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`Government claim on food surplus a myth'

Special Correspondent

Country fast heading for an acute food shortage: Vandana Shiva

AHMEDABAD: The noted environmentalist and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resources, Vandana Shiva, has described the Indian Government's claim of "food surplus" as a "myth'' and warned that the country is fast heading for an acute food shortage.

Delivering the fifth Tirath Gupta Memorial Lecture at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, here on Wednesday, Ms Shiva said that with the Central Government again talking about a second Green Revolution, it was time to take stock of the impact of the first Green Revolution which in effect had left the small farmers dispossessed from their land, had pushed the rich agro-biodiversity to extinction, mined the aquifers, desertified the soils and undermined nutrition and health.

Claiming that India's food and agricultural policy was no longer been controlled by the central government but was being driven through the World Trade Organisation by five major multinational corporate houses dealing in global grain trade, Ms Shiva said the country had `artificially' created food surplus in 2002 when it had dismantled the public distribution system taking out from its purview all but the people living below the poverty line. But while the foodgrain stock in 2002 was 65 million tonnes, the availability had come down to 15 million tonnes last year as against 22 million tonnes required to call itself `food secure' forcing the government to think on lines of importing foodgrains. She, however, cautioned, no country in the world was so much food surplus now to be able to feed one billion mouths in India.

According to Ms Shiva, more than 40,000 small farmers in the country had committed suicide in the last few years because of growing debts as a result of the first green revolution. The `industrial agriculture and chemical farming' to which the world had turned to in the last five decades or so, was based on negative economy, she said. She claimed that the model would not have worked even in a rich country like the United States but for the massive 400 billion dollars subsidy the government provides for the farm sector.

She believed that the only solution was organic farming with lower input costs and favourable price premiums making ecological agriculture based on rotational cropping and production of diversity of crops a more profitable proposition than the conventional farming while protecting the natural resources. Ms Shiva strongly opposed bringing the de-commissioned French warship, Clemenceau, to Alang in Gujarat for dismantling. Both she and the IIMA director, Bakul Dholakia, said the country had "better things to trade and better things to do" than breaking ships laden with toxic materials.

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`Government claim on food surplus a myth'

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