The issues surrounding the food security bill, which proposes to confer double benefits-procurement at a remunerative price for the public distribution system are dealt with. This is followed by a discussion on the contribution of usar (sodic land) development to food security in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
It was Mahatama Gandhi’s dream to see an India free from hunger. Today, India is going to operate the largest social protection programme against hunger in human history. Right to food through the National Food Security Bill has been recently introduced in Parliament. India is set to commit over 60 million tonnes of home grown rice, wheat and millets to fulfill the legal entitlements under the Food Security Act. It is important to realize the significance of the National Food Security Act in the light of the food conditions which prevailed in the past.
During 1960’s India was the largest importer of food aid, mainly under the PL-480 programme of the U.S. having imported over 10 million tonnes of wheat in 1966. In 1947-48 the country’s population was a little over 300 million about one-fourth of the current population. During this period hardly 10 per cent of the cultivated area had assured irrigation facilities and the average consumption of nitrogenous phosphatic and potassic nutrients was less than one kg per hectare. The average yield of rice and wheat was about 800 kg per hectare.
After Independence, during the first two Five Year Plans (1950-60) emphasis was placed on extending the area under irrigation and increasing fertilizer production and enhancing its consumption. Agricultural scientist did extensive experiments during first two five year plans to assess the response of two staple crops of rice and wheat to fertilizer application. The then varieties of both the crops cultivated had tall and thin straws and the crops lodged when even small quantities of fertilizers were applied. It showed the need for the varieties with short and stiff straw to get positive response from irrigation and fertilizer application.
During 1950’s a cross breeding programme started to cross japonica varieties of rice obtained from Japan with our indica rice varieties, but the programme lost its priority when the genes became available to develop semi-dwarf varieties of rice during 1960’s from Taiwan and International Rice Research Institute, Philippines.
In 1960’s Dr. Norman Borlaug was conducting dwarf wheat breeding programme in Mexico. His Mexican semi dwarf wheat suited the Indian climatic conditions. Dr. Borlaug himself visited India and tested the semi dwarf wheat variety at locations all over North India during the 1963 winter season. The multi-location trails revealed its suitability to India and a yield potential upto 4 to 5 tonnes per hectare.
With good political will and support, it spread on a large scale during 1968 with irrigation and fertilizer use. Indian farmers harvested to the tune of 17 million tonnes of wheat in comparison to earlier highest harvest of about 12 million tonnes in 1964.
In addition to the yield breakthrough in rice and wheat, hybrids of maize, jowar and bajra developed by Indian Scientists opened up good opportunity to increase food grain production. This whole programme was coined as the green revolution of India.
The technology is scale-neutral but not resource neutral. The green revolution was criticized by social activists and economists as high-yield technology which was environmentally harmful and bypassed small and marginal farmers.
While agricultural outputs were increased as a result of the green revolution, the energy input in the process has also increased at a greater rate, so that the ratio of crops produced to energy input has decreased over time. Green revolution techniques are heavily dependent on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, most of which are developed from fossil fuels, making agriculture increasingly reliant on petroleum products, although a vast potential exists for using organic matter and farmer friendly bacteria, fungi etc.
In India there is a large untapped production reservoir. Compared to China, whose average productivity of food grains is 5332 kg per hectare, India’s productivity stands at 1909 kg per hectare. But growing sufficient food will require us to make changes such as increasing productivity in areas depending on rain-fed agriculture, improving soil fertility management, expanding cropped area, investing in irrigation and reducing post-harvest losses. Increased agricultural productivity enables farmers to grow more food, which translates into better diets and where surplus can be marketed for higher cash income as well.
In agriculture, gene revolution popularized the use of conventional hybridization to increase yield by creating High Yielding Varieties. They were further hybridized with local varieties to create high yield strains resistant to local climate, diseases and pests. Both the government and industry have been pushing hybridization which has resulted in several of the indigenous varieties becoming extinct or threatened.
Because of low of profitability and uncontrolled and unintentional cross pollination and cross breeding (genetic pollution) formerly available huge gene pools of various indigenous varieties have collapsed causing wide spread genetic erosion and genetic pollution. This has resulted in loss of genetic diversity and biodiversity as a whole. Genetic erosion in agriculture is the loss of genes which is manifested in locally adopted genes of plants adapted to the natural environment in which they originated.
A large number of crop varieties have often dramatically reduced when commercial varieties (including GMO) are introduced into the traditional farming system.The main problem related to agro-eco system management is the general tendency towards genetic and ecological uniformity imposed by the development of modern agriculture.
The heartland of the green revolution, comprising Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh is now in an ecological crisis, as a result of over-exploitation of groundwater and spread of salinity, besides decline in per unit productivity. Loss of microbial activity in soil is turning one’s very fertile soil to unproductive soil. Decline in the health of soil resources is a major constraint to sustain agriculture growth in our otherwise growing economy.
Much of the inventions of the high-yielding varieties of seeds that launched the first green revolution took place under the auspices of publicly, funded research institutions but now the intellectual property rights of the genetically modified (GM) seeds are held by the Monsanto, Duponts, and Dows of the developed capitalist world, mainly U.S. agribusiness cooperations. They now want India’s agriculture research infrastructure, a number of organizations under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and State Agricultural Universities and Colleges to become business oriented and enter into public-private partnerships to carry out research in bio-technology that has the potential to be rapidly commercialized.
The Food Bill
The food bill entitles the poor to 7 kg of grain per person per month at prices of Rs 1, 2 and 3 per kg for coarse grain, wheat and rice respectively. Now, India’s food security bill would increase the food subsidy burden by Rs. 27,663 cr, from Rs. 67,310 cr to Rs 94,973 cr annually. The food grain to be set aside for the food bill would rise from 50 to 55 million tonnes to around 65 million tonnes.
The food security bill will confer double benefits-procurement at a remunerative price for the public distribution system. It will also stimulate production and consumers who need social support to ward off widespread and rising hunger, will be able to have economic access to the food needed for a productive life. There are many issues surrounding the food bill such as the definition of below poverty line households, number of bogus ration cards and number of fair price shops.
Until 1997, PDS food grains used to be provided to all families. Then the government divided the list into below poverty line (high subsidy) and above poverty line (lower subsidy), which has created another set of problems in the data base. Our public distribution system data base is full of holes and the food subsidy burden will increase if it is not corrected in time.
The need of the hour is to strengthen the PDS to ensure minimum leakages and efficient distribution. There is need for radical restructuring of procurement, storage and distribution system including -
- Procurement from all mandis, of all kind of food grains at remunerative prices to provide critical market support to the majority of small, dry land farmers of the country who are bearing the brunt of the agrarian crisis and so far has been denied public procurement support.
- Decentralize storage facilities may be at Block level.
- Creation of procurement-distribution zones with distribution of grains being from that procured within the zones, except in cases of shortfall for which grain can be acquired from neighbouring zones. This system of localized procurement storage and distribution will not only boost production across the country, help track corruption and provide consumers with timely availability of locally preferred grains. This will also substantially reduce the current high transportation cost.
Though the country has recorded highest level of food production, the food security atlas prepared by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation has highlighted that India has the highest number of undernourished children in the world and malnourished mothers coexist with high food production. Food insecurity hot spots highlight the regional disparities on one hand and also the nature of ecological unsustainability in the current mode and forms of production on the other.
By early nineties, as a result of record food production levels, a feeling of food security came in but the inherent instability in the system was felt very soon when despite record buffer stocks available in the godowns, reports of malnutrition and famine deaths rocked the country at the time of the drought during 1999-2000.
A 2010 Action Aid report warned that even in a fast growing economy like India nearly half the country’s children are malnourished.
It is evident from NSSO and NFHS surveys that the proportion of the population that is nutritionally deprived is significantly larger than the poor population for example the Planning Commission estimate of rural income poverty based on the National Sample Survey 2004-05 was 28 per cent, but the same survey indicated calorie deficiency (at less than 2,200 Kcal per day) among 70 per cent of the rural population. Therefore equating poverty and hunger is fallacious.
The bill interprets food security only as distribution of cereals and cooked meals and is completely silent on pulses, millets and oil. There is no commitment towards nutritional security.
There are chances that people will demand their entire entitlement in rice from the ration shops (since it carries the maximum subsidy) and then convert it into whatever consumption basket they desire in the open market. In most of the dry land areas people consume coarse grain and nutritious millets .People living in abject poverty in these areas will try to claim 35 kgs of rice from the ration shop for five members at Rs 105 and sale the same at Rs20-25 per kg for Rs 700 to Rs 875 in the open market and buy usual 25 kgs of coarse grains in the open market for Rs 250 (at Rs 10 per kg) and earned a handsome profit which would then be used to send a child to a nearby private school or partially buy liquor for self consumption.
The food bill promises cheap staples-mainly rice and wheat to more than two-third of Indians. The bill also addresses nutritional concerns of school going children and pregnant women. But it doe not guarantee nutrition to children who are not in schools, street children and the destitutes. Malnutrition and starvation require much more than a meal.
Mr Abhijit Sen, Member, Planning Commission says that the bill presumes the same level of hunger, food requirements and poverty across the country. “In all of this, we are forgetting what any food security notion should address, which is price stabilization. Price stabilization, therefore, is a mechanism to ensure quick transfer of food from a surplus region to a deficit region. Some regions may require more entitlements not because of poverty alone but simply because it may not be a major food growing state due to agro-climatic conditions. The bill does not leave much space for this.”
We should also be aware of the impact of climate change, which is real. Thousands of people living close to the sea coast may become refugees in future. There is need to take anticipatory action to check the impact of high temperature causing warmer and earlier growing seasons (will also increase crop susceptibility to insects, pests and virus which are expected to proliferate as a direct result of rising temperature), floods and other fallouts of climate change. Diversion of foodgrains is also very important in context of climate change because one or the other of these can be produced in adverse climatic conditions.
There are assumptions that small holdings are inherently unproductive and inefficient, but small holdings are bio-diversity based production systems and great conservatories of genetic resources. The food security depends mostly on the conservation and production of a variety of genetic resources and there is a role of small farms in ensuring this. Most of the traditional crop grown provides multiple securities:
- Provide varieties and nutritive food security throughout the year.
- Provide varieties of fodder and feed security for livestock.
- Enhance soil fertility.
- Allow for effective utilization of farmland through mixed cropping, inter cropping etc., unlike monoculture crops.
- Provide for economic securities in adverse climatic, environmental and market conditions.
- Restoration of ecological balance by retrieving local agricultural practices like the use of farmyard manure, vermicompost etc.
- Provides nutritionally superior, traditional and staple grains like jowar, bajra and millets instead of rice and wheat made available in the mainstream PDS which is alien to the poorer sections in the villages of rainfed areas.
A great scope exists for a better agro-ecosystem management for increasing productivity in dry land areas.
By 2050, foodgrain production would have to double to ensure food security to meet the growing population needs, which is expected to increase by almost 50 per cent.
Dr. M.S. Swaminathan feels that women must be declared head of the household for entitlement under the PDS and food security bill. They should be considered in-charge of food security in the family. That is important because women can ensure nutrition from newborns to the eldest.
Contribution of usar land development to the food security of Uttar Pradesh
Uttar Pradesh is home to a sixth of India’s population but much of its soil is high in sodium. Before the start of the sodic land reclamation project in the state, about 6.4 million hectares land was estimated to be wasteland out of which 1.5 million hectares was sodic land.
Usar land development in Uttar Pradesh
Image courtesy: Uttar Pradesh Bhumi Sudhar Nigam
In the post-independence period from 1949-1989, as many as nine different projects/schemes were launched to reclaim usar land but did not succeed due to various reasons. Though these reclamation schemes had been going on for 40 years, there are doubts as to whether they have truly been successful. Dr Bhumbla, a renowned soil scientist remarked that “efforts to reclaim these soils have been, to say, the least, halfhearted. The programme mainly seems to concentrate on selling amendments which will not lead to either improvement of alkali soils or improvement in production. Amendments, though important, should be recommended only if the other components of technology could be ensured. Application of amendments alone will not be of much use.”
During April 1985, a workshop on “Afforestation of usar wastelands” was organized by the Society for Promotion of Wastelands Development (SPWD) in collaboration with the Forest Department of Uttar Pradesh in Lucknow. This was the place where the idea emerged of enhancing socio-economic conditions of marginalized sections of the community through usar land reclaimation in collaboration with Sarvodya Ashram whose premises itself was located on a big patch of usar land.
Usar land problems were well understood through visiting farmers and observing soil characteristics of affected land. Those lands were such that nothing could grow on land; crops and grasses used to burn away. In technical terms, this was owing to the presence of high concentration of “exchangeable sodium” that damages the soil.
The science and technology of usar land reclamation is simple. Gypsum is added to neutralize the alkaline salts in the soil. Drains are built so that water does not stand in the fields; paddy and other crops are grown subsequently so that the soil, covered by vegetation, no longer heats up. It ensures that water evaporation from the surface of the soil is minimized. Normally six steps are followed: (i) setting up a system of irrigation (tube-well), (ii) leveling of land, (iii) spreading required quantity of gypsum and ploughing it into the soil, (iv) watering of the land till gypsum seeps uniformly into the field, (v) transplanting of paddy and (vi) cultivating the land continuously at least for three seasons. The technology is simple but managerially complex.
The work of usar land reclamation through Sarvodya Ashram expanded slowly and systematically. In the first year in 1986, it reclaimed 18 hectares in two adjacent villages with technical support from Central Soil Salinity Research Institute, Karnal.
In the next year, it reclaimed 10 hectares of land each in 12 districts, a total of 120 hectares. In the third year it reclaimed 10 hectares of land each in 25 districts, a total of 250 hectares. In all, over a six year period, over 4,600 hectares of land was covered benefiting 10,000 farmers.
During 1978, the Uttar Pradesh Land Development Corporation (UPLDC) had been set up with the mission of preserving the health and productivity of the land resources in a sustainable manner and to protect, rehabilitate and regenerate all potentially cultivable lands.
The World Bank aided project on sodic land reclamation started in 1993 and the task of implementation was assigned to the UPLDC .
In the first phase of reclamation during June 1993 to March 2001, the districts selected were Aligarh, Allahabad, Etah (Auriya), Etawah, Fatehpur, Mainpuri, Pratapgarh, Raebareli, Sultanpur and Hardoi. 68,414 hectares of sodic land was reclaimed out of which 36,026 hectares (about 53 per cent) land was brought under cultivation for the first time, increasing the cropping intensity in the reclaimed area from 37 to 230 percent.
Loans of Rs 208.59 lakhs and Rs 721.38 lakhs respectively were sanctioned and disbursed for pumping sets and raising crops. The market value of reclaimed sodic lands had increased. There was upward revision of upto 58 per cent of local wage rates and the project helped in generating 164.98 lakh man days, reduced migration and helped in raising farm income upto 96 per cent. There was a marked reduction in number of BPL families, from 80 per per cent before start of the project to 56 per cent at completion of the phase I of the project.
In the second phase of the project during April 1999 to September 2007 the districts selected were Aligarh, Allahabad, Azamgarh, Auriya, Etawah, Bulandsahar, Etah, Fatehpur, Hardoi, Hathras, Jaunpur, Kanpur, Kanpur Dehat, Mainpuri, Pratapgarh, Raebareli, Sultanpur and Unnao. There was a target of reclaiming 1,50,000 hectares of sodic land and as per latest report of UPLDC, under the second phase programme, 1,26,780 hectares have been reclaimed. The project was implemented in 3,591 villages benefiting 57 per cent marginal farmers, 36.4 per cent small farmers and 6.6 per cent large farmers.
Image courtesy: Uttar Pradesh Bhumi Sudhar Nigam
In second phase of the project, the key performance indicators were -
- Increased crop yields (paddy 3.5 tonnes/ha, wheat 2.7 tonnes/ha and increase in cropping intensity in reclaimed areas upto 200 per cent)
- Increased market value of land (4 times)
- Increased household income (upto Rs 12,000) of small and marginal farmers who constitute about 75 per cent of the beneficiaries.
- Establishment of improved drainage network in ten districts (which would also increase agriculture production in adjacent non-sodic areas)
- Upgrading of 700 km farm to market road and
- Increased community participation
The third phase of the project for the period from September 2009 to December 2015 has been sanctioned on June 30, 2009. The project is being implemented in Allahabad, Aligarh, Auriaya, Azamgarh, Barabanki, Etah, Etawah, Farukkhabad, Fatehpur, Firozabad, Ghazipur, Hardoi, Jaunpur, Kannauj, Kanpur Dehat, Kanpur Nagar, Kaushambi, Lucknow, Mainpuri, Pratapgarh, Raebareli, Sant Ravidas Nagar, Sitapur, Sultanpur and Unnao districts. The third phase of the project aims to reclaim 1, 30,000 ha of predominantly barren and low productivity sodic lands. Under this project about 3.25 lakh farmers would be benefited and 85 per cent of beneficiaries would be small and marginal farmers besides 65 per cent belonging to BPL families. By focusing on the reclamation of land for the poorest section of farmers the project is expected to contribute significantly to poverty alleviation and improved food/nutrition security in the project areas.
The World Bank project being implemented through UPLDC has already helped reclaim about 2,00,000 hectares of unproductive sodic land. The sodic land reclamation intervention has been made in almost 50 per cent of the districts of Uttar Pradesh which comes in the 100 most backwards districts of India prepared in 1997 by a Committee of the Government of India’s Ministry of Rural Areas and Employment.
The project has been very successful in raising the income of poor people in Uttar Pradesh according to Roberto Zagha, World Bank Country Director for India. “More than 4,25,000 poor families have benefitted so far, experiencing three-to six fold increase in crop yields. The new project (third phase) is expected to directly benefit over 3,25,000 farm families.”
Beyond reclaiming sodic lands for sustainable agricultural use, the project also aims to boost agricultural productivity through introducing new technology, better cultivation practices and more effective provision of key support services.
The project has helped in sustainable reclamation of sodic land and prevention of further increase in sodicity, and has definitely contributed in developing food security. On farm development of sodic lands with provision of assured irrigation and reclamation through crop production on sustainable basis would definitely add to farmer’s food basket.
As per UPLDC reports, after the completion of first phase project, the annual incremental production of wheat and paddy from reclaimed land was estimated at 3.10 million tonnes per annum worth Rs. 180 million.
It is assumed that small holdings are inherently unproductive and inefficient. The project has shown that even small holdings with problematic soils through proper management can help in providing food security besides socio-economic empowerment of people in the villages.
References
Food as people’s right, M.S. Swaminathan, The Hindu, January 3, 2012
Food Security Bill is somewhat defective, The Times of India, January6, 2012
Experts voice apprehension over Food Security, The Business Line, Coimbatore, January 9, 2012.
Food Security Bill: Simpler the Better, EPW December 24, 2011.
Cumbersome Food Bill could crumble under own weight, Zia Haq, The Hindu, December 24, 2011
All for Food Security, EPW, December 11, 2010.
The political economy of hunger in 21st Century India, Jayati Ghosh, EPW October 30,2010.
Right to food: Right to Food Campaign, EPW, August 2011.
Sustainable land use management and food and energy security, Juned Khan Komal, Jagdish K Purohit and Viren Lobo, SPWD, New Delhi
[This article has appeared in Wastelands News, Vol. XXIV, No. 4 October-December, 2011, a quarterly newsletter of Society for Promotion of Wastelands Development, New Delhi]
/articles/issue-food-security-india-case-sodic-land-reclamation-uttar-pradesh-preserve-health-and