The article below is the September editorial of the Indian-based Analytical Monthly Review. It is reprinted from MRZine.
We now face the immediate need of a qualitative change in our most fundamental economic relationship — delivery of food supply.
The problem is not the variability of the weather. Rather, it has arisen from the sharp growth in inequality that has resulted from the extension of capitalist social relations in the period of "reform". The conditions of half of the Indian population have been steadily weakening over the past decades — with people growing ever more undernourished.
At the same time, the governmental tools available to respond to a food crisis have been under continuous attack, and are no longer able to fill their role.
The UNICEF report "The State of the World's Children 2009" said India had the highest rate of child malnutrition in the world. On average, children in rural areas are twice as likely to be underweight as children in urban areas.
The rate of child malnutrition in India is higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa.
The crisis has been building up for some time. Grain output has been stagnating for over a decade.
For the five years from 2002-07 the average annual growth rate in agriculture has been a meager 2.2%, hardly more than India's 1.5% annual population growth. Per capita availability of foodgrains in terms of kilograms/year was 162.5 in 2006, below the level of 1972 figure of 171.1.
But the availability of foodgrains does not give the real picture of the food question; access to food is the main criteria. The decline in per capita availability masks a yet more severe decline for disadvantaged sections, the inevitable result of the neoliberal dogma of rationing scarce goods by ability to pay — "market relations".
Extreme poverty
The vast extent of the numbers living in extreme poverty is known in fact to everyone, but simply does not appear in the business press, television or Bollywood. A
t election time, lying blather about "poverty reduction" appears, but the fact is that if we were to follow international criteria then 45% or more of Indians are extremely poor.
Arguably the most significant achievement since independence was the extension of food security to this immense sector of the population through the Public Distribution System, assuring a minimum level of supply. The PDS achieved, at least to some considerable extent, the rationing of scarce but necessary goods without making the means of payment the decisive consideration.
But only the shadow now remains.
The "reform" post-1991 regime set out to destroy the PDS, and to no small degree achieved this aim.
The means used was "targeting" — removing from the PDS tens of millions of the poor deemed not poor enough. Yet the damage went much further.
Every study we are aware of shows that most subsidised food grains fail to reach the remaining "Below Poverty Level" supposedly still entitled to receive them, and that a very large percentage (approaching half) of those entitled in theory to ration cards do not have them.
With relentless neoliberal logic, subsidies supposedly "targeted" for the poorest in fact now go to the ration dealers and their intermediaries who sell on the black market, according to studies (necessarily unofficial and approximate), up to 40% or more of all subsidised supplies.
With the PDS largely destroyed, the availability of food for the poorest once again depends on their ability to pay for it.
Food prices
Food prices have been steadily rising in the five years since 2004. In these years between 2004 and 2008, when India had some good monsoons and "record production" of foodgrains was claimed, the price of rice went up 46%, wheat by over 62%, atta (whole wheat flour) 55%, salt 42%, etc.
By March 2008, the average increase in price of such items was already well over 40%. These prices rose dramatically in the past three months. Inflation based on year-on-year variation in consumer price indices (CPIs) has increased since June 2008.
Various measures of consumer price inflation remained high in the range of 8.6-11.5% during May and June, and 8.0-9.7% in March 2009 — compared with 7.3-8.8% in June 2008.
For the most disadvantaged who have fallen out of the wreckage of the PDS system, and we are talking of tens of millions, the last years of price rise for foods have meant a steady gradual increase in hunger and malnutrition.
And now comes the bad monsoon of 2009. We are officially told fully half of the country is suffering drought.
Yet the question at issue is not unpredictable weather in one month or another; it is the consequences of what ecologists have told us is certain — that facing us today are the results of global climate change and irresponsible market-driven practices in the absence of planning.
Not only this year but in the years ahead there will be repeated crises arising from water shortages. A study published in Nature in August said a satellite study showed that groundwater reserves in northern India have dropped sharply between 2002 and 2008.
This depletion, due primarily to irrigation, is accelerating over time. And even in the absence of consensus on a causal linkage between global warming and bad monsoons, there is consensus on the increased prevalence of extreme weather variation — i.e. that previously rare events (such as failed monsoons) will be more frequent.
Once again, the future has arrived.
Disintegration
In recent weeks, the rise in food prices has accelerated. And the broken channels of the remaining PDS distribution system are everywhere visibly disintegrating.
A September 2 Times of India report is a good illustration of the problem (and of one among the available solutions): "Maoists ... seized 75 ration cards from ration dealer Laxmikanta Das' house at Memul in Salboni on Tuesday and allegedly distributed them to actual card holders who had so far been unable to buy anything through the public distribution system. In fact, the dealer allegedly used to lend money to the poor people of the area, keeping their ration cards with him as mortgage.
"Maoists also seized 1500 litres of kerosene from the accused ration dealer's house-cumgodown.
"Ration card holders like Debjani Das, Rekha Das, Dhanapati Das, Shambhu Tudu and Gopal Hembram — whose cards Das kept with him — wondered how 'the corrupt ration dealer piled 1500 litres of kerosene as his ration shop was closed for about two months'.
"Shambhu Tudu and Gopal Hembram said, 'We know Maoists are banned in our country. But neither political parties nor officers dared to seize our ration cards from the influential ration dealer. Maoists did it.'
"West Midnapore district magistrate Narayan Swaroop Nigam said, 'We have got to know of the ration card of the racket from local sources. I have ordered a probe into it.'"
Predictably, we are told by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee that food supplies are sufficient, that any shortfall shall be met by purchases on the international markets, that the economy was recovering, and not to worry. This was then followed by the usual nonsense about aggregate growth rates.
However, the supposed 6.1% year-on-year growth for the June quarter was more than half accounted for by a sharp increase in the trade balance. But the increase in the trade balance was wholly accounted for by a decrease in imports far greater than the decrease in exports.
So half of the "growth" was due to contraction!
But even this "recovery" is about to take a tumble. Agriculture's contribution to GDP for the September quarter is forecast to be off 10% or worse. And the drop in the price of petroleum products in the first half of the year (resulting in the positive trade balance) has reversed.
Food prices are climbing rapidly, and the purchases on the international markets promised by Mukherjee will be very costly indeed.
Yet were it even possible that aggregate growth rates were to be restored to "India Shining" brilliance, the question at issue would remain.
With agriculture now contributing but a sixth of GDP though providing the livelihood of more than half of the population, a fundamental divergence has emerged between the real world and that of capitalist economic calculation.
Let us recall that, according to home ministry records (and surely an undercount), more than 180,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1997, a period in which GDP supposedly doubled.
If, say, over the next two years agriculture's contribution were to be cut in half, the aggregate GDP would increase provided only that service sector, banking and real estate and so on expanded by a fifth (a rate achieved in most recent two year periods).
Of course, we would be dealing with farmer suicides numbered in tens of millions, while the business press would no doubt celebrate "growth".
This is what we meant in suggesting that the question of food supply now requires a qualitative change in our most fundamental economic relations. The path of neoliberal market "reform" has come to the edge of the cliff.