http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/business/22indiafood.html?
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The Food Chain
India's Growth Outstrips Crops
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: June 22, 2008
JALANDHAR, India — With the right technology and policies, India
could help feed the world. Instead, it can barely feed itself.
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The Food Chain
Articles in this series are examining growing demands on, and changes
in, the world's production of food.
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A Harvest That Falls Short India's supply of arable land is second
only to that of the United States, its economy is one of the fastest
growing in the world, and its industrial innovation is legendary. But
when it comes to agriculture, its output lags far behind potential.
For some staples, India must turn to already stretched international
markets, exacerbating a global food crisis.
It was not supposed to be this way.
Forty years ago, a giant development effort known as the Green
Revolution drove hunger from an India synonymous with famine and
want. Now, after a decade of neglect, this country is growing faster
than its ability to produce more rice and wheat.
The problem has grown so dire that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has
called for a Second Green Revolution "so that the specter of food
shortages is banished from the horizon once again."
And while Mr. Singh worries about feeding the poor, India's growing
affluent population demands not only more food but also a greater
variety.
Today Indian agriculture is a double tragedy. "Both in rice and
wheat, India has a large untapped reservoir. It can make a major
contribution to the world food crisis," said M. S. Swaminathan, a
plant geneticist who helped bring the Green Revolution to India.
India's own people are paying as well. Farmers, most subsisting on
small, rain-fed plots, are disproportionately poor, and inflation has
soared past 11 percent, the highest in 13 years.
Experts blame the agriculture slowdown on a variety of factors.
The Green Revolution introduced high-yielding varieties of rice and
wheat, expanded the use of irrigation, pesticides and fertilizers,
and transformed the northwestern plains into India's breadbasket.
Between 1968 and 1998, the production of cereals in India more than
doubled.
But since the 1980s, the government has not expanded irrigation and
access to loans for farmers, or to advance agricultural research.
Groundwater has been depleted at alarming rates.
The Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington says
changes in temperature and rain patterns could diminish India's
agricultural output by 30 percent by the 2080s.
Family farms have shrunk in size and quantity, and a few years ago
mounting debt began to drive some farmers to suicide. Now many find
it more profitable to sell their land to developers of industrial
buildings.
Among farmers who stay on their land, many are experimenting with
growing high-value fruits and vegetables that prosperous Indians are
craving, but there are few refrigerated trucks to transport their
produce to modern supermarkets.
A long and inefficient supply chain means that the average farmer
receives less than a fifth of the price the consumer pays, a World
Bank study found, far less than farmers in, say, Thailand or the
United States.
Surinder Singh Chawla knows the system is broken. Mr. Chawla, 62,
bore witness to the Green Revolution — and its demise.
Once, his family grew wheat and potatoes on 20 acres. They looked to
the sky for rains. They used cow manure for fertilizer. Then came the
Mexican semi-dwarf wheat seedlings that the revolution helped
introduce to India. Mr. Chawla's wheat yields soared. A few years
later, the same happened with new high-yield rice seeds.
Increasingly prosperous, Mr. Chawla finally bought his first tractor
in 1980.
But he has since witnessed with horror the ills the revolution
wrought: in a common occurrence here, the water table under his land
has sunk by 100 feet over three decades as he and other farmers
irrigated their fields.
By the 1980s, government investment in canals fed by rivers had
tapered off, and wells became the principal source of irrigation,
helped by a shortsighted government policy of free electricity to
pump water.
Here in Punjab, more than three-fourths of the districts extract more
groundwater than is replenished by nature.
Between 1980 and 2002, the government continued to heavily subsidize
fertilizers and food grains for the poor, but reduced its total
investment in agriculture. Public spending on farming shrank by
roughly a third, according to an analysis of government data by the
Center for Policy Alternatives in New Delhi.
Today only 40 percent of Indian farms are irrigated. "When there is
no water, there is nothing," Mr. Chawla said.
And he sees more trouble on the way. The summers are hotter than he
remembers. The rains are more fickle. Last summer, he wanted to ease
out of growing rice, a water-intensive crop.
The gains of the Green Revolution have begun to ebb in other
countries, too, like Indonesia and the Philippines, agriculture
experts say. But the implications in India are greater because of its
sheer size.
India raised a red flag two years ago about how heavily the appetites
of its 1.1 billion people would weigh on world food prices. For the
first time in many years, India had to import wheat for its grain
stockpile. In two years it bought about 7 million tons.
Today, two staples of the Indian diet are imported in ever-increasing
quantities because farmers cannot keep up with growing demand —
pulses, like lentils and peas, and vegetable oils, the main sources
of protein and calories, respectively, for most Indians.
"India could be a big actor in supplying food to the rest of the
world if the existing agricultural productivity gap could be closed,"
said Adolfo Brizzi, manager of the South Asia agriculture program at
the World Bank in Washington. "When it goes to the market to import,
it typically puts pressure on international market prices, and every
time India goes for export, it increases the supply and therefore
mitigates the price levels."
Recently, in a village called Udhopur, not far from here, Harmail
Singh, 60, wondered aloud how farmers could possibly be expected to
grow more grain.
"The cultivable land is shrinking and government policies are not
farmer friendly," he said as he supervised his wheat harvest. "Our
next generation is not willing to work in agriculture. They say it is
a losing proposition."
The luckiest farmers make more money selling out to land-hungry mall
developers.
Gurmeet Singh Bassi, 33, blessed with a farm on the edges of a
booming Punjabi city called Ludhiana, sold off most of his ancestral
land. Its value had grown more than fivefold in two years. He made
enough to buy land in a more remote part of the state and hire
laborers to till it.
Meanwhile, Mr. Chawla's neighbors migrated to North America. They
were happy to lease their land to him, if he was foolish enough to
stay and work it, he said. Today, he cultivates more than 100 acres.
Last year, on a small patch of that land, he planted what no one in
his village could imagine putting on their plate: baby corn, which he
learned was being lapped up by upscale urban Indian restaurants and
even sold abroad.
At the time, baby corn brought a better profit than the government's
price for his wheat crop.
This had been the Green Revolution's other pillar — a fixed
government price for grain. A farmer could sell his crop to a private
trader, but for many small tillers, it was far easier to approach the
nearest government granary, and accept their rate.
For years, those prices remained miserably low, farmers and their
advocates complained, and there was little incentive for farmers to
invest in their crop. "For farmers," said Mr. Swaminathan, the plant
geneticist, "a remunerative price is the best fertilizer."
Mr. Swaminathan's adage proved true this year. After two years of
having to import wheat, the government offered farmers a
substantially higher price for their grain: farmers not only planted
slightly more wheat but also sold much more of their harvest to the
state. As a result, by May, the country's buffer stocks were at
record levels.
Nanda Kumar, India's most senior bureaucrat for food, said the
country would not need to buy wheat on the world market this year.
That is good news, for India and the world, but how long it will
remain the case is unclear.
Will greater demand for food and higher market prices enrich farmers,
eventually, encouraging them to stay on their land? There is
potential, but other conditions, like India's inefficient
transportation and supply chains, would have to improve too.
How to address these challenges is a matter of debate.
From one quarter comes pressure to introduce genetically modified
crops with greater yields; from another come lawsuits to stop it. And
from yet another come pleas to mount a greener Green Revolution.
Alexander Evans, author of a recent paper on food prices published by
Chatham House, a British research institution, said: "This time
around, it needs to be more efficient in its use of water, in its use
of energy, in its use of fertilizer and land."
Mr. Swaminathan wants to dedicate villages to sowing lentils and
oilseeds, to meet demand. The World Bank, meanwhile, favors high-
value crops, like Mr. Chawla's baby corn, because they allow farmers
to maximize their income from small holdings.
The market may yet help India. Mr. Chawla, for instance, has replaced
baby corn with sunflowers, prompted by the high price of sunflower
oil. For the same reason, he is also considering planting more wheat.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
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