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| Food Security Act: Challenges and Issues! | | The Government has decided to extend the National Food Security Act, 2013 to Jammu and Kashmir from February 1, 2016! | | Dr. Pragya Khanna
The extension of the Act marks an important step towards the right to food for the people in J&K. Food security is a flexible concept as reflected in the many attempts at definition in research and policy usage. The World Food Summit of 1996 defined food security as "when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life". Usually, the concept of food security is defined as including both physical and economic access to food that meets people's dietary needs as well as their food preferences. In many countries of the world, health problems related to dietary access are an ever increasing threat. In light of this, the concept of food security is built on three main criteria, viz., Food availability, that is sufficient quantities of food available on a consistent basis; Food access, having sufficient resources to obtain appropriate foods for a nutritious diet and Food use, that is appropriate use based on knowledge of basic nutrition and care, as well as adequate water and sanitation.
Food security is a complex sustainable development issue, linked to health through malnutrition, but also to sustainable economic development, environment, and trade. There is a great deal of debate around food security with some arguing the conflicting thoughts:
n There is enough food in the world to feed everyone sufficiently; the predicament is distribution.
n Future food needs can - or cannot - be met by current levels of production.
n National food security is vital - or no longer necessary because of global trade.
n Globalization may - or may not - lead to the persistence of food insecurity and poverty in rural communities.
The other related issues being discussed worldwide include:
- The importance of the net impact of the further liberalization of food and agricultural trade, considering the widely differing situations in developing countries.
- The degree of extension of domestic economic and social policies and food, agricultural and rural development policies compensate for the varied (and possibly negative) impacts of international policies, such as those relating to international trade.
- The measure of by and large economic gains from trade benefit to those who are most likely to be suffering from food insecurity.
- How much do the gains "trickle down" to augment the economic access to food for the poor?
- How can food and agricultural production and trade be controlled from the over-exploitation of natural resources that may endanger domestic food security in the long term?
- How to guarantee the acceptability of quality and safety of imported food products?
Food security as a concept originated only in the mid-1970s, in the conference of international food problems at a time of global food crisis. The preliminary focus of consideration was chiefly on food supply problems and of assuring the availability and to some extent the price stability of basic foodstuffs at the international and national level. That supply-side, international and institutional set of concerns reflected the changing organization of the global food economy that had precipitated the emergency. A process of international negotiation followed, leading to the World Food Conference of 1974, and a new set of institutional arrangements covering information, resources for promoting food security and forums for dialogue on policy issues.
The issues of famine, hunger and food crisis were also being extensively examined, following the events of the mid 1970s. The outcome was a redefinition of food security, which recognized that the behaviour of potentially vulnerable and affected people was a critical aspect.
A third, possibly significantly important factor in modifying views of food security was the evidence that the technical successes of the Green Revolution did not automatically and swiftly lead to spectacular decline in poverty and levels of malnutrition. These problems were recognized as the result of lack of effective demand.
In 1986, the greatly influential World Bank report "Poverty and Hunger" focused on the sequential dynamics of food insecurity. It commenced the widely accepted distinction between chronic food insecurity, associated with problems of continuing or structural poverty and low incomes, and transitory food insecurity, which involved periods of intensified pressure caused by natural disasters, economic collapse or conflict. This concept of food security is further elaborated in terms of:
"Access of all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life".
By the mid-1990s food security was recognized as a noteworthy concern, spanning a range from the individual to the global level. However, access now involved adequate food, indicating systematic concern with protein-energy malnutrition. But the definition was broadened to integrate food safety and also nutritional balance, reflecting concerns about food composition and minor nutrient requirements for an active and healthy life. Food preferences, socially or culturally determined, now became a consideration. The potentially high degree of context specificity implies that the concept had both lost its simplicity and was not itself a goal, but an intermediating set of actions that contribute to an active and healthy life.
The new prominence on food utilization, the demand side and the issues of access by vulnerable people to food, is most closely identified with the determining study by Amartya Sen. He focuses on the entitlements of individuals and households.
In 1996 the World Food Summit (WFS) set the target of ''eradicating hunger in all countries, with an immediate view to reducing the number of undernourished people to half their present level no later than 2015". In 2000, the Millennium Declaration (MD) promoted the target to ''halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger''.
FAO received the mandate of monitoring progress towards the objectives set by the WFS and the MDGs. For this reason, the FAO statistics division meticulously and continuously works on the methodology and the parameters needed for estimating the prevalence of undernourishment.
Still a number of reasons have been perceived for the existing food insecurity in India. In the context of rural and tribal areas the problem is envisaged mainly due to lack of improvement in agricultural productivity owing to inadequate resources and markets needed to obtain agricultural stability. An agrarian crisis is currently being unleashed in India and it has a variety of causes, the prominent being the huge cut in government's development expenditure in the nineties, particularly in rural areas. Following the adoption of structural adjustment policies from the early 1990s, the focus was shifted on expenditure reduction. As against an average of 3.8 per cent of the country's Net National Product (NNP) spent on rural development per year during the seventh plan period 1985 - 90, the share of spending on rural development was down to 1.9 per cent of NNP in 2000 - 01 and rose only to 2.3 per cent in 2004 - 05. This adversely affected the availability and expansion of irrigation facilities, improvement in agricultural technology and overall food grain output. Lack of education and job opportunities in rural areas have further added to the problems. Climate change too, has an impact on the agricultural productivity, which affects the availability of food items and thus, food security. Major impact of climate change is on rain fed crops, other than rice and wheat. For the tribal communities, habitation in remote difficult terrains and practice of subsistence farming has led to significant economic backwardness.
Further in urban population, the key issue which catalyzes the problem of food insecurity needs to be addressed is the large proportion of informal workforce resulting in unplanned growth of slums which lack in the basic health and hygiene facilities. Rural-to-urban migration has shown a gradual increase, with its share in total migration rising from 16.5% to 21.1% from 1971 to 2001. These rural migrants form a large chunk of population referred to as 'informal sector'. The emergence of these rural origin pockets in the urban areas has resulted in a number of slum settlements characterized by inadequate water and sanitation facilities, insufficient housing and increased food insecurity. Another important point which might promote food insecurity is the dependence of this labourer class on daily employment wages which tends to be variable on different days of the month and thus the food procurement and access is also fluctuating. A striking issue is that in India, all the privilege of the government schemes and programmes, aimed at helping the urban slum people, is enjoyed only by those slums that are notified. Ironically, around 50 % of the urban slums are not notified and thus are deprived of the government schemes. People from these un-notified slums have to buy their food from the common market at the competitive price and are devoid of the subsidized food made available through Public Distribution System (PDS). In spite of rapid economic growth since the early 1980s and 1990s, the access and absorption indicators of urban food insecurity convey a notion that there has been relatively negligible improvement in nutritional intake and deterioration in terms of food security.
Food security in India has to be understood as a distress phenomenon, as with insignificant increase in their incomes over time they are forced to cut down on their food consumption to meet other pressing demands of health and education that were not considered important in the past. High economic growth rates have failed to improve food security in India leaving the country facing a crisis in its rural economy. If food security is a complex objective, pursued with others (shelter, safety, health, self-esteem), in a world where individual households face diverse, complex and different livelihood opportunities, it is to be analysed what role can policy possibly play?
Nevertheless, there is a compelling need to operationalize the concept of nutrition security which implies physical, economic and social access to balanced diet, clean drinking water, safe environment, and health care. Ensuring food security alone will aid in reducing hunger but will not eliminate malnutrition or impact nutrition status largely if other components such as safe drinking water and health care are also not envisaged. |
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