Author: Arnab Chakraborty
Arnab Chakraborty Masters is a Masters student of society and development with Azim Premji University (APU). He was part of a summer internship program with Keystone Foundation during which he was associated with the Using Diversity Network in a research capacity. This paper is a culmination of some of the research he carried out during his internship.
Arnab wants to understand and contribute to the process of improving the health and well being of communities from a socio-ecological perspective. His past experience has been in understanding urban agriculture, sustainable housing, sanitation and water as well as governance of common pool resources like wetlands.
Traditional production and the modern economy
Traditional modes of production are known to be underproductive, when calculated in terms of the carrying capacity of the resource base. In an economic sense this is only possible in a condition of abundance of resources. This abundance is not a matter of technical capacity of production, for both agricultural produce and wild foods; it is rather a result of the social and cultural relations. In most foraging or traditional societies practicing methods like shifting agriculture believe diversity and natural regeneration as a mode of insurance against unexpected shocks to their social resource base, very much like the Indian government maintains a buffer stock of grains for a year of bad rain, or some unexpected disruption of the food supply chain like a country-wide lockdown.
In traditional societies, the labour power applied to the productive activities is regulated by cultural patterns, in terms of marriage norms, lineage, property ownership rules etc. All these often help in maintaining a population size which is much lower than the technical carrying capacity per unit of resources. And this is what helps in creating this sense of abundance among the community members. But in the modern world it is not possible to maintain such communitarian norms; therefore food security and resource management becomes intertwined with the market and policies around food production, and distribution.
PDS for consumers or producers?
The emergence of PDS, Mid-day meals (MDM) and Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) has been associated with the recognition that food security in the country has to move from yield of food to access. And in doing so it initially got integrated into educational, maternity health and child care programs and led to increased calorie intake. And it also meant higher income for producers, as their income also increased through the subsequent process of government acquisition at a standardized minimum price for certain food grains like rice and wheat.
This increase income may or may not have led to increased dietary diversity among the producers, but in the supply side, it led to increased monoculture. While the per-capita consumption of food grains largely remained the same in the country, the proportion of wheat and rice significantly increased. And if we are to believe the assumptions of Bennet’s law (greater income=greater dietary diversity), dietary diversity reduced more for the poorer populations, because the non-producing poor received more of grains without any increase in income.
Purchased food supply chains in India
Purchased food consists of 92% of all food consumed in India. While a larger proportion of food is consumed by the urban populations, since they are net-consumers of food and have higher purchasing power, even in rural areas the populations depend a lot on purchased food, along with the PDS and other government schemes. Through the integration of the rural-urban food supply chains the rural population’s income is significantly dependent on the food supply chains. There are several non-agricultural rural income sources like transportation, minor services at local “mandis”, medium and small processing units etc. which are dependent on the supply chain. Thus, their nutritional requirements are also fulfilled by food supply chains including that of the cultivators practicing mono-cropping.
Nutrition and climate resilience of traditional agriculture
The PDS system has focused mostly on calories, ignoring the micro-nutrient deficiencies that can be caused by a diet which lacks diversity, according to many experts. And it is for this reason that there is a call for the inclusion of millets, pulses and many of other nutritious food grains into the PDS system along with the MDM, ICDS etc.
Apart from the nutritional importance of coarse cereals, their climate resilience has been highlighted. It has been observed that these crops can grow in much more harsh climatic conditions. But since they are grown in regions and conditions which are much harsher, the effects of climate change on these crops will also be much more, making them more vulnerable. Therefore in order to promote their introduction within the PDS system, there is a greater need for more research and support.
Indigenous populations as consumers and producers
However, these prescriptions for making modern food systems more sustainable may not be applicable for indigenous communities. This is because the indigenous communities always had a diverse diet, independently of the market. But with the contact with the market economy, the dietary pattern has changed and has become more limited. In fact the incidence of malnourishment, specifically undernourishment has increased among tribal communities in the past few decades.
The food systems of traditional societies are not only very elaborate, but also very labour intensive. The practice of traditional food requires a detailed knowledge of nature and ecological systems, and a lot of time commitment and labour commitment to cultivate and process these before consumption. The unavailability of accessible technological solutions for processing the coarse grains along with easy access to market and PDS has reduced the interest of many community members in the consumption of these traditional crops.
Therefore, people like Naresh Biswas, who have worked on ground with Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTG) in India are quick to call out the dangers of providing a floor price for traditional food grains. They essentially point out that increasing commercialisation of the societies have been the root cause of resource poverty, which as indicated above, is an anomaly among traditional societies, since the traditional resource base is enough to provide a sense of abundance. They have in many places also been dispossessed of their land and forest and forced to take up industrial vocations, while in other cases the need for cash and lack of revenue from agriculture has induced many younger members of the communities to migrate to the cities as semi-skilled or unskilled labour. This has made them more dependent on the markets. Given that the prices of coarse grains have risen in the markets, often the members of PVTGs have been induced to sell their produce and depend on grains with lower nutritional value.
According to Biswas, the best way to promote the crops is to provide assistance to the traditional cultivators, in terms of processing but not to connect them to the larger market and policy framework. Even efforts of promotion of these practices in certain states, according to him, have led to disproportionate support to particular coarse grains reducing not only the agricultural diversity, but also the nutritional intake of the communities. Therefore, while it is impossible to create a separation of the traditional mode of production from the modern influence, the practices requires support in various forms for long term nutritional security, which the present policy and market regimes have failed to provide.
The support has to be in the form of providing opportunities to leverage both nutritional access through traditional forms of farming as well as encouraging livelihoods. And both the actions of civil society and government authorities working with indigenous communities can go a long way with these objectives at their heart.
