Food Security in India

Abstract

Food Security for a household means access by all members at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life. The World Food Summit was held in Rome, with the aim of renewing global commitment to fight against hunger. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nation (FAO) called the summit in response to widespread under nutrition and growing concern about the capacity of agriculture to meet future food needs. Food Security exists, when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preference for an active and healthy life.  (World Food Summit, Rome, 1996). An attempt is made in this paper to analyse the status, further scope and needed strategies for food security in India. Specific objectives were i. to analyze the growth rate of major food grains in India, and also study the demand and supply gap of food sector status in India, ii. To analyse the status of access to food and iii. to suggest suitable policy to implement food security. Secondary data were analyzed for the study. Time series data on area, production, yield of food grains for 50years were used for the analysis. The secondary data has been collected from different sources namely FAO, Food and Public Distribution, Agricultural statistics at a glance 2012, India stat.com, Directorate of Economics and Statistics. Conclusions from the study are - growth rate of food grains area(0.218), production(2.45)and productivity (2.23) are positive; the availability of food grains in India is almost in secure state since the production of food grains was increasing over the years; the increase in Minimum Support Price for Rice and Wheat, did not affect the access to food to the population and zone wise distribution of food grains will minimize the transportation and handling cost over the states. Some suggestions like - focusing on distribution of food grains in an equitable manner, besides increasing food production to ensure success of food security in India, improving the efficiency of public distribution system, need to reduce cost of operations in FCI through PDS by changing the procurement policy and more scientific storage of food grains be made to prevent rotting of food grains - were given.