With the supply crunch in basic commodities (especially wheat) in the international market due to the Russia-Ukraine war since the beginning of the year, several countries and agencies like the IMF have, in recent months, been repeatedly urging India not to impose strict export restrictions on commodities like wheat and sugar. To rein in inflation due to supply disruptions, as many as 30 countries have imposed export restrictions and India too has resorted to this strategy. “I do have an appreciation for the fact that India needs to feed nearly 1.35 billion people and I do have appreciation for the heat wave that has reduced agricultural productivity, but I would beg India to reconsider as soon as possible because the more countries step into export restrictions, the more others would be tempted to do so and we would end up as a global community less equipped to deal with the crisis,” Kristalina Georgieva, IMF MD had commented around the end of May. While the comment certainly underlined a grave global situation, to an Indian it could well have delivered a moment of pride. For a country that, especially in the first two decades after its independence, could barely feed its people, Kristalina’s comment confirmed a dramatic change in scene. Considering the equation then and now, it does indeed appear to be a tale of two extremes, as an analyst points out. From acute shortage to self-sufficiency to a surplus situation in many commodities, the Indian agriculture journey has been quite a story notwithstanding the fact that the reforms of the 1990s gave preference to services and manufacturing. Even the recent attempts to liberalise the farm sector by way of new legislative laws failed to take off, with vehement protests by some farmers’ associations. There have been strong undercurrents of both quantitative and qualitative growth, probably best exemplified in the tremendous growth of the horticulture sector which is now bigger than foodgrain. The future seems promising, with the prospect of technology delivering major changes in production dynamics. However, some structural challenges still remain to be addressed and a much bigger issue would be to save the sector from the increasing vagaries of climate change. Reaching a commendable base Nobody even talks about this today but in India’s recent history, food security has been a major challenge. Between the 18th and the early 20th century, famines used to be a usual occurrence, as the main occupation – agriculture – was mostly dependent on rainfall. Historical accounts suggest that the country suffered nearly a dozen large scale famines in the stated period, resulting in millions of deaths. “There have been several periods in Indian history, when food shortages had a serious impact on civilization. In pre-independent India, agriculture had been heavily dependent on climate. Unfavourable monsoons, particularly the southwest monsoon, caused droughts and crop failure. Such droughts, sometimes in consecutive years, led to famines. Famines in India resulted in more than 30 million deaths over the course of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries,” underlines a recently published report by the Indian Council of Agriculture (ICAR).
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It is the toiling work of millions of farmers that transformed India from a food deficit country to a food surplus nation
