The incredible lightness of being

The incredible lightness of being
Yoginder K. Alagh

The concern, the world over, is with removing hunger. Given India's food performance this is now possible. A beginning can be made with a two million tonne programme of grain which would otherwise be wasted. Once upon a time we were at the forefront of original thinking on such programmes. Now we need to at least keep a track of the thinking elsewhere.

Human security implies safety from chronic threats such as hunger, disease and oppression, linking it to the broader concept of human development. One-third of people in the world live on less than US$ 2 per day. More than a billion people in developing countries live without adequate housing, and an estimated 100 million are homeless (UNDP HDR, 2000). What is it that makes individual households, as well as national and regional societies, vulnerable to hunger and famine? How does the affected population cope?

The questions about the linkages between hunger, poverty, land degradation, destruction of resources and demographic changes have been discussed for decades. The Brundtland Commission on Environment and Development stated: ``Poverty is a major cause and effect of global environmental problems. It is theoretically futile to attempt to deal with environmental problems without a broader perspective that encompasses the factors underlying world poverty and international equality.'' India started this thought process at Stockholm. Now it is not there.

It is mainly the poor that suffer from famine, hunger and malnutrition. But not all poor people are equally vulnerable to hunger, and it is not always the poorest who are exposed to the greatest risks. There are many other factors that determine the vulnerability to hunger, including the risk of exposure to crises, stress and shocks.

A number of approaches have been chosen to address these problems (entitlement, empowerment, enfranchisement). Food security should be closely tied to human security. While food supply to the rural poor is still a major problem, more emphasis on urban food security is also needed. The general tendency to combat environmental and social forms of degradation, as expressed in famine and poverty, should be not only to be reactive but preventive in its approach. `Preparedness' is the keyword here. This leads to the increased necessity of early warning systems.

Policy makers have reacted already by establishing short and medium term early warning systems for the most vulnerable regions. However, without accurate socio-economic and structural information from the field, such computer assisted warning systems based mainly on biophysical parameters, will not be able to accurately predict famines in a given region.

The Indian discussion of hunger is not particularly illuminating. We only know that according to the National Sample Survey people who claimed that they do not have two square meals a day went down to less than a twelfth of the population in 1993 from around a fifth in 1983. But the sub-regional and socio-economic correlates of this are not known. Hence the need of indicators and information systems.

We really don't know much about these problems. Our approach has been on macro estimates of poverty and not hunger and intense deprivation. Coalition politics also forces us to worry about the ones who make most noise rather than the most vulnerable. But some studies are there. Recent work with participative rural appraisal analysis suggests that the earning power of hungry households is related in a significant manner with the demographic status of the household (hungry households more often tend to be women-headed or consist of disabled workers) and the health status of the members of the household (morbidity significantly reduces economic status). On the positive side, hungry households in rural areas showed considerable dignity and desire to improve their status, the democratic polity was seen as a factor empowering them and, in fact, there was considerable resistance in classifying themselves as destitute or hungry.

A hunger removal programme, embedded in a food security strategy will have to be a part of the wider process of diversification of Indian agriculture and larger exposure to trade. Sustainability considerations will also require release of land from low productivity cereals to more appropriate cropping sequences in different agro-climatic regimes.

The reform process has to be accompanied by a serious effort to locate these populations and communities and, with a combination of food for work and related programmes, make a beginning at solving the problem. An information system, a selected employment guarantee scheme with a lower than market wage rate to screen out the non-needy and a educational and health component can be a part of a programme. One hopes this will be reflected in the next budget, or even earlier.

Food security should be closely tied to human security