Buy cheapest clomid uk

buy cheapest clomid uk

Salient features of the National Food Security Bill, 2009:

• President Pratibha Patil on June 4, 2009 said that a National Food Security Act would be formulated whereby each BPL family would be entitled by law to get 25 kg of rice or wheat per month at Rs 3 a kg, a promise made by the Congress before general elections 2009. Many would agree that the proposal for a Food Security Bill has come at the right point of time when the world has already witnessed food crisis in 2008 that pushed millions of people to the brink of poverty and undernutrition*.

• The draft Food Security Bill is going to provide 25 kg of wheat/ rice to BPL households at Rs. 3/- per kg. For some, it is just old wine in a new bottle and would rely excessively on existing infrastructure and logistical support of the public distribution system (PDS)*.

• If made into a law, the draft Food Security Bill would reduce the allocation for a below poverty line (BPL) household (e.g. in the case of Antodaya Anna Yojana) from 35 kg of rice/ wheat per month to 25 kg of rice/ wheat per month. This would appear contradictory to many who expected the Bill to be a benign effort of the UPA-II (2009-****) to ensure food security.

• There are possibilities of increased food subsidies amounting to Rs. 70,000 crore per annum if the Bill becomes a law, which might be opposed by those who prefer to follow neo-liberal doctrine. Subsidies are usually opposed on the pretext of distortion in prices, inefficiency and leakages. The Interim Budget 2009-10 estimate of the food subsidy bill in 2009-10 was of the amount Rs. 42,490 crore%^.

• The exact number of BPL households may vary according to the definition of poverty line one selects. In that case, it would be difficult to target the original BPL households under the new Food Security law. There are four different estimates for the number of BPL households: one by Prof. Arjun Sengupta (www.nceus.gov.in), another by Dr. NC Saxena (www.sccommissioners.org), World Bank estimates and the Planning Commission estimates%$.

• According to Prof. Arjun Sengupta who chaired the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector, 77% of the population of India lives below the poverty line. Dr. NC Saxena, a retired civil servant acting as a Commissioner appointed by the Supreme Court, feels that half the country’s population of 1.15 billion is below the poverty line, which he apparently defines as a monthly per capita income of Rs 700 in rural areas and Rs 1,000 in urban areas. While a Planning Commission estimate puts the number of below poverty line (BPL) families at 62.5 million, state governments estimate that this number is closer to 107 million. Some experts feel that availing the public with more number of BPL ration cards help the state-level politicians to win elections through populist means. The World Bank’s figure for the percentage of population below the poverty line in India is 42 per cent, based on 2005 data%$.

• According to the Economic Survey 2008-09, the Uniform Recall Period (URP) Consumption distribution data of National Sample Survey (NSS) 61st Round places the poverty ratio at 28.3 per cent in rural areas, 25.7 per cent in urban areas and 27.5 per cent for the country as a whole in 2004-05. The corresponding poverty ratios from the Mixed Recall Period (MRP) consumption distribution data are 21.8 per cent for rural areas, 21.7 per cent for urban areas and 21.8 per cent for India as a whole. While the former consumption data uses 30-day recall/reference period for all items of consumption, the latter uses 365-day recall/reference period for five infrequently purchased non-food items, namely, clothing, footwear, durable goods, education and institutional medical expenses and 30-day recall/reference period for remaining items. The percentage of poor in 2004-05 estimated from URP consumption distribution of NSS 61st Round of consumer expenditure data are comparable with the poverty estimates of 1993-94 (50th Round) which was 36 per cent for the country as a whole. The percentage of poor in 2004-05 estimated from MRP consumption distribution of NSS 61st Round of consumer expenditure data are roughly comparable with the poverty estimates of 1999-2000 (55th Round) which was 26.1 per cent for the country as a whole

• Instead of better implementation of the already existing schemes such as the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS), Antodaya Anna Yojana (AAY), Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), Mid Day Meal Scheme (MDMS) etc., the Food Security law might make things unduly worse and unnecessarily complicated. A cynical question here would be: Is the Food Security Bill going to replace all such food related schemes that existed before its enactment?  

• If the Bill is about ensuring food security, how can it leave those who may not fall below the poverty line but are already exposed to food insecurity? The Rome Declaration (1996) made during the World Food Summit states that ‘food security is achieved when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active life’. Food security is about nutrition security too. If that is the case, the Food Security Bill has to rethink about the quality of foodgrains supplied and distributed. The Food Security Bill must also aim at providing fortified foodgrains along with edible oils, salt and essential spices. A balanced diet would ensure both food and nutrition security. The basket of commodities, which would be available to the consumers, should reflect local tastes and preferences and must include locally grown cereals and legumes.  

• The alternative draft Food Security Bill that has been prepared by Prof. Jean Dreze and his team and which has been scrutinized by 10, Janpath, according to media resources, has clauses to make the various food related programmes running in the country more accountable and transparent. It has focused on public accountability and more coverage of BPL households under the yet to be enacted Food Security law. Prof. Dreze's draft points out that subsidy would not rise due to reduction in allocation for rice/ wheat per BPL household**.

• If targeting of BPL households is done under the Food Security Bill, then that would lead to inclusion (including the non-poor) and exclusion (excluding the poor) errors. It would be wiser to go for universalization (rather than targeting) as was recommended by the Committee on Long Term Grain Policy under the chairmanship of Prof. Abhijit Sen (2000-02).

• There are apprehensions that sustainability of Food Security law would be at peril if India faces lower agricultural production due to poor harvest, drought etc. in the future. Is India ready to rely upon food imports and food aid to ensure right to food at all cost? At present, the country has been facing shortage in south-west monsoon rainfall that might affect agricultural production and prices of commodities.

• Is India ready to rely exclusively upon biotechnology for increasing its agricultural production so as to ensure food security for all? Much of debates have already taken place on the usefulness and pitfalls of GMOs. 

• Some analysts feel that India presently has adequate buffer stocks to enact and implement the Food Security law*.

• The Food Security law is nothing but a gimmick so as to increase the popularity of the UPA II. This is a forward-looking step to ensure vote for the Congress so that Rahul Gandhi could lead UPA-III. 

• Seeing the popularity of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which helped the Congress to win the 2009 parliamentary elections, the newly constituted Government has thought of bringing out the Food Security Act within the first 100 days of its stay in the office for the second time.

• The World Development Report 2008-Agriculture for Development, which has been brought out by the World Bank mentions that India presently faces the problem of depleting ground water level that makes agriculture unsustainable and poses risk to environment. If rice is one of the foodgrains that is going to be supplied when the Food Security Act comes into being, then more and more farmers would go for cultivation of rice by looking at the price incentives offered by the Government. In the Punjab region, overexploitation of groundwater takes place thanks to the huge subsidies given on electricity. Moreover, minimum support prices (MSP) for rice increase the financial attractiveness of rice relative to less water-intensive crops, which makes depletion of ground water table more obvious.

* Govt. to introduce Food Security Bill soon, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4743682.cms
%^ UPA’s proposed food security law faces big challenges,
http://www.livemint.com/2009/06/10004521/UPA8217s-proposed-food-secu.html
%$ Poverty of thought, http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/povertythought/362649/
** The hungry tide,
http://www.outlookindia.com/fullprint.asp?choice=1&fodname=20090713&fname=Food+Security+%28F%29&sid=1

**page**

The Global Monitoring Report 2012: Food Prices, Nutrition, and the Millennium Development Goals, World Bank/ IMF, http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/file/global%20monitoring%20report%202012.pdf  talks about making countries and communities more resilient in the face of food price spikes. It finds how countries reacted to the last two food price spikes of 2007–08 and 2010–11, and how their reaction affected their progress toward the MDGs. It summarizes effects of food prices on several MDGs. It reviews policy responses—including domestic social safety nets, nutritional programs, agricultural policies, regional trade policies, and support by the international community

•    In 2011 international food prices spiked for the second time in three years, igniting concerns about a repeat of the 2008 food price crisis and its consequences for the poor. The World Bank Food Price Index rose 184 percent from January 2000 to June 2008.

•    In February 2011 international food prices again reached the 2008 peak, after a sharp decline in 2009, and stayed close to that peak through September. The international food price spike in 2007–08 is estimated to have kept or pushed 105 million people below the poverty line and in the spike of 2010–11, 48.6 million people.

•    As food and fuel prices rose in 2010 and the first half of 2011, consumer prices rose in tandem in many countries. In emerging and developing countries the median inflation rate rose from 4 percent in 2009 to 6 percent in 2011, but experiences were mixed.

•    The additional fiscal cost involved in policy responses to 2006–08 price spike was 19.1 percent of total fiscal revenue in India in 2008.

•    Poverty typically rises initially with higher food prices, because the supply response to higher prices takes time to materialize and many poor (farm) households are net food buyers, so higher food prices lowers their real incomes. Higher prices hurt consumers with high shares of household spending on food, as in much of Africa and Asia.

•    In India, children who were thinner in infancy and experienced rapid growth show a higher prevalence of diabetes, giving it the highest numbers in the world, both of malnourished children and of people with diabetes.

•    In India productivity losses to individuals are estimated at more than 10 percent of lifetime earnings, and GDP loss to undernutrition runs as high as 3–4 percent (World Bank 2009).

•    Even moderate adversity, such as low rainfall during the year of birth, has been associated with reduced child growth and increase child morbidity in India (Maccini and Yang 2009).

•    In South Asia, the $1.25 a day poverty rate fell from 54 percent to 36 percent between 1990 and 2008. The proportion of poor is lower now in South Asia than at any time since 1981.

•    The largest number of poor people remain in South Asia, where 571 million people live on less than $1.25 a day, down from a peak of 641 million in 2002.

•    The FAO estimates that in 2008 there were 739 million people without adequate daily food intake.

•    Globally, the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day fell from 43.1 percent in 1990 to 22.2 percent in 2008. In 2008 1.28 billion people lived on less than $1.25 a day.

•    Less nutritious diets due to inflation caused malnourishment and made people more susceptible to failing health. A malnourished child has on average a seven-month delay in starting school, a 0.7 grade loss in schooling, and potentially a 10–17 percent reduction in lifetime earnings—damaging future human capital and causing national GDP losses estimated at 2–3 percent. So, malnutrition is not just a result of poverty—it is also a cause.

•    South Asia has reached the target on access to safe water and will probably eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2015.

•    In India 2.4 million adults and children were living with HIV during 2009.

•    Most of the expansion in land cultivation since 2005–06 (24 million of the 27 million increase) is located in only six countries or regions: China, Sub-Saharan Africa, former Soviet Union (Kazakhstan, the Russia Federation, and Ukraine), Argentina, India, and Brazil.

•    Introduction of export restrictions on food exports by Argentina, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine for wheat and China and India for rice, in attempts to decouple domestic markets from global markets to keep domestic food prices low, have in the past compounded the food price problem.

•    India contributes 11 percent of international trade in rice. The most frequent users of protection measures for food over the period were China, India, Indonesia, and the Russian Federation, which together accounted for almost one-third of all trade restrictions introduced on food items since the beginning of the financial crisis.

•    In the recent years, India has improved its market information systems.

•    In South Asia, real official development assistance (ODA) disbursements to Afghanistan increased from $1.6 billion in the 1990s to $27.9 billion in the 2000s, whereas Bangladesh and India experienced a decrease in real ODA disbursements of about 20 percent.
 

The key findings of the State of World Population 2011: People and possibilities in a world of 7 billion, UNFPA, 

http://foweb.unfpa.org/SWP2011/reports/EN-SWOP2011-FINAL.pdf are as follows: 

• Nations like Ethiopia and India have launched campaigns to end child marriages and prevent life-threatening adolescent pregnancies.

• According to projections by the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, in 2025, India, with 1.46 billion people, will have overtaken China, with 1.39 billion, as the world’s most populous nation. China’s population will then, based on a medium variant, decline to about 1.3 billion by 2050. India will continue to grow to about 1.7 billion by 2060 before beginning to decline. 

• In India, where the fertility rate, at 2.5 children per woman, is still well above the replacement level of 2.1, there are more than 600 million people who are 24 years old or younger.

• Worldwide, sterilizations account for 18.9 per cent of the modern methods of contraception used by women and 2.4 per cent by men. In India, male condoms, account for a little more than 5 per cent of total contraception. The pill is used by 3.1 per cent of women. Injectables are not provided by the Government.

• In India, the effects of a preference for male children worries demographers, the media, policymakers and many others because of what it has done to sex ratios and the message it sends about how little a society values girls. The issue was heightened by results of the 2011 national census, which showed that in the birth-to-6-year-old age group the number of girls had plunged to 914 for every 1,000 boys, widening the 2001 ratio of 927 girls per 1,000 boys. The new child sex ratio is the biggest gap since independence in 1947. Sex-selective abortions, though illegal, and the sometimes fatal neglect of girls after they are born, are widely assumed to be leading causes of this anomaly. 

• The southern Indian state of Kerala is one such place that reached fertility and development levels comparable to those in richer countries through gender-sensitive policies that included long established and near-universal education for girls and easy access to health care. 

• People under 25 make up 43 per cent of the world’s population.

• There are 893 million people over the age of 60 worldwide. By the middle of this century that number will rise to 2.4 billion. About one in two people lives in a city, and in only about 35 years, two out of three will. People under the age of 25 already make up 43 per cent of the world’s population, reaching as much as 60 per cent in some countries.

• The rapid growth of the world population is a recent phenomenon. About 2,000 years ago, the population of the world was about 300 million. It took more than 1,600 years for the world population to double to 600 million. The rapid growth of the world population started in 1950, with reductions in mortality in the less developed regions, resulting in an estimated population of 6.1 billion in the year 2000, nearly two-and-a-half times the population in 1950. With the declines in fertility in most of the world, the global growth rate of population has been decreasing since its peak of 2.0 per cent in 1965-1970.

• Average life expectancy globally, leapt from about 48 years in the early 1950s to about 68 in the first decade of the new century. Infant mortality plunged from about 133 deaths in 1,000 births in the 1950s to 46 per 1,000 in the period from 2005 to 2010. Immunization campaigns reduced the prevalence of childhood diseases worldwide.

• Fertility, the number of children a woman is expected to have in her reproductive years, dropped by more than half, from about 6.0 to 2.5, partly because of countries’ economic growth and development but also because of a complex mix of social and cultural forces and greater access by women to education, income-earning opportunities and sexual and reproductive health services, including modern methods of contraception.

• Asia will remain the most populous major area in the world during the 21st century but Africa will gain ground as its population more than triples, passing from 1 billion in 2011 to 3.6 billion in 2100.

• In 2011, 60 per cent of the world population lived in Asia and 15 per cent in Africa. Africa’s population has been growing 2.3 per cent per year, a rate more than double that of Asia's population (1 per cent per year). The population of Africa first surpassed a billion in 2009 and is expec ted   to  add  another billion in just 35 years (by 2044),  even as its fertility drops from 4.6 children per woman in 2005-2010 to 3.0 children per woman in 2040-2045.

• Asia's population, which is currently 4.2 billion, is expected to peak around the middle of the century (it is projected to reach 5.2 billion in 2052) and to start a slow decline thereafter.

• Although people 24 years old or younger make up almost half of the world’s 7 billion population (with 1.2 billion between the ages of 10 and 19), their percentage of the population in some major developing countries is already at its peak.

**page** 

According to Food sovereignty: Reclaiming the global food system (2011) by War on Want, http://www.waronwant.org/attachments/Food%20sovereignty%20report.pdf:  

•    In 2009, for the first time in human history, over a billion people were officially classified as living in hunger.

•    Per capita food production increased by 8% in South America and 9% in South Asia between 1970 and 1990, but the number of hungry people rose by 19% and 9% respectively in those regions, both key targets of the new green revolution technologies.

•    From 1970 to 1990, the two decades of most rapid Green Revolution expansion, the total food available per person in the world rose by 11%. The estimated number of hungry people fell from 942 million to 786 million, a decline of 16%.

•    Today, despite unprecedented wealth existing in the world, one in seven people go to bed hungry.

•    In 2010 the world’s four largest agrochemical companies and three largest grain traders together chalked up profits of around US$20 billion. The same sum would be enough to settle 20 million families each on their own plot of land, permanently resolving their problem of hunger.

•    Over the last two decades, MNCs have taken control of more than 1,000 once independent seed companies, so that the top 10 seed companies now account for 73% of the world’s commercial seed market (the top three companies alone account for over half).

•    In 1996 Monsanto was not even among the top 10 global seed companies, but by 2009 it was secure in first place, responsible for 27% of the global commercial seed market on its own.

•    By the end of 2007, the top 10 companies were responsible for 89% of agrochemical sales. Combined sales of agrochemical products in Latin America and Asia have now for the first time surpassed combined sales in North America and Europe.

•    The industrial food system discards (in the journey from farms to traders, food processors, stores and supermarkets) between a third and a half of all the food that it produces. This is enough to feed the world’s hungry six times over.

•    It is estimated that altogether–including cropping, livestock, transport, fertiliser and land use change–agriculture is responsible for 30% of the global greenhouse emissions that cause climate change.

•    The industrial food system is responsible for the eviction of millions of smallholders from their land, exacerbating rural poverty.

•    Some 150,000 farmers in India, overwhelmed by debts accrued by adopting unsustainable and expensive chemical farming techniques, have committed suicide.

•    Worldwide, up to 10 million hectares of agricultural land are lost annually as a result of severe degradation, largely the result of unsustainable farming practices.

•    The industrial food system is responsible for approximately a third of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions destroying our planet.

•    Around 2.5 billion people–men, women and children–live off the land worldwide, cultivating crops, rearing livestock and catching fish. Many of these farmers are small-scale producers, who are building on the valuable knowledge acquired by their forebears over hundreds of years.

•    Fully 70% of the world’s agricultural land is already devoted to livestock production, and the global production of meat is projected to double from its total of 229 million tones in 2000 to 465 million tonnes in 2050. Expansion of livestock is a key factor in deforestation, especially in Latin America: 70% of previously forested land in the Amazon has been taken over for pasture, while feed crops cover a large part of the remainder.

•    Livestock farming is responsible for 18% of world greenhouse gas emissions – more than all forms of transport put together.

•    World poultry production increased from 8.9 million tonnes in 1961 to 70.3 million tonnes in 2001.

•    Today the USA remains the biggest soya bean producer, with an output of 80.7 million tonnes in the 2009-10 harvest, but Brazil (57 million tonnes) and Argentina (32 million tonnes) are catching up.

•    In 2001 alone the Indian government set up 60 agri-export zones, producing 40 agricultural commodities from mangoes and lychees to basmati rice and cumin. These zones have been bitterly criticised by farmers’ leaders in India, who say that the government should have used barren land for the zones rather than taking over fertile areas that were being used to produce food for the domestic market. They were also angry at the number of small farmers who were expelled from their plots to make way for the agri-export zones.

•    US farmers benefit from billions of dollars in subsidies which make up as much as 40% of US net farm income. This means that US farmers can afford to export their crops at well below production cost and still make a profit. The name for this practice is dumping, and it is supposedly illegal under WTO rules.

•    In recent years new factors are fuelling the land grab. One is biofuels, which are being promoted as a way of reducing the emissions of harmful greenhouse gases from transport. The European Union has passed legislation that requires 10% of transport fuels to come from biofuels by 2020, while the USA spends more than US$6 billion annually subsidising biofuels.

According to The State of Food Insecurity in the World: How does international price volatility affect domestic economies and food security? (2011), which has been produced by IFAD, WFP and FAO, http://www.fao.org/docrep/014/i2330e/i2330e.pdf:   

• The total number of undernourished people in India during the period 2006-08 was 224.6 million, while that for China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan during the same time period were 129.6 million, 41.4 million, 3.9 million and 42.8 million, respectively.  

• The total number of undernourished people in India increased from 167.1 million during 1995-97 to 208.0 million during 2000-02 and further to 224.6 million during 2006-08.

• The proportion of undernourished in total population in India during 2006-08 was 19 percent, while that for China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan during the same time period were 10 percent, 26 percent, 20 percent and 25 percent, respectively. 

• The proportion of undernourished in total population in India increased from 17 percent during 1995-97 to 20 percent during 2000-02 but fell marginally to 19 percent during 2006-08. 

• During the world food crisis of 2006–08, domestic prices of rice and wheat were very stable in China, India and Indonesia because of government controls on exports of these crops.

• Public research institutes in countries such as Brazil, China and India are providing an increasing share of public goods in the area of agricultural research.

• In India, farmers underinvest in bullocks due to volatility in income.

• Between 2007 and 2008, the number of undernourished was essentially constant in Asia (an increase of 0.1 percent), while it increased by 8 percent in Africa.

• Prices of food commodities on world markets, adjusted for inflation, declined substantially from the early 1960s to the early 2000s, when they reached a historic low. They increased slowly from 2003 to 2006 and then surged upwards from 2006 to the middle of 2008 before declining in the second half of that year. 

• The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2011–2020 projects that world prices for rice, wheat, maize and oilseeds in the five years from 2015/16 to 2019/20 will be higher in real terms by 40, 27, 48 and 36 percent, respectively, than in the five years from 1998/99 to 2002/03.

**page**

According to the report Nourish South Asia: Grow a better future for regional food justice by Swati Narayan, Oxfam, September, 2011, http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/cr-nourish-south-asia-grow-260911-en.pdf:  

•    Children are the most vulnerable. In homes, nutritional rehabilitation centres and hospitals, unreported by the media, every single day more than 2000 children die of hunger in India alone.

•    At the peak of food and financial crises, more than 100 million people across South Asia were added to the ranks of the hungry-the highest in four decades.

•    Even after decades of land reforms in India, 41 percent of the rural population is effectively landless.

•    Within five years, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has expanded to provide work to 53 million households-roughly 33 percent of India’s rural population in 2009–10.

•    Since it is the panchayats who decide and plan, seventy percent of the ‘public works’ under NREGA chosen have prioritized environmental protection. In just the last three years, as many as 1.9 million ‘works’ have focused on water conservation and drought proofing alone.

•    India had set aside 100 million acres for jatropha cultivation (although in practice, 85 percent of farmers have already stopped its cultivation).


•    The Indian government’s aggressive promotion and cultivation of jatropha on 11 million hectares (27 million acres) of plantations, including on regular agricultural land where it will displace existing crops, including food crops, is therefore an example of an especially ill-advised policy. Its ambition to source 20 percent of all its petrol and diesel from biofuels by 2017 should be repealed.

•    Even in the midst of the food price crisis in 2008–9, government food stocks in most South Asia countries were above the buffer norm. Economist Jean Drèze’s graphic description a decade ago of India’s ‘mountains of foodgrains’, in state warehouses which ‘if they are laid in a row, would stretch more than a million kilometres, taking us to the moon and back,’ holds true to this day.

•    Though three quarters of South Asia’s poor live in rural areas, and are largely food producers, most are net purchasers of food. Food remains the biggest item in their household budgets. It is as high as 50 percent in South Asia compared with 17 percent in the United States. Food price inflation is therefore highly regressive as it hurts the poor the most.

•    More than 250 million dalits across South Asia live precariously. Despite being unconstitutional, untouchability has acquired new guises. Dalit farmers in 35 percent of villages surveyed across India were found to be barred from selling their produce in local markets. The musahars, in particular, who rarely own land, are among the most food insecure.

•    Forest dwellers and tribal populations across South Asia are also among the most acute victims of food insecurity.

•    Despite comprising only nine percent of India's population, indigenous tribal adivasis have been disproportionately affected in the race to modernity. In the last three decades, 55 million have been forcibly displaced from their traditional homes and livelihoods in the name of steel mills, large dams and other so-called ‘development projects’.

•    Ninety percent of adivasis are also either absolutely landless or own marginal plots of land that provide them with little or no food security. The Centre for Environment and Food Security in a 2005 survey found that a staggering 99 percent of tribal households face chronic hunger as they could not obtain even two square meals for even a single month in the entire year.

•    Almost one-third of children in the South Asia region are born with low birth weight. Today, 57 percent of the world’s underweight children live in South Asia.

•    Two-thirds of South Asia’s poor people live in a feudal rural landscape. Here, access to land is all important for food security. But land is concentrated in a few hands, largely with men. Though absentee landlordism has been officially abolished, in practice genuine land reform and redistribution has failed across most of South Asia.

•    The South Asian land Gini coefficient is 0.54–which is very unequal. Skewed landholding and the massive scale of rural landlessness are both chronic.

•    Nearly three-quarters of all farmers in South Asia cultivate less than five acres. The majority of farmers do not even own the lands they till. Instead, they remain bound by feudal relations of exploitation

•    Women now form 30 percent of the agricultural labour force in India.

•    Most rural women continue to earn less than men. Worse still, despite their back-breaking labours in the fields, 46 percent of women are in fact ‘contributing family members’ who are unpaid.

•    In India only 40 percent of the poorest are able to gain anything from 11 social programmes which cost the exchequer 2 percent of GDP. The ‘hoarding’ of ‘below poverty line’ (BPL) cards by village officials to fudge records and siphon off food grains and cash is also rampant.

•    The revolving door between government and business is also a threat. Three years ago, the Indian Education Ministry had to stave off severe pressure from private companies eager to replace the $1bn ‘market’ for freshly cooked school meals with packaged biscuits.

•    The onion crisis in India in January 2011, in particular, exposed the invisible role of the middlemen. Consumers had to pay 200–500 times more than the price at which they were purchased from farmers .

•    In India agriculture's contribution to GDP has declined from 62 percent in 1960 to a mere 17 percent in 2011. But the crux of the problem is that more than half the population of the region continues to survive on cultivation.

•    In desperation, a quarter of a million Indian farmers crippled by debt have committed suicide in the last fifteen years. The main culprit is the mismatch between the cost of production and income, which has increasingly begun to pauperise the peasantry.

•    With groundwater tables plunging, loan burdens rising and smaller holdings yielding less and less, ‘farming has become unviable’.

•    Since the fifties, South Asia’s population has more than tripled. In comparison, in the next forty years, it is estimated to increase by only one-third, to 2.3 billion. But with declining agrarian yields, even the current level of food security may prove to be too difficult to maintain with more mouths to feed.

•     Currently, across South Asia, 17–30 percent of the population does not consume the minimum level of globally recommended dietary energy

•    Though food grain production has more than trebled in South Asia over the last 30–40 years, per capita food availability struggles to keep pace. The productivity peaks of the Green Revolution are undeniably over. Even as India's population burgeoned by 17 percent in the last decade, farm output has expanded at just half that rate.

•    The Indian breadbaskets of Punjab and Haryana are heading towards desertification. The once lush, fertile landscape is fast turning grey.

•    Long-established state subsidies for smallholder farmers are also being systematically dismantled. In 2010, India moved to a cash subsidy scheme to replace fertiliser subsidies. The budget for extension services has almost been wiped out. And district agriculture research centres have become almost moribund.

•    More than 55 million tribal peoples were forcibly evicted through land acquisitions between 1951 and 2005. In the tribal-dominated Indian state of Chhattisgarh, a ministry of rural development report itself blamed the government and private companies for the ‘the biggest grab of tribal lands after Columbus’.

•    The Indian government estimates that since 1990 only 1.5 percent of the sown area has transitioned from farm to non-farm use. But even this would have yielded enough to feed more than 43 million hungry people every year.

•    In South Asia, a rise in temperature of 1.5ºC and a precipitation increase of 2 mm could result in a decline of rice yields of 3 to 15 percent.

•    Seven out of nine food crops could deteriorate in yield with just 1–2ºC of warming by 2030. Crop models indicate that average yields in 2050 may decline by about 50 percent for wheat, 17 percent for rice, and about 6 percent for maize from their 2000 levels.

•    Across South Asia, 60 percent of farming is concentrated in rain-fed areas that depend solely on monsoons.

•    Only 41 percent of the grains released by the Indian government reach poor households.

•    Though in 2008 the Indian government in response to the spate of suicides, cancelled the entire debt of $15bn of 40 million smallholder farmers, this has remained a one-off initiative..

•    The governments of Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam–where over two-thirds of the world’s rice is produced–have also explicitly endorsed System of Rice Intensification (SRI) methods in their national food security programmes.

•    Each day in India alone around Rs. 130 crores (US$ 27m) of fruits and vegetables spoil before they reach markets.

**page** 

According to Global Food Losses and Food Waste: Extent, Causes and Prevention, Food and Agriculture Organization (2011),
http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ags/publications/GFL_web.pdf:  

•    Roughly one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally, which amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year.

•    Overall, on a per-capita basis, much more food is wasted in the industrialized world than in developing countries. It is estimated that the per capita food waste by consumers in Europe and North-America is 95-115 kg/year, while this figure in Sub-Saharan Africa and South/Southeast Asia is only 6-11 kg/year.

•    Food losses refer to the decrease in edible food mass throughout the part of the supply chain that specifically leads to edible food for human consumption. Food losses take place at production, postharvest and processing stages in the food supply chain. Food losses occurring at the end of the food chain (retail and final consumption) are rather called “food waste”, which relates to retailers’ and consumers’ behavior.

•    In low-income countries food is mainly lost during the early and middle stages of the food supply chain; much less food is wasted at the consumer level. Food losses in industrialized countries are as high as in developing countries, but in developing countries more than 40% of the food losses occur at post harvest and processing levels, while in industrialized countries, more than 40% of the food losses occur at retail and consumer levels. Food waste at consumer level in industrialized countries (222 million ton) is almost as high as the total net food production in sub-Saharan Africa (230 million ton).

•    The causes of food losses and waste in low-income countries are mainly connected to financial, managerial and technical limitations in harvesting techniques, storage and cooling facilities in difficult climatic conditions, infrastructure, packaging and marketing systems. Producing food that will not be consumed leads to unnecessary CO2 emissions in addition to loss of economic value of the food produced.

•    Food can be wasted due to quality standards, which reject food items not perfect in shape or appearance. At the consumer level, insufficient purchase planning and expiring ‘best-before-dates’ also cause large amounts of waste, in combination with the careless attitude of those consumers who can afford to waste food.

•    Per capita food loss in Europe and North-America is 280-300 kg/year. In Sub-Saharan Africa and South/Southeast Asia it is 120-170 kg/year. The total per capita production of edible parts of food for human consumption is, in Europe and North-America, about 900 kg/year and, in sub-Saharan Africa and South/Southeast Asia, 460 kg/year.

•    Per capita food wasted by consumers in Europe and North-America is 95-115 kg/year, while this figure in sub-Saharan Africa and South/Southeast Asia is only 6-11 kg/year.

•    In the case of meat and meat products losses and waste in industrialized regions are most severe at the end of the food supply chain—FSC, explained by a high per capita meat consumption combined with large waste proportions by retailers and consumers, especially in Europe and the U.S. Waste at the consumption level makes up approximately half of total meat losses and waste.
 

•    Malaysia: Between 1990 and 2005, the proportion of children who were underweight decreased from 22 percent to 7 percent. This impressive reduction can be attributed to rapid economic growth, as well as interventions targeted to women and young children.

•    Thailand: During the 1980s, Thailand halved malnutrition from 50 percent to 25 percent by using targeted nutrition interventions and creating a widespread network of community volunteers to help change people’s behavior.

According to The State of Food Insecurity in the World: Addressing food insecurity in protracted crises, which has been brought out by the Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme, http://www.fao.org/docrep/013/i1683e/i1683e.pdf:  

•    The number of undernourished people in the world remains unacceptably high at near the one billion mark despite an expected decline in 2010 for the first time since 1995. This decline is largely attributable to increased economic growth foreseen in 2010 – particularly in developing countries – and the fall in international food prices since 2008.

•    A total of 925 million people are still estimated to be undernourished in 2010, representing almost 16 percent of the population of developing countries. The fact that nearly a billion people remain hungry even after the recent food and financial crises have largely passed indicates a deeper structural problem that gravely threatens the ability to achieve internationally agreed goals on hunger reduction: the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and the 1996 World Food Summit goal.

•    In the 22 countries identified by this report as being in protracted crisis (or containing areas in protracted crisis), the most recent data show that more than 166 million people are undernourished, representing nearly 40 percent of the population of these countries and nearly 20 percent of all undernourished people in the world.

•    This unacceptably high degree of hunger results from many factors, including armed conflict and natural disasters, often in combination with weak governance or public administration, scarce resources, unsustainable livelihoods systems and breakdown of local institutions.

•    On average, the proportion of people who are undernourished is almost three times as high in countries in protracted crisis as in other developing countries (if countries in protracted crisis and China and India are excluded). There are approximately 166 million undernourished people in countries in protracted crisis – roughly 20 percent of the world’s undernourished people, or more than a third of the global total if China and India are excluded from the calculation.

•    A deeper analysis of the relationship between protracted crisis and food security outcomes shows that changes in income, government effectiveness, control of corruption and the number of years in crisis are significantly related to the proportion of the population who are undernourished. These factors, plus education, are also all significantly related to a country’s Global Hunger Index.

•    Based on the latest available data, the total number of undernourished people in the world is estimated to have reached 1 023 million in 2009 and is expected to decline by 9.6 percent to 925 million in 2010. Developing countries account for 98 percent of the world’s undernourished people and have a prevalence of undernourishment of 16 percent – down from 18 percent in 2009 but still well above the target set by the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 1.

•    International cereal prices have declined in recent months and are below their recent peaks, reflecting ample global cereal supplies in 2009/10 and prospects for large crops in 2010, but food prices in most low-income food-deficit countries remain above the pre-crisis level of early 2008, negatively affecting access to food by vulnerable populations.

•    Vulnerable households deal with shocks by selling assets, which are very difficult to rebuild, by reducing food consumption in terms of quantity and variety and by cutting down on health and education expenditures – coping mechanisms that all have long-term negative effects on quality of life and livelihoods.

•    The majority of the world’s undernourished people live in developing countries. Two-thirds live in just seven countries (Bangladesh, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia and Pakistan) and over 40 percent live in China and India alone.

•    The region with most undernourished people continues to be Asia and the Pacific, but with a 12 percent decline from 658 million in 2009 to 578 million, this region also accounts for most of the global improvement expected in 2010.

•    Developing countries as a group have seen an overall setback in terms of the World Food Summit goal (from 827 million in 1990–92 to 906 million in 2010), while some progress has been made towards MDG 1 (with the prevalence of hunger declining from 20 percent undernourished in 1990–92 to 16 percent in 2010).

•    The proportion of undernourished people remains highest in sub-Saharan Africa, at 30 percent in 2010. As of 2005–07 (the most recent period for which complete data are available), the Congo, Ghana, Mali and Nigeria had already achieved MDG 1 and Ethiopia and others were close to achieving it; in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, however, the proportion of undernourishment had risen to 69 percent (from 26 percent in 1990–92).

•    In Asia, Armenia, Myanmar and Viet Nam had achieved MDG 1 and China and others were close to doing so, while in Latin America and the Caribbean, Guyana, Jamaica and Nicaragua had achieved MDG 1 and Brazil and others were approaching the target reduction.

According to the FAO Report-The State of Food Insecurity in the World-2008  ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/011/i0291e/i0291e02.pdf:   

According to the Report on the State of Food Insecurity in Rural India (2009), which has been prepared by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) and the World Food Programme (WFP),
http://home.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/newsroom/wfp197348.pdf:

• On the composite index of food insecurity of rural India, states like Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are found in the ‘very high’ level of food insecurity, followed by Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Gujarat. The indicators used for computing the index of food insecurity in rural India are: a) Percentage of population consuming less than 1,890 Kcal /cu/diem; b) Percentage of households not having access to safe drinking water; c) Percentage of households not having access to toilets within the premises; d) Percentage of ever-married women age 15 – 49 years who are anaemic; e) Percentage of women (15 – 49 yrs) with CED; f) Percentage of children in the age group 6 – 35 months who are anaemic; and, g) Percentage of children in the age group 6 – 35 months who are stunted

• The better performers include Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, all of which report an Index value below 0.5

• The proportion of population consuming less than 1890 kcal/cu/diem has in fact increased in the states of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, Rajasthan and marginally for Punjab.

• Almost 2/3rd of rural households in Jharkhand did not have access to safe drinking water in 2001.

• More than 90 percent of rural households in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh did not have access to toilets within their premises.

• As many as eight states - Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan – have shown increase in the incidence of anaemia among women in the reproductive age group. The highest increase in anaemia levels has been observed in Andhra Pradesh (51 to 64 percent), followed by Haryana (48 to 57 percent) and Kerala (23 to 32 percent).

• The proportion of women with CED has drastically increased for Assam (28 to 40 percent) followed by Bihar (40 to 46 percent), Madhya Pradesh (42 to 45 percent) and Haryana (31 to 33 percent).