Wheat Import - a wake up call for India

Sharad Pawar says that India will not hesitate to import Wheat in 2007 if the procurement from farmers are low.

Now, here is the dilemma. If the Budget has allocated enough money in 2007-08 for irrigation related projects and providing credits and insurance to the farmers, why do we require imports.

Imports put pressure on the prices in the domestic market and the "Indian Farmers" have to sell their produce at a lower rate.

As per M. S. Swaminathan, a farm scientist who is acknowledged as the architect of the Green Revolution in India had said in June 2006 "Such large-scale import of staple food grain is a wake-up call." Mr. Swaminathan, chairman of the National Commission on Farmers and co-chairman of the Hunger Task Force of the United Nations Millennium Project, said, "All is not well in the heartland of the green revolution."

Government decided to import Wheat from US based companies (where huge subsidy is provided by Government to the producers) for creating the buffer for Public Distribution System where rampant hoarding and illegal activities go on.

Better option would be enforce a quota system with the Private Sector companies to allocate part of their procurement for PDS which would take care of the illegal activities and hoarding taking place in the PD System of Government.

Another corollary to the issue has been opined by respected analysts and professors from US universities are as follows :

Experts see a more worrying pattern. The government's gradual withdrawal of various production-related support structures for small farmers as part of a broad overhaul of the economy has worsened "the problems of food insecurity, rural income inequality, and the alarming urban-rural gap that is ever widening for the last decade and a half," said Vamsi Vakulabharanam, a food security expert and an assistant professor of economics at Queens College of the City University of New York.

After the first international solicitation of bids failed, the government considerably relaxed its stringent conditions. Quality specifications on toxins, pesticides and weed seeds were loosened, bringing in sellers like Cargill, which bid for 405,000 tons, and ADM, which offered to provide 300,000 tons. Others like Switzerland-based Glencore and the German company Toepfer also participated. The prices quoted were more than $196 a ton, including freight. The grain will arrive in the country beginning in September.

The wheat deals have become politically controversial. While the country has modernized on many fronts, with the services and manufacturing sectors accounting for 60 percent of economic output, about two-thirds of its 1.1 billion population still live off farming

Food security through self-reliance is critical, said Usha Tuteja, an economist who directs an agricultural economics institute at Delhi University. Imports should be an emergency measure only since special problems arise when India buys staples like wheat. "There are just a few growing countries with a surplus," Ms. Tuteja said.

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