The Hindu Business Line : A food revolution is apace

Dedicated to `smallholders in South Asia who face a challenge, and an opportunity, from diversifying diets and consolidating food and retail industries' is Agricultural Diversification and Smallholders in South Asia, even as Handbook of Agriculture looks at problems land has been landed in, and Creative Management and Development offers some down-to-earth take on aspects of farming.

If you were to take the dining table on a time machine ride, you would perhaps notice the changes that have happened to our food practices. "One striking change is the declining demand for cereals and pulses in food basket and growing demand for high-value food (such as fruits, vegetables, milk, meat, eggs and fish) and processed commodities," writes Joachim von Braun, Director-General, International Food Policy Research Institute, US, in his foreword to Agricultural Diversification and Smallholders in South Asia.

The annual per capita consumption of cereals fell by almost 4 per cent in the final decade of the last century, and pulses dropped more than four times that much, in the region under study. Fish and fruits registered the maximum gains of more than 30 per cent during 1990-2000 compared to the decade earlier. Milk and eggs were up nearly 25 per cent. Consumption of edible oils rose by a fifth; vegetables and tubers grew by 12 per cent.

Food Swings: These are attributed to urbanisation, international trade reforms, and rising per capita income. Interestingly, the phenomenon is happening across income brackets. According to NSSO (the National Sample Survey Organisation) estimates, there was a 10 per cent fall in the per capita consumption of cereals among people BPL (below poverty line), even as `a silent revolution' is under way: "Their consumption of milk increased by 30 per cent; of vegetables by 50 per cent; of meat, eggs and fish by 100 per cent, and of fruits by 163 per cent over the same period."

A shift to high-value food promises rise in income and employment opportunities for producers; but smallholders face many problems. More than 80 per cent of farms in India measure less than two hectares, and these account for 36 per cent of cultivated area.

In Nepal, 93 per cent holdings are small, and these constitute about 70 per cent of operated area. And in Bangladesh, `87 per cent of farms operating in 43 per cent of area are of less than one hectare.' Pakistan, however, presents a contrast: 58 per cent of farms are of less than 2 hectares and these cover 16 per cent of farm area; `farms of more than 10 hectares occupy 37 per cent of total farm area'.

Many hurdles: Hurdles that stand between smallholders and high-value foray are many: `High transaction costs per unit of output due to small surpluses; low risk bearing capacity, low access to finance, technology and information; and low capacity to implement food-safety measures.' Empathetically, therefore, the book, edited by P. K. Joshi, Ashok Gulati, and Ralph Cummings Jr., from Academic Foundation (www.academicfoundation.com), is dedicated to `smallholders in South Asia who face a challenge, and an opportunity, from diversifying diets and consolidating food and retail industries'.

High-value commodities, unlike foodgrains, are perishable; they have a shorter shelf life that is `measured in days or perhaps weeks rather than months and years'. They require `fast-moving institutions and infrastructure (for example, improved highways, modern airports, cold chains) to ready markets and processing'. To mitigate the risk of the farmer, new forms of cooperatives, supermarkets and contract farming have sprung up.

The book cites, as example of how ICT (information and communication technology) is changing the lives of farmers, the e-Choupal initiative of ITC's International Business Division, launched in June 2000. It reaches out to `more than 3.5 million farmers growing a range of crops — soyabean, coffee, wheat, rice, pulses, shrimp — in over 31,000 villages through 5,200 kiosks across six States viz. Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan,' informs www.echoupal.com.

By shifting to e-Choupal, farmers' production and marketing costs have fallen by almost two-thirds, while cost savings for processing companies work out to 36 per cent, states the book.

To assist agriculture diversification, we need to reprioritise our R&D (research and development) portfolio, demand the editors. Our R&D spend is at less than 0.5 per cent of agricultural GDP (gross domestic product); most of the developing countries spend about 1 per cent. Agriculture credit is another area that merits attention, because farmers rely on `informal sources of finance' for almost a half of their requirements, and the rates of interest are two to three times of what commercial banks offer.

High-value read!

Contemporary agri-issues

For the agro-inclined, here is Handbook of Agriculture, edited by Shovan Ray, from Oxford (www.oup.com), to throw light on `key issues in Indian agriculture today'. Ray opens with a chapter on economic policy. "The high expenditure incurred under the title of subsidies mostly goes to finance the inefficiencies of the fertiliser industries and other government departments," he writes.

An essay on `Agriculture and environment' mentions grim numbers: Current level of total land degradation in the country is nearly Rs 300 billion annually; that is, an economic loss of about Rs 1,500 per hectare. Soil erosion, the worst form of land degradation, robs us of more than 5,000 million tonnes of soil, or 16 tonnes per hectare, every year, "with about 29 per cent being permanently lost to sea and another 9 per cent deposited into major reservoirs reducing their capacity by 1-2 per cent annually".

Poverty Profile: Profile of poverty, attempted in the book, shows that the landless and marginal farmers are among the poorest families. "Households with less than one hectare have more than the average incidence of poverty." Irrigation seems to halve poverty: "In most states households with access to irrigation have only about half the poverty incidence compared to households without such access."

States that are not self-sufficient in food are calorie deficient, one learns in a chapter on food security. "The high cost of transporting grain from distant surplus regions leads to greater levels of retail prices in these regions." Improvements in rural infrastructure and reduction in transaction costs can bring down food prices in deficit regions, suggests the Handbook.

"Is the Indian village vanishing?" asks the final chapter. "The ambition to leave the village for a better life outside it, or to stay in the village but not to work on land, is too pronounced to be overlooked."

A striking feature is the growth of RNFE or rural non-farm employment. A solemn observation is that though the Indian village has not vanished, it is vanishing `as an agricultural entity, or even as an imagined rural arcadia.'

Handy compilation about problems we have landed our land in.

`Weed' in need

Crops destroyed with poisons. How shocking! Vandana Shiva gives an extreme example: `Bathua, an important green leafy vegetable, with a very high nutritive value and rich in Vitamin A, which grows as an associate of wheat.'

Since bathua becomes a major competitor to wheat when intensive chemical fertiliser is used, bathua was declared a `weed' and killed with herbicides, narrates Shiva in her essay `Monocultures of the mind' included in Creative Management and Development (third edition) edited by Jane Henry from Sage (www.sagepublications.com). "Forty thousand children in India go blind each year from lack of Vitamin A, and herbicides contribute to this tragedy by destroying the freely available sources of Vitamin A. Thousands of rural women who make their living by basket and mat-making, with wild reeds and grasses, are also losing their livelihoods... "

Shiva is of the view that the Green Revolution has displaced entire crops in the Third World. What are called `marginal crops' or `coarse grains' are nature's most productive crops in terms of nutrition, she points out. "That is why women in Garhwal continue to cultivate mandua and women in Karnataka cultivate ragi in spite of all attempts by state policy to shift to cash crops and commercial foodgrains, to which all financial incentives of agricultural `development' are tied... "

Down-to-earth reads for the fisc end week.

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