ood security as defined by the World Development Report 1986 is a situation of “access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life”.
The FAO (1983) defined food security as “ensuring that all people at all times have both physical and economic access to the basic food they need”. As the world population reaches a stage of more than six billion, to which India contributes one billion, the question regarding the future availability of food for all assumes some importance.
The issues pertaining to population explosion and food security was raised by T.R. Malthus for the first time in 1798. Malthus postulated that population tends to increase by a geometric ratio (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 ) but food production grows by arithmetic ratio (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ). Although the idea was over-simplistic, it is not completely irrelevant.
The gravity of the situation of food security in India can be better understood by a study conducted by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) which reveals that India faces major challenges on two fronts vis-a-vis food security, i.e., population explosion which has exceeded agricultural growth rate in the post-independence period and the unequal distribution of food resources due to the abysmally low purchasing power of about thirty-five million of the country’s population.
Even if the food is equally distributed, in order to counter the negative impact of population explosion, the agricultural growth rate has to be maintained at a steady 4.5 per cent from 1997 to 2002 to sustain an overall economic growth of 7 per cent. In the circumstances, it is alarming that the average size of operational holdings has come down to less than 1.6 hectare in 1990-91 from 2.3 hectare in 1970-71.
The marginal and the small holdings together constitute over 78 per cent of the total. Given the continued fragmentation of land holdings the technology we are adopting can never be scale neutral.
The problem of food security is compounded by our increasing tendency to depend on a narrow mix of food crops. Thus, the food production systems have become vulnerable to biotic and abiotic stresses. The cultivators in the early periods of civilisation managed such stresses by adopting sustainable agronomic practices like shifting cultivation, mixed cropping, crop rotations and so on.
An instance of the pressure of population making a once-beneficial practice harmful is to be seen in shifting cultivation. As more people require more food and more land, the practice of leaving land fallow long enough to recover is no more practicable, thus rendering shifting cultivation more harmful than useful.
ndependent India, by and large, has been able to avoid large scale deaths caused by famines, by resorting to a multipronged strategy comprising increased food production, augmentation of grain reserves, maintenance of a public distribution system (PDS) and generation of employment. However, hunger caused by under-nutrition continues to be endemic. The protein-energy malnutrition (PEM) in our country is abnormally high in most of the households.
The study done by the National Council for Agricultural and Economic Research (NCAER) suggests that about 80 per cent of India’s rural population and 70 per cent of urban population thrive on less than the recommended levels of calories. It is estimated that by 2025 almost 50 per cent of the Indian population will be residing in urban areas which calls for a substantial shift in the patterns of food cultivation. Since the national average yield of most of the crops is staggeringly low, it is necessary that we bridge the gap between the actual and potential yield through technology transfer so as to ensure food for all.
While it was physical access to food which was important during the first three decades after independence, nowadays the economic access to food has been considered to be more important because of our endemic poverty and the population explosion. By the end of the Ninth Plan India would require about 215 million tonnes of food-grains. But for keeping a food reserve for contingency purposes and for achieving a consistent export target of 5 million tonnes by 2002 AD the demand for food-grains would further grow to 230 million tonnes.
Most of the quantitative and qualitative indicators of food security at the household level are linked to the poverty issue. As Amartya Sen (1981) points out, the poor do not have adequate means or entitlements to secure food, even when food is locally or regionally available. It is interesting to note that merely increase in income does not necessarily ensure improved nutritional status. Access to gainful employment, suitable technologies and other productive resources are important factors influencing under-nutrition.
