At what cost?

Massive boost in food export is taking place at a time when a large number of Indian citizens are unable to procure enough food to meet their basic minimum needs, and many of them, mostly women and children, suffer from chronic malnourishment. According to the National Family Health Survey, the percentage of anaemic women in India is as high as 57 per cent and the number of anaemic children under five years of age is 67.1 per cent.

Hungry India

The much-discussed Global Hunger Index 2021, which studied 116 countries, has put India at a rank of 101 (the previous year's rank was 94) behind its neighbours Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. An Oxfam report suggests that more than half of Indian women suffer from anaemia. The study also shows that in several parts of India, children born between 2015 and 2019 are more malnourished than the previous generation, as reported by The Indian Express. Another study by Raghunathan et al (2020) revealed that almost three-fourths of Indians cannot afford nutritious diets.

In this context, it may be mentioned that in 1961, India produced 60.9 million metric tonnes of cereals, and in 2021, the estimated production of the same has been 282 million metric tonnes, which means, in these six decades, cereal production has increased by 4.6 times! The production of poultry, milk, and fish have also increased by many times. Nevertheless, the population grew at a much slower pace and has increased by less than three times during this period. But over the years, per capita food grain consumption has declined in India. In 1961, daily per capita food grain consumption was 468.7 grams which declined to 444 grams in 2009! In that period, per capita consumption of pulses declined from 69 grams to 37 grams!

A quick look at table 1 reveals that during 1993-2011, per capita consumption of food grains was on a steady decline though per capita net availability of food grains had not declined, indicating that a large section of the population could not procure the available food grain, possibly due to lack of purchasing power. During that period, decline in the consumption of 'other cereals' was substantial.

The rise in food export

India's food grain exports, mostly of cereals — non-basmati rice, wheat, millet, maize, and other coarse grains — are on the rise. After remaining stagnant for the last three years, the export of agriculture and allied products during 2020-21 grew by 17.34 per cent to USD 41.25 billion. In 2017-18 and 2018-19, it hovered around USD 38 billion, thereafter declining to USD 35.16 billion in 2019-20. As per a June report by Business Standard, in the first two months of the current fiscal year, there was a 43 per cent jump. Recently, India has signed deals to export over two million tonnes (mt) of wheat during December-January as the food grain is being offered at an attractive price. The Businessline reported that in FY21, wheat shipment may touch four million tonnes.

It may be recalled that the Agriculture Export Policy 2018 aims to double farmers' income by 2022 by doubling agricultural exports from India. In FY21, India exported basmati rice worth USD 4.02 billion, non-basmati rice worth USD 4.81 billion, pulses worth USD 284.23 million, dairy products worth USD 201.15 million and buffalo meat worth USD 3.17 billion. As per The Indian Express report, in 2020-21, India had shipped out close to 7.1 million tonnes of sugar. In a country where millions of its citizens are malnourished, anaemic, and hungry, the opportunity cost of a large amount of exported food products could be too high.

The true cost of food export

A recent paper, 'The True Cost and True Price of Food', by the Scientific Group of the UN Food Systems Summit (June 2021), argued that one of the central problems of the current food system is that many of the costs of the bad food are not reflected in the market price. The current externalities are estimated to be more than double — USD 19.8 trillion (USD 7 trillion environmental cost+ USD 11 trillion costs to human life+ USD 1 trillion economic costs) — to the current total global food consumption of USD nine trillion. To avoid this huge cost, many countries have resorted to strategic food imports, especially water-intensive foods. Through this process, they not only save huge cost of food production but also save a substantial amount of water by importing embedded water along with the food products.

Virtual or embedded water is the water embodied in the production of food and fibre and non-food commodities, including energy. For example, it requires about 1,300 tonnes (cubic meters) of water to produce a tonne of wheat and 16,000 tonnes (cubic meters) of water to produce a tonne of beef. It is estimated that in 2014-15, when India exported 3.7 million tonnes of basmati rice, it also exported 10 trillion litres of water which was used to cultivate the rice — from preparing the land for cultivation to the post-harvest processing of the rice, reported India Today.

China, Japan, Germany and Iran are a few major importers of virtual water, and the USA, Brazil, Canada, India are a few major exporters. It is reported that in the recent trade war between China and USA, when China stopped importing soybean from the USA in November 2018, American farmers suffered USD 1.8 billion in revenue losses. But that also translated to 5.08 billion cubic meters of virtual water not received by China!

Virtual water trade through the export of water-intensive food products is not only a global strategic and trade issue, it is also an emerging political and environmental issue in a country like India where water endowments differ substantially across different regions. Few think tanks have already proposed to explore the intra-regional transfer of water via virtual mode instead of interlinking rivers. In the absence of a functional Parliamentary civil society, academics should take the responsibility to address this vital issue.

Views expressed are personal