Karnataka’s newly-elected Congress chief minister Siddaramaiah was running from pillar to post to get more rice to fulfil the ambitious ‘guarantee’ promised to state residents in the Congress manifesto. The manifesto had promised to increase the quota of free rice in the public distribution system from 5 kilos to 10 kilos per head per month.
His ambition to do so was scuttled by the refusal of the Union government to give him the rice under the Open Market Sale Scheme (OMSS) of the Food Corporation of India, though FCI had initially agreed to give him the rice.
Karnataka needs to bridge the gap of 2.28 lakh tonne per month of grains to fulfil the guarantee. A notification issued by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution on June 13, 2023, decided not to issue wheat and rice to state governments under the OMSS. This is being viewed as revenge politics by the Bharatiya Janata Party for having lost the Karnataka election miserably. Another reason why the Union government is unwilling to sell rice to states is because approximately 86% of India’s fuel needs are said to be met by imports. Hence to reduce this dependence on imports, the government is pushing for ethanol production from rice for blending it with petrol.
Is it not a gross irony that for ethanol production, the government has fixed the price of rice at Rs 2,000 per quintal, whereas it is sold at the rate of Rs 3,400 per quintal to state governments to meet the food security of their citizens?
And the amount of rice sold for ethanol production is reportedly six times higher than that sold to all the states.
Are the needs of cars for fuel to be prioritised over food for the hungry and malnourished millions of the country?
However, this refusal by the Union government has made many in Karnataka question whether buying more rice produced by distant states should be the way forward. Instead, say agriculture experts such as Prakash Kammardi, former chairperson of the Karnataka Agriculture Prices Commission (KAPC), the state government should explore procurement of Ragi and Jowar locally by paying the minimum support price (MSP) to Karnataka’s farmers instead of importing rice from other states.
A man holding PDS rice. Photo: Adithyan P.C.
This will put the Rs. 10,000 crore estimated for importing rice from outside in the hands of Karnataka’s farmers instead. The recent statement by CM Siddaramaiah himself that only 25% of the rural population of Karnataka eats rice and that 75% of them eat Ragi and Jowar and that this 75% eats rice only on festival days, has fuelled efforts to rethink the whole strategy. Further, growing millets consumes very little water and is hence an environment friendly measure to adopt in view of the current water crisis.
In fact, announcements that incentives will be provided to increase production of Ragi and Jowar by Karnataka’s farmers to give these grains through the PDS have been made for more than a decade without concrete action being taken about it. The government and Kammardi have both pointed out that the government may not be able to procure 2.28 lakh tonnes a month of Ragi and Jowar immediately as their current supply is low.
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Shockingly, the Deccan Herald reported on July 7 that the area under millets in Karnataka has actually been going down over the years. Data from the agriculture department shows that the area under millets has declined from 21 lakh hectares (ha) in 2017-18 to 16 lakh ha in 2022-23.
Hence, production has come down from 32 lakh tonnes to 21 lakh tonnes. This, when the world is celebrating the International Year of Millets this year.
The main reasons cited for the reduced production of millets are inadequate procurement and distribution of the crop by the government, lack of processing and marketing facilities, and unstable prices. Though there is a provision in the National Food Security Act (NFSA) to bring millets under the PDS, this provision has hardly been made use of. So, there is great potential to increase the area under millets in Karnataka. If only the government makes known its desire to procure millets at the MSP, farmers will increase their production. And the government may be able to procure the full required amount by the end of five years.
The government will have to give the farmers Rs 50 per kilo for Ragi and Rs. 43 per kilo for Jowar (the MSP as per the M.S. Swaminathan Committee formula of cost of inputs plus 50%), as per a detailed study by the KAPC in 2014, according to Kammardi.
This price would not be very much more than what the government would have to pay for rice procured from the Union, as the real economic cost of this rice would be Rs 43 per kilo, plus the cost of transportation, according to Kammardi. Also, if 10 kilo of rice is given to each individual who does not really eat it, this would only aggravate the issue of PDS rice being sold in the black market.
If a similar incentive is provided to north Karnataka farmers with the assurance that MSP will be paid for toor and other dals and oilseeds to be distributed through the PDS along with the Ragi and Jowar, these measures would lead to the total development of Karnataka’s farmers, who are in distress currently.
A farmer throws away tomatoes he grew in Maharashtra’s Karad, after prices crashed because of rumours around the spread of coronavirus. Photo: PTI
Further, the frequent upheavals in the prices of agriculture products are a great source of distress to farmers.
Just a few weeks ago, farmers were throwing the tomatoes they had grown on the road as they failed to get remunerative prices for them. But now, there has been a sudden surge in the prices of tomatoes, which has reached prices of Rs. 130 per kilo in many places. The same situation prevails in the price of toor dal, the mainstay source of protein for most families, which has reportedly increased by 7.8% to Rs. 130.75 per kilo.
The government putting stock limits on urad and toor dal to prevent hoarding seems to have had hardly any effect to bring down the price rise of dals. But the problem is that the rise in market prices of these food items hardly benefits farmers, most of it going to the pockets of middlemen.
Also Read: Karnataka Becomes an Accidental Pioneer of Cash Transfers for Food
Study recommends storage
A detailed study conducted by the Indian Institute of Plantation Management in collaboration with the KAPC in September 2019, titled, ‘Group Approach on Marketing of Farm Commodities: A Roadmap…’, says that an effective way of stabilising prices of food products, especially of perishables such as fruits and vegetables, is to increase the storage facilities for them so that farmers are able to store them safely until markets become more benign.
The study recommends collectivisation of small and marginal farmers through Farmer-Producer Companies (FPCs) or Farmer-Producer Organisations (FPOs) which will enable them to invest jointly in machinery, common collection centres, storage godowns, transportation, marketing, value addition through food processing, etc., to achieve greater bargaining power, economies of scale, and avoid steep fall in prices. While some incentives are proposed in Karnataka’s budget towards this, much more needs to be done.
Procuring millets, dals, milk, eggs, fruits and vegetables locally from farmers’ cooperatives and distributing these items through the PDS and to Anganwadis and schools will reduce the malnutrition levels. Representative image credit: Asian Development Bank/Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Procuring millets, dals, milk, eggs, fruits and vegetables locally from farmers’ cooperatives and distributing these items through the PDS and to Anganwadis and schools will reduce the malnutrition levels across Karnataka, which is currently languishing behind other southern states in nutrition levels. The Hyderabad-based National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau has recommended that a healthy person requires 10 kilo of food grains a month. This has been the ask of the Right to Food Campaign as well, which has demanded that in addition to 10 kilo food grains, 1.5 kilo of dal and 800 gram of oil per person per month should be provided through the PDS. Rough estimates suggest that farmers will get 45% more for their toor dal and oil seeds if government procures it at MSP.
A survey in March 2023 of Karnataka’s most impoverished district, Yadgir, by the Auro Society for Public Nutrition, Public Health and Public Policy, revealed that 64% of children under the age of three were either stunted, wasted or underweight.
Though Karnataka is supposed to be a well-developed state, poverty and malnutrition are a major challenge in at least 10 districts, says the survey result. The survey report has suggested that the government should focus on agricultural interventions to increase farm productivity and thereby lift at least 20% of the population above poverty level in Yadgir, Raichur and Kalaburagi. The findings of the report only confirm that investing in the farmers of North Karnataka is the way forward for removing their poverty and reversing the neglect of the North Karnataka region by successive governments.
Karnataka itself will prosper as the additional money in the hands of its farmers will boost local economies instead of going to the farmers of other states. Is this not a golden opportunity for the new Congress government to show the Union government that Karnataka will increase the income of Karnataka’s farmers substantially before its five-year term ends? This is the best ‘guarantee’ that the Congress government can assure to Kannadigas. This would be a sure-fire strategy for the Congress government to win the election again in 2028, since the Union government has failed miserably in fulfilling the promise to double farmers’ incomes that it made in 2014 in its manifesto.
Kathyayini Chamaraj is the Executive Trustee of CIVIC-Bangalore and an associate of the Right to Food Campaign.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
