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India Facing Serious Food Crisis
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.
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.
The alarm bells should have rung earlier but the record buffer stocks between 2001 and 2003 led to complacency. Such were the stocks then that if the foodgrain bags had been stacked up, they would have reached the moon.
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