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Food Security Situation in India:

The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimates reveal that in 2014, the number of severely food insecure people in the world was 585 million, which increased to 704.3 million in 2018. If moderately food insecure people are also added to the number, it increased to 1696.3 million in 2014, and to 2013.8 million globally in 2018. Across most regions, the numbers for both severe and moderately food insecure have increased between 2014 and 2018. The South Asia also has witnessed a rise in numbers of severely and moderately food insecure people (Table 1) (FAO, 2019).

Table 1: Number of Severely and Moderately Food Insecure People in Different Regions of the World

Regions	Number of Severely Food Insecure People (Millions)			Number of Moderately and Severely Insecure People (Millions)
	2014	2016	2018	2014	2016	2018
World	585	600.4	704.3	1696.3	1801.9	2013.8
Africa	210.7	268.2	277	554.1	644.1	676.1
Asia	305.9	264.8	353.6	875.6	871.1	1038.5
Southern Asia	247.1	195.8	271.7	565.7	559.6	649.1
Latin America	45.1	46.5	54.7	141.2	170	187.8
Northern America and Europe	16.1	13.4	10.6	105.2	95.8	88.7

Source: (FAO, 2019)

Across continents, the largest number of food-insecure people live in Asia, which is partly because of its high share in total global population. Further, as it happens, India, which accounts for 1.38 billion out of 7.46 billion of the global population, has the highest incidence of absolute hunger, and the situation has become more worrisome in the recent years. As a marker of food insecurity, Global Hunger Index, which is an initiative of International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Concern Worldwide and Welthungerlife, is a good indicator. This index uses three components, namely, undernourishment, child underweight and child mortality; it takes into account share of the undernourished population, the share of children under the age of five who have low weight against their height, share of children under the age of five who are stunted and mortality rate of children under the age of five. The Global Hunger Index (GHI) score4 of India was 23.7 with the 67th position out of 81 countries in the list in 2011; this score went down to 29 and the country was ranked 80th out of 104 countries in 2015. As per the most recent estimate, in 2019, India’s score further declined to 30.3 and it was ranked as 102 out of 117 countries. In other words, the GHI scores and ranking for India in recent years clearly show an extremely worrisome state of under-nutrition, child wasting and stunting and unacceptably high mortality rates of children due to acute hunger.

As is obvious, food grains production is the major pre-requisite for the first pillar of food security, i.e. availability. As it happens, in the last thirty years of neoliberal policies, production of food grains output in India has increased at a slow pace, barely keeping ahead of the population growth; however, given the major policy reconfigurations during the period since the early 1990s, there has been a significant compression in food availability, going well beyond what may be explained by per capita production figures.

Figure 1 provides the annual food grain production in India and a comparison of per capita production and availability of food grains. In the period between 1990–91 and 2018–19, food grain production in India increased from 176 million tonnes to 285 million tonnes, with compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.7 per cent. In the same period, per capita food grain production increased from 208 kg per year to 214 kg per year with a CAGR of 0.1 per cent. However, in the referred period, the per capita availability declined from 186 kg per year to 180 kg per year with CAGR of −0.1 per cent.

Figure 1: Food Grain Production (Million Tonnes), Per Capita Production and Availability of Food Grains (Kg/person/year) in India, 1990–91 to 2018–19

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Source: Agricultural Statistics at a Glance—2019, Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India.

As regards, per capita availability of food grains, and in particular the growing gap between per capita production and availability, the factors responsible have very strong connects with the changes in the overall macroeconomic policy regime. One of the most important reasons is that of income deflation for a very large segment of the population, and consequently their ability to access food. Other important correlates that we need to take into account are: changes in agricultural subsidy and trade regimes, reconfiguration of the public distribution system, policies of stockholding, among others.

Table 2 presents the per capita availability and consumption of three major items and their related processed products, namely, rice, wheat and pulses. Between 1993–94 and 2011–12, the gap between availability and consumption of these items in India has widened considerably. This is based on different rounds of surveys done by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO)5.

Table 2: Per Capita Availability and Consumption of Rice, Wheat and Pulses (Kg/year/person)

Year	Rice			Wheat			All pulses
	Per Capita Availability	Per Capita Consumption		Per Capita Availability	Per Capita Consumption		Per Capita Availability	Per Capita Consumption
		Rural	Urban		Rural	Urban		Rural	Urban
1993–94	75.7	82.6	62.4	58.2	52.6	54.0	13.6	9.3	10.5
1999–00	74.3	80.2	62.1	58.4	54.1	54.1	11.6	10.2	12.2
2004–05	64.7	77.6	57.3	56.3	51.0	53.1	11.5	8.6	10.0
2009–10	66.4	74.7	56.6	61.4	53.0	52.8	12.9	7.9	9.6
2011–12	69.4	74.6	56.7	57.8	53.9	52.6	15.2	9.5	11.0

Source: Agricultural Statistics at a Glance—2019, Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India.

Table 2 presents the average picture of the country; however, it is well acknowledged that neoliberalism tends to exacerbate inequality everywhere and the India story is no different. From the different rounds of the above noted quinquennial rounds of the NSSO, we are in a position to map per capita consumption and food intake across different deciles of the population between early 1990s and 2011–12. As per the estimates available for this period, it is clear that for the bottom 9 deciles in rural and the 6 deciles in urban India, per capita consumption is less than the official norms of adequate calorie benchmark, which are 2400 and 2100 calories per day respectively (refer Table 3) (Ram 2017). This shows extreme levels of food insecurity in both rural and urban India. In the next sections, the paper offers an analysis of some of the major reasons for persistent and growing food insecurity in India; essentially these correlate well with ascendency and consolidation of neoliberal policies in the country.

Table 3: Estimated per Capita Calorie Intake per Day (in kcal)

Decile	Rural				Urban
	1993–94	2004–05	2009–10	2011–12	1993–94	2004–05	2009–10	2011–12
1	1465	1482	1545	1674	1453	1509	1558	1634
2	1731	1676	1712	1820	1703	1681	1700	1760
3	1850	1797	1819	1911	1800	1829	1760	1855
4	1975	1875	1882	1977	1900	1847	1846	1917
5	2057	1955	1980	2038	1997	1935	1912	1977
6	2165	2037	2022	2119	2080	2010	1977	2049
7	2278	2148	2110	2184	2189	2094	2074	2127
8	2411	2280	2181	2348	2287	2195	2164	2244
9	2588	2362	2323	2333	2462	2315	2290	2378
10	3035	2764	2610	2610	2844	2654	2527	2638
All	2156	2038	2018	2099	2072	2007	1981	2058

Source: (Ram 2017)

There are various studies that have analysed the trends and causes for decline in calorie-intake since the early 1990s (Deaton and Dreze, 2009; Patnaik, 2010a, 2010b; Nayyar and Nayyar, 2016: among others). Although there are some differences as regards the precise estimates of calorie deficient population across these studies, due to methodological differences, there is a broad similarity regarding the overall trends.

Neoliberalism and Its Impact on Food Security

It is well-acknowledged that the rise of neoliberalism has reconstituted the balance of power between the State and market forces, resulting in reduced commitments through a host of policy changes, towards citizens’ welfare at large. It is well known that, as a theory of political and economic practice, neoliberalism promotes strong private property rights, free markets and free trade in order to achieve human well-being through entrepreneurial freedom and skills (Harvey, 2007). In these theories, the State is confined to the responsibility of creating and preserving an institutional framework conducive to the free markets (ibid). India shifted in a significant manner towards liberalisation with the adoption of so-called new economic policy (NEP) in July 1991 (Patnaik and Chandrasekhar, 1995; Patnaik, 2007). In line with the policy prescriptions of the Brettonwoods Institutions (e.g. the World Bank and the IMF), India went ahead with policies of fiscal stabilisation and Structural Adjustment Programmes resulting in significant curtailment of its development and social sector expenditure and promoting a whole range of market friendly measures; these have had substantial impacts of well-being of the masses in general such as poverty, food security, employment etc. along with increases in inequalities across different axes such as rural-urban, social and occupational groups, among others. In the following sections, we focus on policies that impacted, directly and indirectly, on overall food situation in the country.

A. Export Orientation

The trade liberalisation, which is an integral part of the neo-liberal policies, has facilitated the export of agricultural products from developing countries to developed countries, despite falling per capita availability and consumption in the latter (Patnaik, 2016). As mentioned earlier, the export of food grains from India is among one of the significant factors contributing to the gap between production and availability, as is clearly evident from the table below.

Figure 2: Indian Export of Food Grains (Thousand Tonnes), 1990–91 to 2018–19

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Source: Agricultural Products Export Development Authority, Government of India

In the last three decades, the export of food grains from India has increased with a CAGR of 12.7 per cent. Rice has the largest share in the total agricultural export from India; the share of wheat was relatively higher in the period between 2000 and 2006. The share of maize in total food grain export was significant only between 2011 and 2015. The increasing export orientation of food grains has happened in a context where the export price received for the major crops were less than the economic cost which is indeed a very strange phenomenon; further, apart from reducing availability, it obviously contributed to a compression of the income of the substantial segments of farmers. Thus, in a sense, it was akin to a “dual loss” to for the country as a whole (Kumar, 2019).

It is also well known that globalisation has tended to increase price volatility for agricultural products, contributing to major shocks in the recent decades; for instance, in 2006–08 and 2010–11. The FAO reported that food price index rose between 7 per cent and 27 per cent for 2006 and 2007 and for 2008, it was 24 percent above the level of 2007 (FAO, 2009). These upward spirals of global food commodity prices were due to the massive increase in financial speculation in the food commodity on the commodities future markets (Ghosh et al., 2012), which was largely due to crisis in the traditional financial sector around the same years.

In India, there was a continuous pressure on food prices from 2006–2013; as it happens, it was also a period of growing trade openness and integration with the global market for agricultural commodities. The share of agricultural trade to agricultural GDP increased from 5.2 per cent to 19 per cent in 2013–14 (Bhattacharya and Sen Gupta, 2017). The integration of India’s agricultural market to global agricultural market led to a rising share of agricultural land being diverted to exportable crops having high-end prices. In 2007–08, when global prices were soaring to a very high level, the export of food items became lucrative than selling in the Indian domestic market. There was a significant increase in the share of exports in total Indian food production, i.e. from 6.2 per cent between 2003–04 and 2005–06 to more than 10 per cent in the period 2006–07 to 2008–09.