No end to plight of farmers as govt priorities look the other way

It has been raining in Punjab and Haryana, comprising the food bowl of the country, for the past few days. At a time when harvesting is already delayed because of strong winds and a heavy rainfall in the third week of March, the latest spell has added to the misery of wheat growers.

But what is more worrying is that the latest spell of rains has brought pictures of wheat bags lying in a pool of water in mandis. At the same time, there are pictures in newspapers of wheat bags lying drenched and soaked in water. Whether the bags are drenched or lying in a pool, these images are reminiscent of the rain damage to the harvested crop appearing in the media consistently for almost 30 years now.

As a young journalist with Indian Express, and that was some three decades back, I myself had written extensively about the rain damage to the harvested wheat crop. In fact, during that period, I had even got the quality of the rain-soaked wheat grain analysed in the Food Corporation of India (FCI) lab. The results were damming.

It showed that the wheat grains that I had picked up from a pool of water in the mandis were afflicted with toxic aflatoxins beyond the permissible limits. My report about the diseased grains had come as a shock for the Punjab government and had caused such uneasiness that the affected quantity was urgently dispatched.

I don't think the situation has markedly improved so as to reduce the emergence of toxic fungi in the rain-hit wheat. Except that the Ministry of Food and Civil Supplies is now asking the State governments not to store wheat in the open under what is called as CAP storage (meaning covered with tarpaulin) but many pictures appearing in the media today show that the practice of keeping grain bags in the open, exposed to the vagaries of the nature, is still being followed. Just because no journalist or a media house had made the effort to get quality checks done, we continue to live under the impression that all is well. But in reality, we are living with the same bad quality wheat for public stockholding.

This brings me to a pertinent question, one that needs to be asked again and again. If vikas(development)means investing Rs six lakh crore in five years for building highways, why is that vikas continues to elude the farm marketing infrastructure?

I have posed this question several times, and all I get to hear is a deafening silence. If we can spend Rs six lakh crore for building new roads or expanding the existing ones, why can't at least Rs one lakh crore, to begin with, be kept aside for upgrading the existing mandis and also for expanding the marketing infrastructure as per the country's needs. There are close to 7,000 regulated APMC mandis in India, and if a mandi has to be provided within a 5-km radius, India will need to expand the existing network to 42,000 mandis.

It's all a question of priorities.

But for a nation, which stands at 101st position in the Global Hunger Index spanning 116 countries, protecting every grain should be the top priority. More than the six-lane or eight-lane highways that we go on building, what is arguably more important is to provide adequate grain storage facilities so that not even a bag of grain is allowed to rot. And yet, every rainy season we see whole lot of grain bags drenched or soaked in the mandis just because we have been unable to provide covered area for storage for the wheat (and for that matter paddy) bags.

Neither has the interface that wheat grains have with rain drops changed in these years that we think the wheat grains lying in the rain water collecting in the mandis is not inflicting the grains with harmful aflatoxins. It is just that since nobody is reporting it we feel we don't have to worry about harmful fungi. If we close our eyes to an impending danger, the harm that it is likely to inflict doesn't go away. I thought the bureaucrats manning the public agencies engaged in collecting and storing the grains would know of the story of cat among the pigeons.

As per news reports, the Punjab government will be moving 30 to 35 lakh tonnes of wheat immediately to the consumer states and the rest would be stored for transfer later. Considering that wheat procurement is expected to be around 120 lakh tonnes this season, it should be clear that there would be a huge backlog that needs to be dispatched at the earliest. The daily off-take and dispatch hovers around 25 to 28 goods trains carrying anything between 60,000 and 70,000 tonnes of wheat.

I still don't understand why goods trains can't be moved at a faster speed, like that of Vande Bharat Express, to clear the overflowing stocks. After all, country's food security is of utmost importance.

Further, there are also indications that the Centre is now contemplating setting up godowns at the regional level, something the 'Grow More Food' campaign had envisaged way back in 1979. We are just 44 years late!

That speaks a lot about the priority that grain reserves have been accorded with. But what is irksome are heckles one gets from the trolls every time you talk of food wastage. Not aware that the Big Business has failed to enhance farmers income anywhere in the world, the right wing troll goes on with expressing the insidious influence of the corporate culture.

What is being missed out is that private sector can only supplement the efforts, but the true support has to come through public-sector investment for agriculture.

According the RBI, public sector investment in agriculture between 2011-12 and 2018-19 has been to the tune of 0.4 per cent of the GDP. Such a low investment in agriculture, which employs more than 47 per cent of the country's population, is in itself a pointer as to why farming continues to remain in distress.

(The author is a noted food policy analyst and an expert on issues related to the agriculture sector. He writes on food, agriculture and hunger)