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kuku · 03-31-2008, 01:55 AM

Quote:

India headed for food shortages?
31 Mar 2008, 0001 hrs IST,Amit Bhattacharya,TNN

NEW DELHI: Surging foodgrain prices and worsening global supplies are now bringing the domestic food crisis to the boil. The crisis has been building up for some time - Indian farmers seem to have hit a dead end as their foodgrain yields are no longer going up. Grain output has been stagnating for over a decade and now there's a growing gap between supply and demand.

"Yes, we have a problem,'' admits Abhijit Sen, economist and Planning Commission member, "and it can be starkly put in the following way: roughly around 2004-05, our per capita foodgrain production was back to the 1970s level."

The figures tell a stark story. In 1979, at the height of the Green Revolution euphoria, per capita availability of cereals and pulses had gone up to 476.5 grams per day. The corresponding figure in 2006 was 444.5 grams per day, according to provisional government statistics.

In 2005, it was still lower at 422 grams. In the case of pulses, per capita net availability today is almost half of what it was five decades ago - 32.5 grams per day in 2006 compared with 60.7 grams per day in 1951.

The reason for this fall in the availability of food is that our farm output is just not growing. Since the mid-1990s, the output has hovered around 415 million tonne. "In the eight years between 1996 and 2004, when agriculture was growing at a low 2%, there was, in fact, zero growth in foodgrains," says Sen.

This stagnation is hitting us all now. For one, food prices are rising and the rise is likely to continue. For another, despite nudging up wheat production in the last two years, the government still needs to import wheat.

The problem is, it's not easy to import. "Last year, India wanted to import around five million tonnes of wheat but couldn't get more than three million tonnes because there isn't any surplus wheat going around in the world market," says food analyst Devender Sharma.

India headed for food shortages?-India-The Times of India

Wow man, i thought we will die from water shortage, nice to know we wont have any food either.

I must congratulate the Government on the remarkable feat of turning the huge wheat and rice surplus of 2000-2003 into what seems like a food grain shortage for the coming years.

I think the government should add this in the constitution, With out producing all the food requirements inside the nation, any government in power looses its majority.

Just think of this as the final death call for the struggling forests and crying rivers, we are going to rape them at a faster rate now.

Congratulations you guys in power, we are finally going to screw everything up.

Quote:

Era of cheap food over, say experts
31 Mar 2008, 0002 hrs IST,Amit Bhattacharya,TNN

NEW DELHI: With agencies like World Bank predicting that the international shortages will last at least two-three years, the food crisis is here to stay.

"The global food crunch only underlines the fact that India has to meet its needs itself. The current market prices make imports unviable," food analyst Devender Sharma said.

Experts say the alarm bells should have rung earlier but the record buffer stocks between 2001 and 2003 led to complacency. Such were our stocks that if the foodgrain sacks were to be lined up, they would have reached the moon.

"There was a feeling that our food problem had been solved. What remained to be done was just efficient distribution and poverty alleviation. With foreign exchange at a high, there were voices saying that importing food is fine, we should import from wherever food is being grown efficiently," says agricultural scientist M S Swaminathan, better known as the father of the Green Revolution of the 1960s.

Fortunes reversed following bad years in 2003 and 2005. By 2005, the stocks had dipped below the buffer level and have remained there since. On Friday, responding to growing rice prices, India banned exports of non-basmati rice by raising the minimum export price to $1,000/tonne and simultaneously reduced import duties to zero.

But there's little hope of cheap rice coming in, with major producers like Thailand and Vietnam too putting barriers on their rice exports. Rice prices, meanwhile, have almost doubled in the past three months.

"The era of cheap food is over," says Sharma. "As the current situation shows, there is no alternative to self-sufficiency in agriculture."

Era of cheap food over, say experts-India-The Times of India

Nice to know that even all the money we have stored up will be unable to buy any food grains, none are in the market to sell.