Governments look only reluctantly into the future, and the five-year planning framework - short as it is when it comes to planning for the needs of even a generation - is followed only reluctantly. Politically and administratively, 12 months is the typical horizon, punctuated by a budget or by the end of a term.
This is not a practice that serves planning for India's agriculture and food needs. As earth systems scientists and climatologists are discovering with every passing season, changes in and to the ecosphere have impacts that carry over several human generations. So it is with the crops that we grow, for the effects of selections made even a century ago - favouring some cereals over others, choosing oilseeds instead of orchards - shape the way several generations feed themselves, and alter their very DNA.
Our governments, from the one which hesitantly ushered in the First Five Year Plan (1951-56) to the one that was replaced in May 2014 have not taken such a view for agriculture and food. This one, from the sixteenth Lok Sabha, can do so and thereby break from a past that has too often preferred to measure meals for us Indians without strengthening the ecological and cultural factors upon which our foods rest.
The growing of food staples is a complex activity easily mastered by every farming household (three out of every four rural households grow crops as cultivators or as agricultural labour). But the matter of learning what is grown in our 141.6 million hectares (arranged as immense mosaics within 60 agro-ecological sub-regions) is a lifelong exercise in studying complexity in motion.
None of this - not even in the smallest agro-ecological sub-region - can be described using the bland methods so typical of the agronomist or the macro-economist. This inertia must change, for to reduce such complexity to a group of banal indices is to disrespect 'prakruti'. When central and state governments began, some 20 years ago, to devote more effort to broadening what is called the services sector, the idea that a share of gross domestic product (GDP) could illustrate the widespread changes place took hold.
It has now been impressed upon two generations of post-graduate students that India's agriculture contributes no more than 14% to the country's GDP and that this portion is shrinking as others grow, and that agricultural GDP itself has been reluctant to grow. The numbers attached are large beyond the ken of our farming households, for in 2013-14, so the mathematics tells us, our agricultural GDP was nearly Rs 800,000 crore. Likewise the proud assertion that our farmers can feed us all well with 105 million tons of rice, 93 million tons of wheat, 40 million tons of what are unfairly called coarse cereals, 19 million tons of pulses and about 270 million tons of all that is collectively called horticulture (fruits, vegetables, root and tuber crops, aromatic and medicinal crops, spices and plantation crops, and flowers).
These form the 'big picture' that planners and politicians are comfortable with because to view any other picture of agriculture and food demands application and a willingness to consider consequences over generations. Yet it is in the post-reform era for the first time that there is a central government which possesses the cultural wherewithal to do so, and over the remainder of this term at least, these are areas that the NDA-BJP government must address:
1. That the food for our meals is secure in a manner of our choosing. From 2012 our agricultural establishment broadcast more loudly the scare that food security would be endangered if the country did not take immediate steps to ward off shortages in future (not true, for India has grown enough to supply every citizen with the minimum dietary requirement for at least the last decade, and the quantity of cereals harvested today will even provide for our population in 2030). In the hands of wily technocrats however, the future is presented as being affected by climate change (true) thus virtually guaranteeing lower production of food staples and lower yields (uncertain).
No matter, for the solutions presented take the form of greater industrialisation of agricultural production, the widespread use of bio-technology including genetic engineering, and extending greatly the reach of retail food - even the mid-day meals provided to children in schools. That is why this government must first halt such corporate coercion, and then reverse its effects which are already visible in rising rates of obesity especially amongst the urban youth. Food security can only have meaning when coupled with the strengthening of local foodways, for that is where the diversity of our diets and their cultural roots are preserved.
2. That our square meals are cheap without impoverishing the cultivator. Till here, central planners have prided themselves on finding a balance between a consumer price index for food that can be borne by our households, and an income for cultivators that ensures them a viable livelihood. From the First to the Tenth Five Year Plans, this was an effort that occupied some of the best minds in India. Thereafter however, the 'market' intervened, so did foreign direct investment, so did a burgeoning retail food processing industry, agricultural exports, the diktat of the World Trade Organisation, agricultural commodity exchanges and what is now called the food service industry.
This transformation of agriculture and food, over a generation, has all but overturned the stodgy curriculum of central planning for the previous half century, stodgy perhaps but reliable, and in government and public sector hands so that accountability could be scrutinised from Parliament to panchayat. Accustomed to only very modest changes (in keeping with what used to be called "the Hindu rate of growth" of the economy), indicators like gross capital formation in agriculture and agricultural credit have galloped over the last decade, prompting India's neo-liberal brigade to claim success.
Overwhelming as an annual set - agricultural credit was Rs 511,029 crore in 2011-12 and the target for 2013-14 was Rs Rs 700,000 - the provision of credit has in no way meant that our small and marginal farming households have money to run their small plots and feed themselves, nor has it meant that salaried urban consumers and those with informal jobs experience stable prices of food staples, for whereas the cost price of a vegetarian 'thali' has doubled in six years, informal sector and rural wages have not. This is the disconnect between market claims and true costs which the NDA-BJP government must set right.
3. That urban India abides by the limits of rural Bharat. The suspect seductions of large numbers are no substitute for agricultural truth. In June 2014, the total urban population of India crossed 400 million people (will be between 399 and 417 million, the 2001 Census recorded this population at 286 million). This enormous number is distributed amongst 4,041 statutory towns (a label that includes large cities and metros) and 3,894 census towns. When a class II town (population between 50,000 and 100,000) becomes a class I town (more than 100,000 residents) it has brought in migrants - many from tehsils and talukas - who no longer cultivate the land.
The counts in village India seem endless - there are 43,264 villages in Rajasthan, there are 25,372 in Assam, there are 40,959 in Maharashtra - but their farming households strive to feed themselves and sell their crop surplus. Not always successfully despite our two 'flagship' programmes, the National Food Security Mission and the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana, which are accompanied by a host of 'missions', on horticulture, oil seeds, sustainable agriculture, crop insurance, and so on. The proof of this patchy success lies not in the grand announcements of the growth of agricultural GDP and the inauguration of yet another 'mega food park' but in the trend of consumption of cereals and pulses.
Rural households in five large states allocate more than half their total monthly expenditure to food: Assam (61%), Bihar (59%), Jharkhand and West Bengal (58%), and Odisha (57%). If the proportion of cereals - rice, wheat, jowar, bajra, ragi - to total expenditure has fallen from about a quarter in 1993-94 to around 12% in 2011-12, this does not signal a success for liberalisation, 'reform' and the private sector. It means instead, that squeezed between rising food inflation and other competing costs (health, education, transport, communication), households are substituting fresh-cooked food staples with processed foods, losing the nutritional diversity their grand-parents enjoyed, and becoming culturally poorer with every noodle packet consumed.
The best answers which automatically lend themselves to the six-month old government at the centre are also those that are culturally sound and socially strengthening. It is not too late to step away from the obsession with yield at all costs and an irrational faith in technocentric fixes. Agro-ecological integration between our consuming centres and our talukas requires civic participation and the enhancement of our farmers' inherent ecological literacy - not its replacement by imported models. Such an approach, partial to our agricultural heritage and respectful of 'prakruti', will revitalise the new generation of 'annadaatas' that India needs.
The author is a UNESCO expert on intangible cultural heritage and studies agricultural transformation in India
