Food Self-Sufficiency and Food Security at the National and Local Level In India.

Abstract

The Indian planners, right from the beginning, realized the need to attain self-sufficiency in food grains as one of the important goals of planning. The government realized that food surplus countries used their food-surplus as a weapon to force food deficit countries to submit to their dictates. Food security implies access by all people at all times to sufficient of food to lead an active and healthy life. P.V. Srinivasan states that food security requires not just adequate supply of food at the aggregate level but also enough purchasing capacity with the individual/household to demand adequate levels of food. The Ninth Plan discussed the problem of food security at national and at the household level. The Planning Commission states: “An approach to national food security, which relies largely on domestic production of food needed for consumption as well as for building buffer stocks, can be described as a strategy of self-sufficiency.” This strategy emphasized the extension of irrigation facilities and later in the sixties adopted seed-water-fertilizer technology popularly known as Green Revolution. As a consequence of these concerted efforts, India was able to avert famines and acute food scarcities, yet it has not been able to provide food “needed for an active and healthy life” to its population. At the household level, food security implies having physical and economic access to food articles that are adequate in terms of quantity, quality and affordability. This raises the question of prices of food articles and the purchasing power in the hand of population. To help the poor sections, the government introduced the Public Distribution System (PDS) and adopted dual price mechanism. At the PDS outlet, the issue price of food articles was kept lower than the market price to enable the poor to purchase subsidized food, but due to political pressure, the government adopted a universal PDS, rather than a targeted PDS focused on the poor.