By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 23 (IPS) - Despite weathering the worst drought in living memory, India has granaries overflowing with foodgrain, forcing a worried government to get rid of the surplus.
Earlier this month, the Minister for Consumer Affairs, Shanta Kumar, announced plans to auction off five million tonnes of surplus wheat because the godowns of the government's Food Corporation of India (FCI) are bursting at the seams.
Kumar said the FCI had much more than the 14 million tonnes of grain reserve it needs for supplying a countrywide network of subsidised retail outlets that form the backbone of the world's largest state-run food security operation.
Kumar's ministry supervises the Public Distribution System (PDS) as the food security operation is known, that is fed by the FCI which in turn buys from Indian farms.
India has had ever bigger farm harvests every year in the past 12 years. Last year's farm produce of over 200 million tonnes has saddled the foodgrain buffer stocks with an embarrassing excess of 25 million tonnes.
But critics say that the abundance is misleading. A key reason for the glut is that the poor are too poor to buy even the subsidised food. A hike earlier this year in the price of PDS grain has made it more unaffordable for millions of Indians.
India's farm abundance is based on another paradox. Despite the much acclaimed Green Revolution that is said to have banished famines from India, the bumper harvests are the work of tens of millions of tillers who did not gain from the Green Revolution.
According to Bruno Dorin, a French agronomist and director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Humanities, it is the work of these subsistence farmers that it generating the surpluses.
"It is a fact that even several decades after the launch of the Green revolution, Indian agriculture remains, for the most part subsistence agriculture," says Dorin. Critics have long noted that the farming revolution is confined to a limited part of the country and mainly two crops -- rice and wheat.
According to official statistics, the two main Green Revolution states of Punjab and Haryana together produced less than 18 million of the 203.04 million tonnes of foodgrain harvest in the 1999-2000 farming season.
A much bigger contribution -- some 57 million tonnes -- came from Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. But unlike the Punjab and Haryana farmers, the bulk of tillers in these states work on marginal land holdings.
While marginal tillers make up less than a third of farmers in Punjab and Haryana, more than two-thirds of the over 20 million farm holdings in Uttar Pradesh that produced nearly 20 million tonnes of grain, are marginal.
Nearly three-fourths of the farmers in the eastern border state of West Bengal that produced more than seven million tonnes of grain, operate marginal holdings.
Despite producing the bulk of grain, farmers in these states are denied their share of massive government subsidies for farming. It has been estimated that a Punjab farmer gets 188 U.S. dollars in subsidies every year, while a farmer in Orissa gets just 14 dollars.
A study Dorin has found that fertilisers, irrigation and electricity account for most subsidies. India's Planning Commission has calculated that agriculture uses a third of electricity sold by state utilities, but generates a mere five percent of earnings of the power utilities from electricity sales.
On the other hand, there is evidence to show that much electricity meant for famers is actually diverted to industrial and other consumers.
For example, according to government records, farms in southern Karnataka state used nine billion units of electricity in 1997-1998. But estimates by the International Energy Initiative and Chase Manhattan Bank, found that only six billion units of electricity actually reached the farms.
To add to the paradoxes are new findings that show Indian agriculture to be uncompetitive, a situation that can only worsen as the country lifts import restrictions and exposes its farmers to global competition.
A liberal export-import policy announced in April has dismantled decades of protectionism in the food sector with experts warning that this could hurt local farmers because of heavy farm subsidies in western countries.
According to famed Indian farm scientist and food security expert, M.S. Swaminathan, India's advantage of cheap labour is being nullified by the cost of producing food in this country because of poor levels of automation.
"We produce 75 million tonnes of milk providing livelihoods for 80 million women who own a buffalo or two cows. For the same output the West would deploy 100,000 people," says Swaminathan.:
