Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Need to revive food economy of State

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: How safe is Kerala with regard to its food needs, as cereal prices, both internationally and within India, continue to climb?

The State produces hardly 15 per cent of its food needs. It has become accustomed to being dependent on Central cereal supplies and market purchases from the neighbouring regions. The acreage under rice, the people’s staple diet, has been dwindling at an alarming rate over the past three or four decades due to various reasons.

The nation’s food policy had provided Kerala a measure of security in the past. Adequate supply of rice and wheat reached the State through the public distribution system. But, the supply of rice to the State from the Centre is now only a fourth of what it was at the beginning of this decade.

This year, there were even restrictions in the movement of rice to the State from key markets in the neighbouring States such as Andhra Pradesh. Rice production in all the southern States has either come down or stagnated during the last five years, according to the latest Economic Survey published by the Planning Commission. This has put pressure on the availability of rice in the region as a whole.

This situation was not entirely unexpected. The Economic Review for 2007, prepared by the State Planning Board, had discussed in detail the global and national trend in food availability and found that Kerala, the most food-deficient State in the country, would have to face some difficulties in the coming days.

The Review noted that the “looming world recession” would have a double impact on Kerala: “First, [there will be] a terms of trade movement against primary commodities in favour of manufacturers, which will, of course, hurt the cash crop growers [who prop up the State’s agriculture economy]; and second, a terms of trade movement between foodgrain and other primary commodities in favour of the former that will further compound the adverse effect on these growers, even as it hurts other sections engaged in petty production economy of the State.”

In other words, the planners had warned that, as matters were evolving, Kerala would find its food bill shooting up and income from cash crops (in relative terms) going down.

“This is a situation for which we have to be prepared,” the Review said. “Putting pressure on the Centre for adequate supplies of foodgrains and keeping the public distribution system going must constitute one part of our effort; reviving Kerala’s food economy so that a modicum of food security is provided to the State must constitute the other part.”

A proposal is now before the government to launch a campaign-mode initiative to increase food production in the State in view of the signs of vulnerability it has begun to show in the matter of food availability in recent times. The proposal is to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of all the departments such as Agriculture, Irrigation, Fisheries, Local Self-Government, Dairy Development and Animal Husbandry and turn the drive for enhancing food production into a massive public campaign of the type that helped Kerala become the first State to achieve total literacy several years back.

According to the proposal, it is well within the realm of possibility to increase the annual production of rice in the State by 50 per cent from the present level of 6.3 lakh tonnes, milk by 75 per cent from the present level of 20.63 lakh tonnes and eggs by 100 per cent from the present level of 1,196 million by the end of the Eleventh Plan (2011-12), if the available resources were utilised with purpose and not frittered away.

Funds that can be routed to the farm production sector will come to more than Rs.1,200 crore a year if the resources normally available with various departments are added up.

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