In search of a paradigm

Debates and discussions in the academic, media and public policy circles with regard to socio-economic issues have a tendency to identify positions as either Right or Left. The questioning mind thinks whether Right is right and  Left is to be left or is it the other way round where Right is to be left and Left is right. One talks of the virtues of the market a la Adam Smith and the other the virtues of a classless society a la Karl Marx.

Daniel Mackie, Thinkers, Adam Smith and Karl Marx

Among lay persons the discussions at times can point to the right-hand use among people being the norm whereas the left-hand use being an aberration by the supporters of Right, which is countered by stating that left-hand users are smarter and intelligent by the supporters of Left. There are others who want to broker peace and point out that there are advantages in both the hands while conceding that there can be situations where we are more attuned to the right and some others where we are more attuned to the left. But then a middle position leaves an unanswered question with regard to the appropriate paradigm. Are we both Right and Left? Or, are we neither Right nor Left? These questions put us in a catch-22 situation.

Getting back, the virtues of the market as also that of classless society have their own merit. The market gives the freedom to individuals to exchange their goods and services and because of the existence of large number of buyers and sellers none of them can determine the prices and it is this that can do away with any vested interest. A classless society does away with any kind of hierarchy and with it any power relationships that can lead to vested interest are also done away with. Both these are ideal situations that do away with some form of vested interest.

The doing away of vested interests is also articulated through the impartial spectator in Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments and the need is conveyed by the corruption of our moral sentiments, which is occasioned by the disposition to admire the rich and the great, and to despise or neglect persons of poor and mean condition. The role of the impartial spectator is taken forward in recent times by Amartya Sen in The Idea of Justice.

Another idea of doing away with vested interest is John Rawls' 'original position'. Here the individuals enter into an agreement by remaining under a veil of ignorance where they do not know their identities, as articulated in A Theory of Justice.

A very powerful call to our moral power is invoked when Mahatma Gandhi gave us a talisman. This talisman suggests that whenever in doubt an individual should recall the face of the most vulnerable person and contemplate whether the action to be taken will be of any help to that person and provide them with swaraj and it is this that will lead to one's doubt as also one's self melting away.  There will be no vested interest.

Steve Jobs in his commencement address (also see video below) to students at Stanford University refers to three stories from his life. The third one states that since he was 17 years old he has been starting his day every day by contemplating that it could be his last and it is this invoking of death that does away with all redundant things - external expectations, pride, fear, embarrassment or failure; only truly important things remain.  This reminds us about John Donne's Death be not proud, but more importantly it is also a very powerful moral power that does away with vested interest. 

Speaking about the contemporary political scenario in India one cannot but agree about the public perception of honesty and integrity by its Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh. At least with regard to financial propriety at a personal level and without going into ideological differences and some other acts of omission and commission, one can also name half-a-dozen  Chief Ministers from different states cutting across political parties such as Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal, Manik Sarkar of Tripura, Narendra Modi of Gujarat, Naveen Patnaik of Odisha, Nitish Kumar of Bihar and Prithviraj Chavan of Maharashtra among others who are also known to satisfy the acid test of public probity in some sense. This is a good thing and a necessary condition to root out vested interests leading to corruption, but it is neither a sufficient condition nor the only test required for good governance.

For instance, being personally honest does not mean that we can assume that everyone around us is also honest. The assumption of trust is a positive thing, but this cannot be the basis of a statecraft to allow markets to rule the roost. Similarly, espousing a classless society through different process does not necessarily mean the absence of hierarchies and vested interests, as the recent experiences in the umpteen years of Left rule in West Bengal or the fall of the erstwhile Soviet Union suggest.

Markets or a classless setup are means to do away with some forms of vested interest so that people live in a fair society.  Thus, as a deeper reading of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Rawls would show, it is people with plural concerns who should be at the centre of focus - the ends. As Amartya Sen would say, it is the enhancing of capabilities of people so that they can be and do what they have reason to value is what matters. These have been articulated in numerous ways in the Human Development Reports of the last two decades.

So, to sum up, the question of either Right or Left, or, neither Right nor Left are not the appropriate ones. One can use, markets as also classless set-up or any other means or none of them to help people depending on the context. One should take advantage of these as also other means and tools when required, but should also be on the guard for adverse implication that can come out of the usage of these. But, most importantly one should never loose sight of the people-centric approach, our end. It is this that takes us in our search for a paradigm to one called 'human development'.

An interesting note, tangentially related is Karl Marx and Adam Smith Drop In On Occupy Wall Street. This link and the link to some of the photographs have been put up on 25 April 2012.

To Bt Or Not To Bt?

To Bt Or Not To Bt? Risk and Uncertainty Considerations in Technology Assessment is the title of a new working paper from IGIDR by Sarthak Gaurav and myself (Srijit Mishra). I give below the abstract and some extracts from the Introduction and Conclusion, but without the references.

Abstract

The acreage under the transgenic Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton seeds in India has risen significantly since its legalization in the year 2002. Discussions on the advantages from the technology have focused on increments in productivity and income, without much analysis on risk. We point out that claims on productivity gains seem to be misplaced, as appropriate counterfactuals do not exist for the same hybrids. In this article we analyse production costs and crop incomes in drought years to test a simplistic theory of risk based on first principles. We employ a mixed-methods framework to draw inferences by combining data from two cross-sectional surveys in Gujarat (Saurashtra and Southern-Plains) and Maharashtra (Western Vidarbha) for the period 2009-10 and compare it with unit-level data for the corresponding regions from a nationally representative sample for the period 2002-03. Empirical evidence, though limited, brings out the problem of how a high cost technology could be associated with higher risks and may be dominated by traditional alternatives under certain conditions. Ethnographic accounts from the field provide qualitative support to our understanding of potential risks and uncertainties associated with the new technology.

Introduction

It is observed that in less than a decade since its legal introduction in 2002, there has been a remarkable diffusion of Bt cotton technology in India, with  the genetically modified seeds being used to cultivate nearly 90 per cent of the total area under cotton in 2010.  During this period, the yields and overall production has increased on an average, and India, which is the second largest producer of cotton in the world, became a net exporter of cotton from being a net importer. Should we accept these trends as evident of a successful adoption of the technology? Or, is there something more than what meets the eye – like the dominance of the QWERTY technology for keyboard layouts? In other words, can the increasing acreage under Bt cotton be solely attributed to inherent benefits of the transgenic seed technology or there are at work other mechanisms that demand explanation? More importantly, are we missing out on critical dimensions of assessing the technology amidst the ‘deceptive rhetoric, spin, and soundbite science portraying the wonders or horrors of the new technology’ propounded by the competing discourses of the pro and anti Bt camps? 

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For a scientific evaluation of the hypothesized superiority of Bt cotton seeds in the causal sense, the use of these seeds should be the differentiating factor in attainment of higher yields and profitability in cotton production, ceteris paribus. Also, it should be borne in mind that in the absence of appropriate counterfactuals and adequate controls, any evidence that rejects the null hypothesis of Bt seeds not being superior to their non Bt counterparts, does not necessarily imply the superiority of Bt seeds, and vice versa. In the case of Bt cotton, the co-existence of scores of varieties with Bt genes and non Bt hybrids complicates the separability of the effects of the Bt strain.  Unfortunately, the Bt cotton discourse has failed to acknowledge this fundamental logic while attempting to establish the positive or negative impacts.

In this article, we argue that an improved understanding of risk and uncertainty is central to the assessment of Bt cotton technology by analyzing outcomes in two drought periods, across two cross-sections. First, we use unit-level data from the Situation Assessment Survey of Farmers from the 59th round of the National Sample Survey (NSS), for the period 2002-03 across specific regions of Gujarat (Saurashtra and Southern Plains) and Maharashtra (Western Vidarbha).   Then we employ data from our surveys and ethnographic inquiries in the similar agro-ecological zones in the two states for the period 2009-10. Furthermore, the Gujarat sample provides interesting comparisons across Bt and non Bt growers and ethnographic findings from the field in Wardha district of Vidarbha allow us to draw critical inferences on the Bt technology.

By taking up the analysis in two drought periods – one at a time when the legal (official) commercial transgenic varieties were introduced, and the other at a time when the technological diffusion can be assumed to have played out well, the findings of this article attempt to sensitize Bt cotton analysis to issues of risk and technological uncertainty. We believe, this article has two important contributions to improving our understanding of the Bt cotton debate. First, we argue for the need to consider the fundamental aspect of risk in the evaluation of the impact of Bt seeds. This assumes significance at a time of crisis in the Indian agriculture and spate of farmers’ suicides among predominantly cotton growers.

Second, our study is a contribution in mixed-methods research paradigm. In this context, we introduce a methodological innovation that combines quantitative and qualitative findings from the field with secondary data from a nationally representative sample that provides a rough baseline approximation in the context of Bt cotton evaluation for the two major cotton growing regions of the country, namely, Saurashtra and Southern Plains in Gujarat and Western Vidarbha in Maharashtra. It is quite likely that some farmers in the nationally representative sample would have already used illegal Bt seeds Nevertheless, the analysis can be safely assumed to be representative of non Bt usage scenario and hence a valid benchmark for conditions of cotton production in the relevant regions. For the current purpose we compare and contrast results from the NSS survey for the crop season of 2002-03 with that of some location specific and somewhat independent surveys in the above-mentioned two cotton growing regions during 2009-10.

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Conclusion
In this article we argue that the perceived benefits and costs of introduction of the genetically modified seed technology, needs to be re-evaluated from the perspective that by being a substantial addition to cost in the farmers input vector, it also has risk considerations that need to be analyzed. Its dynamic interaction with a host of other factors like changing pest ecology, price risks, multi crop systems and market dynamics needs attention.

Using data from the Situation Assessment Survey of Farmers of the NSS 59th round, for a drought period 2002-03, we derive baseline scenarios for regions in Gujarat and Maharashtra. Data from the field and ethnographic evidence in similar regions provide changes in conditions of cotton production in the drought year 2009-10. First, we show that Bt technology is first order stochastically dominated by non Bt technology for our sample of cotton growers in Gujarat and the Bt technology adds substantial input costs to the production system.    

Second, findings from the village level study in Maharashtra provide evidence of technology uncertainty, rampant deskilling and sub-optimal production decision making by farmers with limited information. Widespread institutional failures in the market for seeds emerge as a major concern in the farmers’ adjustment process and demands immediate attention.

Last but not the least, we provide the first evidence on the riskiness of Bt cotton technology by employing a simple risk framework (Mishra 2008) which takes the ratio of  costs with that of net returns from cultivation of a specific crop. In this theoretical framework Bt technology can be both risk increasing or risk decreasing given the actual conditions under which the production occurs, but empirical evidence presented in this analysis indicate that Bt cotton has been risk increasing.

Even though our datasets are limited in terms of external validity and we employed a mixed-methods framework to address our core research question, we get substantive qualitative and quantitative confirmation on the Bt technology being associated with increasing risk in a drought year. This perspective is critical for the technology evaluation because the farmers stand to lose more in bad crop years than they would have in the case of traditional varieties. Moreover, if the net gains from Bt (at higher expected yields) are offset by the high intensity losses (frequent or otherwise), the yield advantage promised by Bt seeds should be taken with a pinch of salt because the absolute returns are so low that an increase in returns in such years would not lead to an increase in savings that can be used to compensate in a bad year. The riskiness of this technology becomes even more important from the fact that around 65 per cent of India’s cotton is produced in rainfed conditions and 35 per cent is irrigated.

We would like to emphasize that this article is not an addition to the existing literature on the productivity or socio-economic impact of Bt cotton technology, rather it is an attempt to introduce a new perspective in evaluating the technology by analyzing farm level data from a nationally representative sample and field level data from an ongoing panel data based study in one of the most challenging socio-economic and institutional contexts where the merit of the technology could be put to test. The contribution of our paper is that it introduces an alternative perspective on how the inherent riskiness of a so-called innovation like Bt cotton should be identified, irrespective of its potential benefits or observed merits across different parts of the country and among different groups of farmers. We demonstrate how a neglect of the simple economics of crop production and the associated risk factors can play out against the farmers who make a conscious decision to adopt a particular technology given multiple constraints, with the hope that it will pay off well.   

There are certain methodological issues in Bt cotton evaluation that have not been dealt with in this paper but could be taken up as future research. Bt hybrids outperforming the earlier non Bt varieties should not be taken as a positive increment in yield on account of Bt alone, and the separability of effects of the hybrid impacts from Bt traits in a seed should be strived at. Variability of yield and other dimensions like price risks need to be assessed rigorously. Moreover, Bt technology could also induce moral hazard in farming practices as the farmer would expect the superior technology to be causing higher yields. An analysis of the dynamic performance of the technology over an appropriate period of time across different agroclimatic conditions could throw more light and also help us study the associated effects on the ecology and environment. Despite these limitations, our analysis does suggest that the proposition – to Bt or not to Bt; demands more non reductionist analyses that take cognizance of the localized variations and institutional realities.

Those interested, may read the full paper, To Bt Or Not To Bt? Risk and Uncertainty Considerations in Technology Assessment.

Options and Priorities for Agriculture in India on the Eve of the Twelfth Five-Year Plan

Introduction

The Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai and the Institute for Human Development (IHD), New Delhi with the support from the Planning Commission, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and The World Bank conducted a two day workshop on 'Policy Options and Investment Priorities for Accelerating Agricultural Productivity and Development in India' at the India International Centre, New Delhi during 10-11 November 2011. Besides the inaugural session (where Dr Abhijit Sen, Member, Planning Commission delivered the keynote address), there were six technical sessions, viz., agriculture in the global perspective, agricultural growth, agricultural investments, technology, marketing and structural transformations, and three panel discussions on perspectives from the states, government perspectives and the way forward. Based on these deliberations, some policy aspects are raised on the eve of the twelfth five-year plan.

Issues and concerns

While agricultural productivity and development is an important question, there could be different perspectives such as increasing foodgrains production, providing livelihood security for more than half the population dependent on agriculture or efficiency in resource use of not only land but also water and other inputs. All these have their own rationale, but they can conflict with each other and that is the challenge for planning. In addition, questions of food inflation in recent times and the ongoing debate on food and nutrition security as also crop diversification, efficiency of small holdings and soil fatigue are also relevant concerns.

Learning from others

Drawing on the comparative study with a focus on Brazil, China and Indonesia, the lessons for India is to focus on research in facilitating appropriate technology, sprucing up the research and extension systems, emphasis on diversification and investment in infrastructure. At a global level, increasing hunger, adverse impacts on production on account of climate change and shift in acreage to biofuels among others are matters that are also pertinent for India.

Growth in agriculture: variation across states

After a period of deceleration from mid-90s, there has been a revival in agricultural growth in the eleventh plan, but this revival is being backed by a technology that is increasing the cost rather than reducing it, which jeopardises the livelihood sustainability of the mass of people dependent on agriculture. There are differences in priorities and policies across states and agro-climatic regions and the planning at the centre should take this into note. In particular, the rainfed regions and districts with lower productivity need special attention. The Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) should be bottom-up in spirit and not just in letter, that is, start planning from the village level by involving the local communities based on their requirements.

Investments in agriculture: public and private

Public investments should sustain the momentum on irrigation, research & development, and rural roads; focus on rainfed and eastern region; and find ways to make fixed capital efficient among others. The policy environment to facilitate private corporate investment should also look into appropriate regulatory and institutional issues. Farmer household level private investment is complementary to public investment, but for this to happen, appropriate credit facilitation should be provided by the formal banking institutions keeping the marginal and small farmer in mind. Further, research should be encouraged with farm level data. The unit level data maintained by the Department of Economics and Statistics (DES) and used by Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) should be made available to researchers so as to help in the policy deliberations and planning process.

Technology: a critical link

New technological developments are required to improve production and this necessitates change in agricultural education, facilitating research that has to be integrated with on-field training and extension education, draws on farmers' innovations and incorporates the ecological concerns among others. For all these, appropriate additional investment is required in research and development. There should be ample scope to integrate Agriculture Technology Management Agency (ATMA) to the needs of the states with a focus on providing appropriate services, as required by the farmers. Efforts should be made to reduce yield gaps from research station potential to on-farm demonstration to actual farm outputs. Independent of the input-intensive cultivation, the alternative paradigm of rainfed cultivation with a focus on soil organic matter, supplementary irrigation, seed bank, millet production along with small ruminants and fisheries among others may be promoted on a pilot basis under the twelfth five-year plan in some selected blocks of backward rainfed districts. This also requires building up of farmer-friendly institutions to facilitate their livelihood security.

Market: beyond efficiencies

In recent years, Agriculture Produce Market Committee (APMC) laws have been enacted or are in the process of being enacted in most states, but some of the variation across states need to be bridged with subsequent amendments and the enacted laws need to be properly implemented and where there are no laws, appropriate regulatory structures need to be put in place. There is a case to empower marginal and small farmers by expanding their choice set so that they benefit from market transactions and this may be possible through pro-poor value chains, and appropriate contracts that are situation-specific to guard them against price and income shocks. Risk mitigation at the household level has to be based on diversification and low external input technologies. There is a need for appropriate insurance instruments – crop insurance at the farm level and weather-based insurance to factor in different stages of crops life cycle and input requirements.

Village studies: multiple perspectives required

The changing technological and market scenario as also socio-economic intervention is also bringing about a lot of changes in rural India. Revival of village studies from multiple perspectives would help complement our understanding from large scale surveys and macro data. Such studies need to be encouraged.

The way forward

On the eve of the twelfth five-year plan, the challenges for agriculture are multiple – climate change, foodgrains production, technology fatigue, resource use efficiency, food inflation, and livelihood security for those dependent on agriculture among others. It requires coming together of many domains and perspectives, as has been shown in this workshop wherein one received support from the government and multilateral organizations involving researchers from Indian as well as International institutes with an attempt to initiate a conversation between agricultural scientists and economists.

Alternative technologies emphasizing on sustainable and conservation practices with a focus on rainfed regions need to be explored. This has to be complemented with appropriate institutions: (1) those that organize farmers from the village level to aggregate their input and market requirements, (2) those that help to leverage scientific developments and the claimed potential with on-field outcomes at the farmer level through appropriate research and extension structure that are bi-directional in nature and also take into consideration the local situation – both agro-climatic as also socio-economic, and (3) those that facilitate collection and analysis of quality data at the micro (farm or household level including village studies), meso (regional or state-specific studies) and macro (aggregate economy level studies) level. There is also a case to bring together the concerns of agricultural development with that of rural development.

The task ahead is daunting. To quote Robert Frost, “…And miles to go before (we) sleep, And miles to go before (we) sleep.”

(This has been prepared by Srijit Mishra in consultation with S Mahendra Dev and with inputs from Ritika Palit, Sanjay Prasad, Upasana Sharma and D Suganthi.)

Some of my other recent related posts are:

Size-class and returns to cultivation in India

Food, hunger and ethics

Report on strengthening the role of agriculture for nutrition secure India

Poverty estimates in India

Size-class and returns to cultivation in India

'Size-class and returns to cultivation in India: a cold case reopened' is the title of a recent working paper from IGIDR that Sarthak Gaurav and I have co-authored. This revives the age-old debate on farm size and productivity that started in the early sixties  by Amartya Sen. Some excerpts from the abstract, introduction and conclusions of the working paper are given below. An abstract of its revised version published in Oxford Development Studies is also given below.

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between returns to cultivation per hectare and size-class of land cultivated in India, using unit level data from the 59th round National Sample Survey, 2003. The analysis is done separately for ‘kharif’ and ‘rabi’ − for total value of cultivation from all crops at the all India level. The empirical evidence rejects the null hypothesis of no relationship and points to the existence of an inverse association. We argue that the efficiency of the small-holders has to be taken with a pinch of salt because their low absolute returns brings into focus the question of their livelihood sustainability which is further aggravated on account of higher unit costs. Being the first exercise in a series of proposed explorations into disaggregated analyses across states, and for specific crops, it opens up the classic debate on farm size and productivity in the 21st century.

Introduction

In recent years, Indian agriculture has been reeling under a crisis and one of the concomitant outcomes is poor returns to cultivation which has rendered farming as an unsustainable livelihood option – particularly for the marginal and small holders.2 This also raises the long debated question of inverse relationship between size-class and productivity, that is, whether marginal and small farmers are relatively efficient vis-à-vis larger size-class farmers? The current paper explores this aspect of Indian agriculture using unit level data from the Situation Assessment Survey of Farmers, administered in the 59th round of the National Sample Survey (NSS).This survey was conducted during 2003 and collected information for the agricultural year 2002-03.This is the latest (and the largest) nationally representative data set for analyzing the state of farming in India. By conducting the analysis at the unit level, to the best of our knowledge, we provide the first baseline for the 21st century. An attempt has been made to assesses the relationship between size-class and returns to cultivation; and in doing so, it expects to contribute and open-up the long drawn out, and till recently dormant debate.

...

Conclusions

An analysis of size-class and returns to cultivation using nationally representative data from the Situation Assessment Survey of Farmers (SAS) of the 59th Round of the National Sample Survey, for the period 2002-03 opens up the classic debate on the efficiency of the small holder. Our empirical results, computed separately for kharif and rabi, at an aggregate all India level as also for each size-class reject the null of absence of any relationship between size-class and productivity and indicate the existence of an inverse relationship. While the small holder seems efficient the low absolute returns raises questions on livelihood sustainability. This is also important from the perspective of the risk bearing capacity of the small-holders given the fact of their per hectare costs being higher.

To the best of our knowledge, these are the first estimates for the 21st century and at the pan-Indian level; and could be used as a baseline for comparative analyses in the future. Our empirical evidence can be considered as an important contribution to the literature on size-class and productivity relationship. While opening up this cold case we are aware that one needs to go down to further details and control for other factors that may affect returns to cultivation. It would be equally important to analyse the variation across states, social groups as also the crop-specific patterns. We plan to do some of these in a series of future exercises.

In spite of the limitations of our study, it is a first attempt at a fundamental problem in Indian agricultural using a nationally representative sample. Given the relevance of our findings in corroborating the story of a crisis in Indian agriculture on one hand, and with the promise to reopen the classic debate on farm size and productivity on the other, we argue for the need for further inquiries, and if feasible, a future round of the SAS as it is almost a decade since the first (and only) survey.

Those interested in the full paper can click, 'Size-class and returns to cultivation in India: a cold case reopened'.

A revised version of the paper is now available as 'Farm size and returns to cultivation in India: revisiting an old debate' Oxford Development Studies, Published online 21 Nov 2014.

The abstract of the revised version is as follows. This paper revisits the long-debated question of the relationship between farm size and productivity by studying the relationship between area cultivated and net returns to cultivation in India using a nationally representative data-set. The analysis is carried out separately for the two major agricultural seasons, kharif and rabi, and for both the seasons pooled together. Our findings suggest the existence of an inverse relationship, even when we control for a number of household and farm characteristics and even when we treat factors such as household type (occupation), social group (caste), agro-climatic zone (region) and agricultural season as fixed effects. The result is also robust to correction for selection bias. However, the efficiency of the smallholder as a result of this greater productivity has to be treated with some caution as it ignores the low absolute levels of their returns, which raise questions about the sustainability of their livelihoods. This is further aggravated by the fact that they pay relatively higher unit costs and because of their greater dependence on purchased inputs.

Food, Hunger and Ethics

Food, Hunger and Ethics is the title of my new working paper, which has been accepted for publication in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics. The abstract and key words are given below.

Abstract: Management of hunger has to look into issues of availability, accessibility and adequacy. Posing it from an ethical perspective the paper argues out in favour of right to food. But, for this to happen, the state has to come up with an appropriate and effective bill on food and nutrition security, address the issue of inadequate provisioning of storage space by state agencies leading to rotting of foodgrains - a criminal waste when people are dying of hunger, and rely on a bottom-up approach involving the community that complements the top-down administrative structure to identify poor and reduce both exclusion and inclusion errors in targeting.

To read the paper, see  Food, Hunger and Ethics.


Key words: Bottom-up, cash transfers, exclusion and inclusion errors, foodgrains, Mahatma Gandhi, nutrition adequacy, poverty, Rawls, right to food, targeting, top-down, unique identification.

Links to some important papers referred to in the paper are as also given below.

What do we want form a theory of justice? by Amartya Sen

2010 Global Hunger Index

India State Hunger Index 

Right to food campaign home page

Report of Expert Group to review the methodology for estimation of poverty, Chairperson: Suresh Tendulkar, 2009.

Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith

Link to the paper Food, Hunger and Ethics

Report on Strengthening the Role of Agriculture for Nutrition Secure India

The Indira Gandhi Institute ofDevelopment Research (IGIDR), Mumbai and International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), New Delhi organized a workshop ‘Strengthening the Role of Agriculture for Nutrition Secure India’ on 13 September 2011 at New Delhi.

In his welcome and opening remarks, PK Joshi pointed out that the concerns of hunger, micronutrient deficiencies and undernourishment should take our thinking beyond growth. He also mentioned that one per cent growth in agriculture has a greater impact on poverty reduction than a similar growth in non-agricultural sector.  He urged the need to look at agriculture and nutrition linkages through three lenses - economic, social and governance.

S Mahendra Dev indicated that one of the purposes of the workshop is to bring in agriculture-nutrition linkages into the policy making exercise. In particular, the twelfth five year plan. Five concerns that he raised are (a) to increase productivity of rainfed resource poor regions with an emphasis on small and marginal farmers, (b) to diversify the diet beyond cereals and include locally available nutritious food, (c) to curb food inflation, particularly for proteins like pulses, (d) a greater need for empowerment of women, and (e) convergence of agriculture with other programmes. Also see his recent co-authored policy note, Pro-nutrition agriculture in India.

In his inaugural address, Vijay Vyas used some recent nutrition indicators on children and women from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) where India, when compared with similar indicators for other countries, is nearly at the bottom. In addition to low levels, he also pointed out their persistence and in some cases the deterioration of malnourishment. To a large extent, India has addressed the issue of chronic hunger. But seasonal hunger, particularly during the period after sowing and before harvesting, for some sub-groups of population in agricultural communities is a matter of concern. However, when it comes to calorie-protein adequacy and micronutrient requirements we are still below the norm. We are not even able to provide 1800 calories to many and then again a substantial amount of what is provided is only through cereals. Thus, it is not just agriculture, but also the dietary intake, economic accessibility and environmental factors that matter. He reiterated the pivotal role of agriculture both as a supplier but also as a sector that can generate maximum demand. He called for more production, more variety in terms of nutri-cereals, fruits and vegetables and to make this possible the need for changes or a move beyond rice and wheat through policies of pricing, credit facilitation, distribution and institutional reforms among others.

The keynote address was given by RB Singh who began by quoting Hippocrates “Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine be they food” and then goes on to reiterate Dr Vyas’s point by presenting actual data on India’s poor nutrition indicators in a global comparative perspective, particularly with Brazil and China, for undernourishment, underweight children, low birth weight, low body mass index of mothers, greater fertility, higher child anaemia, lower expenditure on child care, lower vaccination, lower mother’s literacy and lower public expenditure. Both Brazil and China also intervened on clean drinking water, sanitation hygiene, education and awareness and backed this up with political will. He reminded the gathering about the Copenhagen Consensus 2008 reiterating the need for Lifelong Livelihood Security and how neglecting issues of child malnutrition can have adverse impacts on the economy. There is immense scope for research towards leveraging agriculture for nutrition. He put up a case in favour of new technology for seeds, but on genetic engineering he said that cisgenic (genes taken from the same species or a closely related one) will have certain advantages and less regulatory requirement when compared against the transgenic (genes from other species like the Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt). He also highlighted the importance of home/kitchen garden in meeting most of the micro nutrient deficiencies. He praised the rich gene biodiversity of India and said that we should maintain it and propagate agro-ecologically differentiated practices. Keeping the importance of children in this concern of nutrition, he concludes by showing the picture of a child with the caption “Hold my today; I will hold your tomorrow.”

In her presentation, Suneetha Kadiyala began by highlighting the overall scenario in India, higher growth, but not doing well in human development dimension and with much higher share of poor and malnourishment (both undernourished and overweight). The agriculture sector is not doing well and one has observed a high food price index. In the global hunger index, India is not doing well and the state-specific hunger index also does not augur well for almost all the states analyzed. To address nutrition problems, direct interventions like infant feeding and bio-fortification could address only one-third of the problem whereas indirect interventions through agriculture, social protection, education, health system, and women’s empowerment turn out to be important. Some of the emerging findings from their recent study are as follows. (a) A cross-country analysis indicates that agricultural growth helps in the reduction of stunting, but the result weakens when Indian states are included in the analysis suggesting a poor linkage or disconnect between agriculture and nutrition in India. (b) There is a data disconnect as the existing information make it difficult to analyze the said linkage. (c) Over the years, dietary diversity has increased and the food base has moved to non-cereal sources but mother’s education and household income seem to have a positive impact on diversity. Some of the key entry points from her presentation are that household income matters, agriculture influences dietary pattern, women’s asset ownership is critical for decision making and nutritional outcomes, and that direct health and nutrition interventions matter.

Praduman Kumar’s talk was from a small holder perspective. It began with the contrast that at an aggregate level, India is self-sufficient in food, but it also has the largest number of hungry and poor and most of them happen to be agricultural labourer and marginal farmers with less than one hectare of land. The presentation pointed out that demand, particularly of non-foodgrain crops will increase, but supply will not. This will increase prices and reduce per capita consumption and also have an adverse affect on dietary diversification. Thus, for a food/nutrition secure India we need to focus on livestock, education, irrigation, aquaculture, horticulture, and dryland agriculture. There is a need to bridge research and policy gaps and integrate them with local wisdom. The presentation ended by showing a critical triangle with the three dimensions being food security and agricultural growth, poverty reduction and rural development, and environmental sustainability.

The next presentation was on Food Security Atlas of Rural India by Preet Rustagi, which was based on a district level exercise for rural areas of eight states. At the district level they came up with two indicators – one on food security based on 12 indicators (of which four were on availability, six on access and two on absorption) and an outcome indicator based on underweight children and under-five mortality. From the 281 districts, 101 are food insecure (all the 18 in Jharkhand, most (13 out of 16) in Chhattisgarh, 29 out of 45 in Madhya Pradesh and 19 out of 30 in Odisha and the relatively food secure districts are mostly in Uttar Pradesh (16) and one each in Maharashtra and Rajasthan. There is a clear connection between food insecurity and low irrigation, poor connectivity, income insecurity, hilly terrain, higher proportion of scheduled tribes and scheduled castes, higher proportion of agricultural labourers, low agricultural wages and low female literacy. However, there did not seem to be much connection with the outcome indicators. Severe or extreme insecurity in outcome were observed in 82 districts (31 in Uttar Pradesh, 26 in Madhya Pradesh (there could be some connection here) and 15 in Rajasthan).  The way forward is to focus on the food insecure and poor outcome districts on various associated risk factors, but the interventions should be locally relevant.

Speaking from a gender perspective, Bina Agarwal brought into the discourse some welfare and efficiency concerns. She vouched the concept of land bank, which can act as a depositor of landowners and creditors to tenants. The landowners could be given some minimum returns and higher returns if the land is put to use by tenants. The latter can work in groups, but they need not worry about going to individuals for leasing in. She also mentioned about integrating other support services for the final tiller.

Coming back again, S Mahendra Dev raised some additional issues. The question of availability/access is important, but so is the productivity of water. This reminds RB Singh’s keynote that one kilogram of potato requires 900 litres of water but one kilogram of beef requires 15,500 litres of water. The other concern is that of climate change, as it could adversely affect the yield. Other matters of concern are to bring nutri-cereals into the public distribution system, who should grow pulses (small or large farmers), the slowing growth of fruits and vegetables (or as someone said, the slowing down of horticulture revolution), bridging the gap in prices between what farmers receive and what consumers pay, and the need for convergence of different district level plan through the panchayati raj institutions. An important point that came up during the discussion is the increasing input costs and adverse impacts of pesticide usage.

Veena Rao, a bureaucrat, lamented that nothing much happened out of the National Nutrition Policy 1993 and the National Plan of Action on Nutrition 1995 where the linkage between agriculture and nutrition was spelt out. However, some of these have been taken up in the Karnataka Nutrition Mission. The important ones being that nutrition is to be addressed from a life cycle approach – infants, children, adolescents, lactating and pregnant mother; bridging calorie, protein and micronutrient deficiency through appropriate intervention to different target groups; accelerating, integrating and tightly monitoring multi-sectoral ongoing programmes; achieving convergence between different programmes and covering pragmatic gaps; involving civil society and community; launching awareness and making available nutritious and energy rich food at lower cost through public-private partnership. This reminds me of the ‘health and nutrition’ intervention through the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) in Andhra Pradesh. In some villages where nutritious food was given to lactating and pregnant mothers, the cost of food in some villages could be met by the participants doing some packaging work for the local grocery shop, and as a result none of the child births in this village was less than 3.5 kilograms – the proof of the pudding lies in its eating.   

Kaustav Banerjee, representing the revitalizing rainfed agriculture, pointed out that from the perspective of availability at the aggregate level one should not be worried for foodgrains as a whole. While there availability at a local level does matter, but a matter of greater concern is the unavailability of millets in adequate quantities even at an aggregate level. Further rainfed agriculture comprises two-thirds of the farmed area but has attracted comparatively less policy design and interventions. Thus, there is the need for a new architecture to address this, which should be holistic and integrate agriculture with livestock and area development.

Comparing the Empowered Group of Ministers draft versions of the National Food Security Act to that prepared by the National Advisory Council, Biraj Patnaik pointed out that the former has several shortcomings. It does not have the definitions of some important concepts such as child, malnutrition, starvation, job chart and health centre upfront and the definitions of foodgrains, homeless person and public distribution system are relatively restricted. The entitlements for a person per day have been reduced from four to three kilograms of foodgrains. There are no special provision for single women, lactating and pregnant mothers, malnourished children and emergency and disaster affected persons. More importantly the rights of the people living with starvation have been watered down. As a result, the links with nutrition is  absent. He also raised the attention of the house to two other things. The global land grab in Africa where many countries (including India) and private companies (including Indian) are leasing in land to produce food to address shortfalls in their own countries, besides building food reserves to make gains through speculation and trading, is contributing to less land being available for the production of food for the local economies in Africa. The other concern was on the role of the commodities futures markets and its implication on food prices (see the Report of the Expert Committee To Study the Impact of Futures Trading on Agricultural Commodity Prices, particularly the note by the Chairperson of the committee, Abhijit Sen).

In his remarks, Sukhadeo Thorat pointed out that some vulnerable social groups suffered more in terms of malnutrition. If one factors in the gender dimension, women from these social groups are found to be suffering more. To address this, there is need to have a group specific policy. He also pointed out that the larger scheme of things makes the farmer take a decision on crop production based on profitability and not on nutrition. See his co-authored policy note on addressing the unequal burden of malnutrition. 

Ramesh Chand began by pointing out the weakening link between agriculture and nutrition and the paradox of higher production as also high prices and hunger existing concurrently. He raised the concerns of India being a global diabetic capital, of whether lower consumption of 1400/1600 kilocalorie by some people is because of absence of purchasing power or low requirement based on different homeostatic conditions, and of the fact that people continue to avoid purchasing nutri-cereals even in those regions/areas where their prices are lower than rice and wheat. The homeostatic argument reminded of PV Sukhatme's dissent note to the Report of the Expert Group on Estimation of Proportion and Number of Poor, pp.46-49.

Pravesh Sharma, a bureaucrat with the Small Farmers’ Agri-Business Consortium, made the last presentation where he outlined three things. First, he pointed out that the institutions of the 1970s that were meant to achieve a macro level food sufficiency are not appropriate to address livelihood and nutrition security. There is need to encourage producers organizations that embed technology credit and market and are also linked to pathways that foster food and nutrition security. Second, there should be diversification at the household or village level, which on the one hand will spread the risk of the small farmer, and on the other will also give the farmer household a healthy and varied nutrition basket. Third, there is a need to encourage the non-farm sector with good backward and forward linkages, as this would be of help for the small and marginal farmers, the local region as also the overall economy.

The day’s session ended with the remarks from Liz Drake, Department for International Development (DFID) and the hosts S Mahaendra Dev, Director, IGIDR and PK Joshi, In-charge, IFPRI, New Delhi. The takeaway from the exercise is that a small group will work towards formulating key policy suggestions that would be submitted to the Government of India. From IGIDR’s perspective, this has been a nice collaborative exercise with IFPRI and in New Delhi and one is looking forward to more such endeavours in the future.

(The author thanks Bhaskar Goswami for his suggestions on an earlier write-up.)

Also see my post, Food, Hunger and Ethics.

If a lie is told three times ...

I am writing this in response to a response on Aadhaar (UIDAI clarifies on Aadhaar), which itself was necessitated because of a note indicating Aadhaar: on a platform of myths.

If a lie is told three times, then it becomes the truth. However, if a lie is told umpteen times then ...

Faced with this dilemma, I cannot but agree with your observations Sharmaji. I agree that the Aadhaar or Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) cannot be compared with what happened in the UK and the USA. I also agree that India is capable of high-end technology. However, I have some questions from a layman’s perspective.

As the context of India is different from that of other countries, the context of Jharkhand is different from that of Delhi. Have we conducted some pilots or rather a series of pilots to understand the context and implications on service deliveries before agreeing on a mammoth project. If yes, then why is that not being discussed and deliberated?

Has the expenditure of so much money for UIDAI been discussed in the parliament? This is important because we were told about the supremacy of the parliament in the recent deliberations on 'anti-graft'.

It is said that Aadhaar will reduce graft. If that is so, then it might make sense to have a pilot for the beneficiaries of graft and come up with a system of tracing the unaccounted sources of wealth and penalizing them. Instead, I am told that it is targeting people who lost out because of apathy of functionaries through a public private partnership (PPP).

If the enrollment in Aadhaar is voluntary then how will a citizen not enrolled under Aadhaar get her entitlement for different services. If there is no recourse for that citizen, is the proposed system not unfair?

In a liberal democratic set-up, what is the value of privacy? Why is it different in India than it is in the UK or the USA?

If Aadhaar fails to reduce the ills then who will be accountable? Will it be the Prime Minister, the Parliament, the Planning Commission or the People of India?

For an earlier note of mine, see Aadhaar, Radiagate and Cablegate.