Why Are People Going Hungry in India Despite a Massive Grain Surplus?
- Details
- Published on Monday, 18 January 2021 17:48
- Written by editor
Why Are People Going Hungry in India Despite a Massive Grain Surplus?
Prabhat Patnaik
The Indian intelligentsia has an incredible propensity to swallow the self-serving arguments of metropolitan capitalism that are typically supposed to constitute ‘economic wisdom’, and nowhere is this more evident than in the case of India’s food economy. There are a plethora of center-page articles in newspapers these days suggesting that Indian kisans (farmers) should move away from producing food grains toward other crops, which is actually a demand that metropolitan countries have been making for quite some time. These countries have a surplus of food grains, and so they want India to import food grains... from them to meet the excess of India’s domestic demand over domestic production. This would take the country back to the pre-Green Revolution days, and now members of the Indian intelligentsia are echoing, in various ways, this metropolitan demand to diversify away from food grains.
One of their arguments is that the kisans from the states of Punjab and Haryana are caught in a “cereal trap” where they keep producing cereals that are not very profitable for them and of which the country now has a surplus because they are lured by the provision of a minimum support price (MSP) that reduces their risk. Sometimes the argument is put differently: the Punjab and Haryana kisans have to move away from MSP-supported activities to other more lucrative ones, for which Modi, perhaps precipitately, is providing a way through his three agriculture laws.
This entire position, apart from echoing the demand of advanced countries, and supporting the Modi government implicitly or explicitly, also shows the same contempt for kisans as shown by the government; these intellectuals are of the view that a bunch of ignoramuses cannot see what is good for them, but Modi can. But let us ignore the motives and prejudices of these intellectuals and just examine their argument.
Continue reading
Follow the Socialist Project on Social Media:
The Bullet is produced by the Socialist Project. Readers are encouraged to distribute widely. Comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome. Write to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Bullet archive is available at r0
Forward to a friend: this link
r39
powered by phpList