Feeding India’s Growing Billions

Ensuring access to quality food by everyone at all times is one of our most challenging tasks, considering that the nation is face-to-face with persistent poverty, hunger and malnutrition and their implications on the nutrition security of the poor

I ndia faces two major challenges in its food management system—one on the supply side, including risk and variability of food production, and the other is access to quality food by everyone at all times (defined as food security). In addition to unabated population growth, food production has been fluctuating greatly over the decades (Figure 1—all figures by the author). The incremental production/supply of homegrown food since 2010 has reached 28 million tonnes of food grain, which is the level it was at in the 1980s. In contrast, it was a total of 44 million tonnes in the decade of 2000-2010. Can such a variable production feed 182 million new consumers as well as satisfy the food needs of the existing billion plus population? Or will it lead to unsustainable food production and growing food insecurity?

Rice as a Crucial Ingredient of the Food Basket

Rice is the most important staple food in India. This single crop occupies the highest area, covering 45 million ha, with a production of 95 million tonnes in 2010 (second only to China). At the global level, rice is the staple food for more than half the world’s population and around two billion people in Asia rely on it for 60 to 70 per cent of their daily calorie intake. Over 90 per cent of the present production and consumption of rice occurs in Asia; two-thirds of it in just three countries (China, India and Indonesia). Most of the rice cultivated in Asia is rain-fed (60 per cent in India), where crop production depends on the vagaries of an erratic monsoon and leads to the endangering of household food security.