Kolkata – Before the Green Revolution, India was a hungry country. With the United States' food aid, it had a "ship-to-mouth" existence – as a senior research fellow, Devesh Roy, at the research think tank, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), puts it.
The Green Revolution improved life with science and machinery – fertilisers, agrochemicals, high-yield variety seeds, irrigation, and mechanisation. However, in retrospect, scientists say it didn’t give us food self-sufficiency but plenty of cereals – rice and wheat particularly.
That was the first global change in the food system the world saw that began in the 1960s, reaching India in 1966. Production and incomes increased, urbanisation and population, too, while mortality fell. Norman Borlaug, its key leader, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation.
But did it solve the problem of nutrition? Apparently not. It created what Dr. Venkatesh Mannar, an adjunct professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at New York's Cornell University, called "hidden hunger" or micronutrient – vitamins and minerals – deficiencies.
Although we are mainly an agricultural economy seen as food self-sufficient, we grow the wrong food.
Always Hungry
As per the 2020 Global Nutrition Report, there is a high prevalence of low birth weight, increased morbidity, and mortality among Indian children. Poor maternal nutrition continues to be a major concern. A quarter of India's newborns start life with low birth weight; 50 of every 1,000 live births do not live to see their first birthday; nearly half – 42 percent – of children up to five years are underweight; more than two-thirds of infants and children under the age of three are anaemic.
In the 2019 Global Hunger Index, India ranked 102 out of 117 qualifying countries. As per the 2018 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, almost 195.9 million Indians, nearly 15 percent of the population, are undernourished. Chronic micronutrient deficiencies persist across the country. Meanwhile, heart disease has already become our biggest killer.
All this is despite India being one of the G20, the group of the world's largest economies.
Although the economy quadrupled between 1990 and 2010, "the reduction in malnutrition rates has been much slower, and COVID-19 has made an additional 100 million Indians vulnerable to food distress," Mannar pointed out in an email interview.
No Planet B
An intense politics of food is unfolding across the world, partly resulting in poor nutrition, obesity, and hunger all at the same time. And the emerging challenge of climate change has made us re-think the global food system's adverse impacts.
So how do we marry good nutrition with globally safe environmental standards?
Roy at IFPRI said first we would need a benchmark.
Inspired by the Gaia hypothesis, which proposes that a complex interaction between living beings and their inorganic surroundings perpetuates life on the planet, as well as Earth System Science (ESS), the term Anthropocene is in vogue to describe a geological dating from the commencement of serious and significant human impact on all the earth's processes.
A new epoch is nigh. Policymakers, agriculturists, and consumers need to ponder these changing perspectives derived from ESS that the UK-based science journal, Nature, describes as a "rapidly emerging multidisciplinary endeavour" to understand the planet, "a complex, adaptive system," as one whole.
Some climate change scientists say we are reaching a tipping point; others say it is already too late.
The ambition now is to address all of the earth's problems simultaneously and in a globally coordinated, rather than piecemeal, way. So the issue of hunger and undernutrition is no longer seen as different from climate change.
One would think this was obvious.
Despite the increase in greenhouse gases (GHGs) and the lowering of the underground water table, human beings have not made a coordinated effort to transform the food system. Scientific targets have not been identified to undo the environmental destruction caused by keeping us fed, or overfed, as the case may be.
No one so far had scientifically thought through the actual, quantitative limits of how much we can push the earth – its soil, air, water, wildlife, and landmass – so the planet, a self-restoring system, may right itself and remain the ever-giving beautiful thing it is.
Such an effort would need experts from human health, political science, climate research, food science, ecology, economics, industry, and agriculture to work with policymakers.
Such a cohort was created in 2019 – the EAT-Lancet Commission – which brought together 19 commissioners and 18 co-authors from 16 countries, including researchers from India, for a study that scientifically decided on "quantitative targets" establishing "planetary boundaries" for the food system – a matrix of the food chain, the environment and consumer behaviour.
EAT describes itself as a non-profit science-based research organisation for global food system transformation through "sound science, impatient disruption and novel partnerships," while The Lancet is a reputed UK-based science and research journal and a platform of peer-reviewed scholarly literature.
The EAT-Lancet study provided the guidelines and a healthy reference diet that could feed 10 billion people by 2050 from an environmentally sustainable food system. Their guidelines may move a country away from its national dietary guidelines towards a reordering that is healthy for both its people and the planet. These targets are located within the safe limits for the earth system as a whole but not nuanced enough to address each country, the report says.
These calculations gave nutritionists from IFPRI, including Roy, the benchmark they needed. They decided to compare the EAT-Lancet reference diet to India's to see the deviations, the gaps, the shortcomings, and slack.
They found that India's daily calorie consumption was less than the recommended 2,500 kilocals per capita per day. This was true for all groups, except for the richest five percent of the Indian population.
Our share of calories from protein sources was only six to eight percent compared to 29 percent in the reference diet. They also found the calorie share of whole grains, rice and wheat, in the Indian diet was significantly higher than the EAT-Lancet recommendations. From fruit, vegetables, eggs, meat, and fish, it was substantially lower. The EAT-Lancet study says the planetary meat consumption must come down. However, ours must go up for us to be better fed, which shows the wide disparity between India and developed countries.
The developed world's accent towards healthier diets is to reduce meat intake, which will also reduce GHG emissions. But in India, the adoption of the planetary diet will mean a rise in GHGs. This is a comment on our measly protein intake. Although a large number of Indians identify themselves as non-vegetarian, they still eat too little meat overall, the IFPRI report stated.
Further, India's calorie intake is pitiful in the lowest deciles of income groups, but even the richest Indians eat too little fruit, vegetables and non-cereal proteins.
In a worrying trend, researchers found that a vast majority of Indian households consumed more calories from processed food than from fruit, and consumed more cereals than fruit and vegetables.
Indian Diets, Environmentally Speaking
What food system transformation does India need to make diets healthier and more sustainable?
The food system for consumption in India is mainly structured around the public distribution system (PDS), which is the largest in the world; MSP for production – the agricultural "minimum support price" set by the central government to procure crops directly from farmers, which is not enforceable by law. For farmers, it is the FPO, or the Farmer Producer Organisation Scheme, a body created by the government's Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare.
Mannar said there is a disconnect between agricultural policy and contemporary nutritional challenges: "Agricultural policy has been slow to respond to the persistent problem of micronutrient malnutrition. It is heavily biased towards staple grain productivity improvement, especially for the major staples– rice, wheat, and maize, while diet diversity needs are not adequately addressed."
PDS also limits and changes food choices. For instance, scientists at IFPRI say that as soon as certain pulses were included in the PDS, the consumption of every other pulse fell. So farmers stopped growing them.
"The moment farmers get irrigation, they start growing wheat and rice," said Roy.
We also don't grow enough oilseeds. Sixty-five percent of our edible oil consumption is through imports – of the cheapest and the most unhealthy kind; palm oil.
Roy adds: "The biggest change in nutrition and health was when oils started to be imported into India. Edible oil was made available through the PDS. It was too expensive, so we started importing palm oil (from Malaysia and Indonesia). This changed our food system forever. Every oil in the market, including the ones available through the PDS, is mixed with palm oil, and that is because if you mix up to 12 percent of other oils to your product, you can still claim the original constitution."
Now the government is trying to promote palm oil plantations in India, he said.
The Green Revolution and the lopsided food policy have together increased staple crop yields in ensuring food security, but it will fall short of the rising demands of India's growing and increasingly unhealthy population.
Mannar added, "there is a need for food systems to go beyond the narrow focus on caloric intake, reduce the dominance of cereal production and increase the availability of healthy foods such as fruit, vegetables, nuts, and whole grain."
Roy has worked out that the first mountain to climb is a change in production patterns: "We produce too much rice and sugarcane and too little of coarse cereals, pulses, fruit, and vegetables."
He asked why fisheries and poultry were not included in banks' priority sector lending, unlike agriculture, which gets a six percent interest rate on loans. A critic of MSP, he said, it distorted the market, "MSP has been there since the 1960s onwards. If it was a silver bullet then why are farmers suffering? Why are we so behind in trade? Thailand can export more than us, even Egypt, which is mostly desert. Why are we unable to compete? Why don't we export pomegranate, for instance? We are its largest producers."
Further, rice and sugarcane are highly water-intensive.
"We keep growing rice and wheat, and farmers must dig up to 350 feet underground to get water," said Roy.
Desertification in Punjab is increasing, he added.
Wet rice fields also emit methane, a powerful GHG. We also know about the stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, which suffocates the national capital in winters with smoke-laced fog.
Roy’s verdict: “People ask what is wrong with the nutrition food system, my answer is India hasn't got the market right.”
Roy's work has focussed a great deal on pulses (and edible oils). Pulses, he said, were an important part of our food system before the Green Revolution. When our farming practices changed, more than 80 percent of where pulses were grown was relegated to marginal, unirrigated lands, left under rain-fed conditions only. As simple as that, pulses became a high-risk crop. Farmers needed a rise in prices to cover their risk premium – that is the cost difference between the yield of a crop if grown risk-free versus depending on the rains alone.
With meager yields, small farmers cannot justify taking their crop to markets to access higher prices given the transport costs involved. An overwhelming majority of Indian farmers are "small farmers" having small landholdings of two or three hectares. A tiny proportion has holdings of up to nine hectares – not a vast cultivation area.
Farmgate trading also allows price collusion by middlemen: "Smaller farmers usually sell at their farmgate to traders who offer prices less than the MSP. The trader or buyer says, 'we are picking up from your farmgate. The difference is the transportation cost.' Larger farmers take their produce to the markets where they have greater bargaining power," said Roy.
This is how public programmes have a very large footprint on nutrition in India. With the Green Revolution and the heavy subsidising, and with the 2012 Right to Food act, which made food a legal entitlement, we thought a formula to rid us of hunger had been found.
But public policy-led schemes such as the PDS and the MSP are now hemlock in a holy grail; rather than market mechanisms that should adapt to change, they have become ideological tools and must be re-thought, with deep changes in the prevailing food system.
They were radical political reforms, but the ones that were not thought through the limits of what was being achieved.
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