The first meeting of an expert group on food took place on 3rd December, 2010. This expert group has been set up by the Prime Minister to examine the recommendations of the National Advisory Council (NAC) on the proposed National Food Security Bill.
The first meeting of an expert group on food took place on 3rd December, 2010. This expert group has been set up by the Prime Minister to examine the recommendations of the National Advisory Council (NAC) on the proposed National Food Security Bill.
It is over two years now since food prices started soaring to the skies, growing at double digit annual rates. The problem of unaffordable food prices was being hotly debated during the campaign for the Lok Sabha elections in 2009. Each party was promising to tackle it on a war footing if voted to power. A year and a half have passed since the second UPA Government headed by Manmohan Singh took charge. All that has been done is the appointment of yet another committee.
There is an acute clash between two opposing class outlooks on the question of food. The working class and other working people look at food as an essential human need to be fulfilled. Communists insist that it is a universal inviolable right, whose fulfillment is the duty of society and the state. The capitalist class looks at food as an important set of commodities, from which maximum profits can be reaped.
The clash between these opposing outlooks became apparent when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked the Supreme Court not to interfere in policy matters. The Supreme Court had ruled that wheat and rice stocks of FCI that are rotting in open air be distributed free. The Prime Minister, in response, declared that it was a policy matter in which courts ought not to interfere. He exposed the truth that ensuring that everyone in society is adequately fed is not the orientation of his government’s policy.
The central government is committed to push ahead further with the liberalization and privatization program, to expand the space for monopoly capitalist profiteering in all sectors. Manmohan Singh is credited with having launched this program almost 20 years ago, when he was the Finance Minister. Since then, the economy and government’s policies have been geared towards ensuring maximum profits for monopoly capitalists in more and more spheres of social production. Such an orientation is incompatible with ensuring availability of food at affordable prices to all members of our society.
Food as source of maximum profits is an outlook that leads to one set of policies, aimed at allowing maximum space for private profits to be reaped, in production and distribution. This is the outlook underlying the progressive liberalization of trade in food and other commodities in our country. Cutting down public spending on food, cutting down eligibility to access the Public Distribution System, in the name of making it more efficient, and in the name of “targeting the very poor” and “allowing peasants to realize market prices”, were all part of the reform program. The PDS was reduced to below economic scale, and effectively destroyed.
The ruling class and its economic pundits do not want to admit that the destruction of the Public Distribution System is largely to blame for the present situation, in which workers and peasants are at the mercy of global market upheavals and profiteering traders.
Organisations of workers and peasants all over the country have raised the demand for a universal PDS, accessible to all and covering all essential items, not just wheat and rice. Faced with this just demand, the government’s response has been to begin an apparently never-ending discussion on a National Food Security Bill. A year and a half after such a law was promised, the government is still discussing the issue in expert committees (see Box). There was active opposition to the draft Food Security Bill circulated in March, 2010, on the part of workers’ and peasants’ organisations and rights activists. Then the National Advisory Council, headed by Sonia Gandhi, worked on revising the draft, but not to provide guarantee for food as a universal right.
In effect, the government has deliberately spent 18 months without giving in to the just demand of the workers and peasants. Meanwhile, private operators have been raking in huge profits from trading in food and food products. The most recent revelation in this context is that more than $40 million (Rs.180 crore) of private profits were reaped through the export of rice from India to some African countries in a period of three months in 2007.
The Manmohan Singh government can only pretend to be addressing the right to food. In reality, negating this right is its preferred policy, as was revealed in Manmohan Singh’s response to the Supreme Court on rotting food stocks.
If food is a fundamental right of every member of modern society, then it needs to be treated like an essential public good and not as a source of maximum profits for capitalists. To treat is as essential public good means to organize its procurement and distribution according to one common plan, under the control of the workers and peasants who produce and consume food, with no role for any private profiteering or middleman’s commission.
Workers and peasants cannot and must not accept anything less than a modern universal PDS, open to all, and covering all essential items of mass consumption. Communists must provide ideological backing to the demand that food be guaranteed as a universal right. Communists must enable the working class to rally the peasants around the program to reorient the economy and establish a state that provides constitutional guarantee and enabling mechanisms for the right to food.
Endless discussion but no action
May 2009 -15th Lok Sabha Election Campaign promise – Congress Party promises to provide 25 kg of foodgrains per month, at Rs 3/- per kg, to every poor family
June 4, 2009 – President of India, in her first address to the joint session of Parliament after the 15th Lok Sabha election in 2009, announces that the Government would pass a legislation called the “National Food Security Act” (NFSA) which would entitle, by law, every family below the poverty line (BPL) in rural as well as urban areas to 25 kg of rice or wheat a month at Rs 3 a kg.
March 19, 2010 – Empowered Group of Ministers under the Union Cabinet, headed by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, clears the draft of the Food Security Bill that promises 25 kg to every BPL family; EGoM also recommends to the Cabinet increased quota of foodgrains for the 11.5 crore APL families
October 2010 – the National Advisory Council (NAC) comes out with its proposals for the National Food Security Act. The proposals, which will form the basis of the Act to be introduced in Parliament, are to provide food security to 75% of the country’s total population, comprising 90% of the rural population and 50% of the urban population. This 75% will, however, be further divided into two categories. The priority group, comprising 46% of the rural population and 28% of the urban population, will get 35 kg of foodgrain at the rate of Rs1/kg for millets, Rs2/kg for wheat and Rs3/kg for rice. The remaining 44% of the rural population and 22% of the urban population will get 20 kg per household at 50% of the minimum support price for the grains. NAC has suggested a phased implementation of the Act, with the current administration’s responsibility limited to 85% of the rural population and 40% of the urban population.
October 26, 2010 – Appointment of Experts Group, headed by Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council C. Rangarajan, set up by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to examine the recommendations of the National Advisory Council (NAC) on the proposed National Food Security Bill.
Meanwhile, debate on estimations of BPL and APL have remained unresolved with various official Commissions providing very varying estimates. The most recent estimates have been submitted by: 1. The ‘Expert Group to Review the Methodology for Estimation of Poverty’ chaired by Prof. S.D. Tendulkar (‘Tendulkar committee report’) to the Planning Commission in December 2009, and 2. The ‘Expert Group on the Methodology for the BPL Census 2009’ chaired by Dr. N. C. Saxena (‘Saxena committee report’) to the Ministry of Rural Development in September 2009.