Contributed articles on economic aspects of agriculture in India.

Publisher description

Population explosions have always pushed India into many deep-rooted socio-economic bottlenecks. India is home to one third of the globe’s poverty-ridden and hunger-prone population, despite the undoubted availability of and access to food grains. This study explores the causes of and solutions to the prevalence of hunger and malnutrition at the grassroots level. Although India’s spending on protecting its boundaries has increased massively, there does not seem to have been as much emphasis on protecting its citizens. There can be no doubt that food security involves the simultaneous growth in demand and supply of food grains. As such, the book analyses the supply-side background behind the accomplishment of food security. It explores the nature, prospects and challenges ahead for Indian agriculture. Food grain production can be enhanced on a par with increasing demand only when hurdles confronting agriculture are addressed.

This volume examines the transitions in Indian agriculture since the 1980s, and emphasizes upon the role of neoliberal policies and their impact. The essays presented here deal with a range of pertinent and contemporary issues, including global food security, livelihoods of agricultural labourers, and public and private investment. These weave together glimpses of the impasse faced by petty commodity producers (marginal and small farmers) and their subsequent economic distress and social exclusion. Comprehensive in analysis, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of agricultural economics, political economy, political science and public policy.

Food security is one of the twenty-first century’s key global challenges, and lessons learned from India have particular significance worldwide. Not only does India account for approximately one quarter of the world’s under-nourished persons, it also provides a worrying case of how rapid economic growth may not provide an assumed panacea to food security. This book takes on this challenge. It explains how India’s chronic food security problem is a function of a distinctive interaction of economic, political and environmental processes. It contends that under-nutrition and hunger are lagging components of human development in India precisely because the interfaces between these aspects of the food security problem have not been adequately understood in policy-making communities. Only through an integrative approach spanning the social and environmental sciences, are the fuller dimensions of this problem revealed. A well-rounded appreciation of the problem is required, informed by the FAO’s conception of food security as encompassing availability (production), access (distribution) and utilisation (nutritional content), as well as by Amartya Sen’s notions of entitlements and capabilities.

Contributed articles.

Using the decennial All-India Debt and Investment Survey from 1981-82 to 2012-13, this paper delves into the spatial and temporal trends in private fixed capital expenditure and its composition, among rural households in India. We also assess its relationship with public investment in agriculture. Amidst sizeable ups and downs, the magnitude and rate of growth in private investment in agriculture has gained momentum from 2000s except in Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir. An increasing preference of farmers to invest in residential land and buildings, and that at the cost of asset formation in farm business, is evident in agriculturally advanced states. Within agriculture, relatively higher investments in land improvement, machinery-implements, tractors, and livestock are identified over the period. Importantly, such investments are positively influenced by public investments in agriculture and irrigation in the high and low income states and also by public spending on input subsidy in the middle and low income states. An increase in public expenditure that is well targeted and is commensurate with farmers’ investment portfolio would reinforce a complementary relation between the two across-the-board. The impact of terms of trade on private investment though positive turns out to be statistically insignificant. Land acts as a constraint, indicating need for policy interventions that augment crop yield and can bring remunerative prices to farmers. A continued effort to improve the outreach of formal financial institutions for credit is warranted for higher private capital formation.

The links between trade-related policy reforms and food security is of key concern to many developing countries. This publication sets out the findings of 15 country case studies from Cameroon, Chile, China, Ghana, Guatemala, Guyana, India, Kenya, Malawi, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda. The coverage includes countries at different stages of development with the main focus on low-income countries that are likely to be at greater risk of food insecurity. The studies examine the impact of trade-related policy reforms on agricultural prices, production and trade, and the consequences for food security issues for each country.