrowing at usurious rates, selling assets at distress rates etc. Other extreme strategies include crime, early marriage of the girl child and commercial sex work.
- When the situation becomes critical, government steps in with regulation, release of food from ‘strategic stocks’, social protection schemes like food for work or employment guarantee schemes.
- To support these schemes, more food has to be procured, from within the country or abroad especially to replenish strategic stocks.
Who would deliberately want a food crisis?
Can we find out. I think we can. When the police investigate murders, the first thing they do is try and identify who benefits from the death. That strategy may be useful here too. So the question we need to answer is “Who benefits from food wastage / shortage?”
- Traders – if food rots, supplies reduce and prices go up.
- Importers – acute scarcity leads to imports, often done at the last moment leading to relaxed conditions (read oversight).
- Bureaucrats – who then get to design food-aid or other safety net schemes and get huge budgets for implementing them. We all know what huge budgets mean don’t we?
- Politicians in the ruling party – nobody loves a good food crisis more than politicians. It gives them a great chance to fulminate at the ‘nasty opposing party’ which, naturally is the root of all evil (it used to be the ‘foreign hand’ in socialist India) and then making tall promises of controlling prices and providing food.
- Politicians in opposition – well obviously.
- Development agencies – who get a chance to either implement government programmes and / or raise funds.
- Media – which can splash stories, show pictures and generally create a shallow racket that gets them the TRPs. I must admit though that there is some serious coverage too but that is often lost in the overwhelming shrillness of the majority.
- Grain exporting countries – linked with importers (above) who get a chance to unload some of the sub-standard and / or overprices grain that they have. Remember it is an emergency and there are limited oversight mechanisms in force?
The only people who get short-changed are the poor producers and hapless consumers. One would think that in the larger scheme of things, they are only ones who matter.. Of course not. They are mere pawns in the larger game that the biggies are playing. In India, a number of influential people wear more than one of those first seven hats.
So is collusion possible? Yes. Is conspiracy too far-fetched? Not really.
Can this be stopped? Of course. Ok, maybe not completely, but it can definitely be curtailed. All it takes is some old fashioned political will. India needs to
- Invest in infrastructure – roads, all weather stores, cold storages, refrigerated trucks etc.
- Support research in longer lasting varieties of grain, fruits and vegetables – get private sector involved in this. Agriculture universities are a joke. They don’t move outside their campuses. No serious breakthrough has come from the Agricultural Universities. Definitely not enough to justify the budgetary spends.
- Encourage private sector investment (small, medium or large) in retail and food processing – ease out the entry barriers for this. For a small producer, getting an FDA licence to make and sell tomato ketch-up can be a nightmare.
As population rises India is going to need more and more food. The pattern of food consumption & hence demand will also change. Unsustainable & rapacious agriculture has led to reducing yield. Climate change is not helping any. I am afraid that we are looking at a crisis where per capita food supplies will dip further over the next few years. It is going to be more and more difficult to feed ourselves.
Increasing yield, research, improved technology, climate change adaptation will all take time. Till the time that this works, we need to work on other solutions.
The more obvious one is, at the very least, to NOT waste food – at all levels.
Waste not want not.
Good one! Addresses What, Who, and How of the issue.
Some similar views worth reading – http://grubshup.com/Blogs/?p=148
It is a nice reading, as usual. The vivid presentation made by Mr.Mahajan is also very enticing. However, the issue is, are we ever going to focus our attention on systematizing and upgrading our agriculture industry and food security systems. When are we going to stop reiterating/harping about Our Grave Agriculture Economic Problems and deliberate on impossibilities. Its time we think on solutions rather than making academic debates.
I do agree with Mr. Mahajan’s view on strengthening PDS system. But we also know it is easy said than done…. with all the loose ends that are manufactured in such systems. The poor of this country is treated like a `Joke’. when we stop doing so, then only we would find answer to our real issues.
Hi,
You seem to be disturbed by reading the article you have referred to. Thanks for providing the link, I did read it and I must say this is completely illfounded and I dont think that the author has bothered to cross check the statements he has used. The statistics (major portion) used in the article could be classified in the category of “Lies, damn lies and Statistics!!”
In a country like India where general temperatures are high and when our techniques are inadequate to reduce moisture levels ( in many cases reducing moisture levels are not recommended, e.g. Fruits), the likelihood of growth of bacterial or fungus is higher as compared to lesser temperatures and moisture levels in any substance. The growth of bacterial/ fungus leads to creation of toxins and sometime toxins having negative impact on human body. The multiplication of fungus (some types) and bacteria could be faster and can lead to deteriorating food condition in non-food (unfit for human consumption) form. (This is not necessarily waste as the West thinks).
The methods (like refrigeration etc) to be adopted for not letting matter (food) change its form is dependant on the costs of such methods, including storage. Storages do not come for free!! In Aurangabad we pay Rs12/- (Twelve) per month per quintal in cold storage ( fit for grain and pulses and dry material only) and pay Rs.7.40/ qtl/Month in dry storage ( Govt. warehousing rates). Now one who invests money in stored goods will decide whether storage costs would be covered later or not. Even the producer farmer will also have to make these calculations before taking a decision on storing goods.
Food rotting is not like Heart attack its more like Cancer!. Normally people do know when food is likely to rot and secondly the entire lot does not rot (as his example of pineapples, he also claims of (only) 20% rotten).
Food rotting problems are faced by those who’s food stocks are affected, it is not only farmers who suffer but the entire chain involved in food handling and participating in food value (enhancement) chain can suffer.
I see a bit of a confusion in your write up on process of rotting and shelf life of a produce. Not every produce rots No material in dry condition would rot, still it may loose its shelf life and subsequent use as food.
Any shortage of material, in absence of substitute, could lead to rise in price and the benefit of rise in price goes to those who hold the stock from before the price rise and dispose off stocks at increased price.
The food part in India is made available; especially to the poor, through Public Distribution System (PDS), this system is also suppose to insulate clients of PDS against price movement and especially price escalation of food commodities. Would not it be more prudent to ensure effective working of the PDS; rather than considering interfering the entire market, under the garb of negating the impact of price rise on the relatively poor.
Mere price rise or in other words the rise in price of any commodity per se does not indicate much; this just indicates the higher demand for the commodity than its supply, at a given point of time. Similarly we have to remember that prices can fall if supply exceeds the demand.
Secondly, rise in price of a commodity affects negatively to the consumer if consumer’s income does not increase in proportion to the rise in price of a commodity under question. If consumer’s income also rises in the proportion or more the negative impact could be negated. In other case, the price rise may have to do with rise in money availability in the society, higher the money availability of money the prices in money terms are likely to rise!
The definitions (of food) define food for “animals” (that includes Humans too) and the scope of food source is not restricted only to Agricultural commodities; this includes plants , animals and other categories of fungus…. et el. Thus how do we account for this “food basket” of ordinary human beings By the by, poor people are not vegetarians by default. Thus one needs to define the food basket for the poor very carefully.
In India we are still far from being commercial in agriculture activities. This has been aptly covered in the following
” … Due to prevailing socio-economic situations (such as; dependency of large population on agriculture, small land-holding size, very high population pressure on and resource etc.), improving household food security has been an issue of supreme importance to many million farmers of India, who constitute 56.15 million marginal (<1.0 hectare), 17.92 million small (1.0-2.0 hectare) and 13.25 million semi-medium (2.0-4.0 hectare) farm holdings, making together 90 per cent of 97.15 million operational holdings. An important consequence of this has been that crop production in India remained to be considered, by and large, a subsistence rather than commercial activity. One of the typical characteristics of subsistence farming is that most of the farmers resort to grow a number of crops on their farm holdings, primarily to fulfil their household needs and follow the practice of rotating a particular crop combination over a period of 3-4 years interchangeably on different farm fields."
Another argument pointing the productivity of land issue and the need for irrigation is well summarized below
" … Estimates indicate that more than 56 per cent of total food grain comes from irrigated ecosystem while progress has been considerably sluggish in rain fed agriculture which still accounts for 92.8 million hectare or 65 per cent of net area sown and contributes only 44 per cent to national food grain production."
(Ref: Cropping Pattern (Agricultural and Horticultural) in Different Zones, their Average Yields in Comparison to National Average/ Critical Gaps/Reasons Identified and Yield Potential P. Das Dy. Director General (Agril. Extension), Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi)
All India food grain production during 2008-09 (GoI, Department of Agri) stood at 234.47 Million Tonns i.e. 23.447 Cr. Tons i.e. 23447 Cr. kilos for a population of 120 Cr. for 365 days makes it ( 23447/ 43800= 0.535 kg or 535gms per day per capita, that too this is only food grains, there are pulses, Oil seeds etc are also available). This is what is available; of course that does not mean every one gets it- the distribution part is different than the production part and there is nothing inherent in production to skew distribution.
The article also refers to breweries using rotten grains! I don’t think the person referred to this statement has ever gone closer to a brewery and methods of alcohol making. Any one using a silo needs to follow silo rules. Silos dont handle the so called rotten grains. I think the word "rotten" needs to be defined carefully while dealing with so called rotten food!
I agree that one needs to pay attention to deteriorating conditions of fruits and other food material balancing its use between fulfilling internal energy needs (as food) or external energy needs (as fuel), or if deterioration fails to serve as either.
Praveenbhai, Thanks for the very detailed comment. Yes, I was upset after reading the article but that was only a trigger. We have read about bumper harvests, farmers throwing away tomatoes on the roads, rotting grain in FCI godowns and also malnutrition in many parts of the country. Had been meaning to vent about it for some time and this was just the trigger..
Some of the points that you are making shed a slightly different light on the issue and definitely give me, if you pardon the expression, food for thought.